In the Washington Post, Dennis Drabelle reviews Jonathan R. Cole’s The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected.

Cole’s prescriptions for improving American higher education include a push for more emphasis on the humanities. “The discrepancy between the growth of federal investments in the sciences and the humanities is appalling,” he writes toward the end of the book. “The humanities are essential to our understanding of other languages and cultures, of the values we hold, and of the moral arguments we make. In a world that increasingly depends on such knowledge for both our economic welfare . . . and our national security, the absence of significant programs to improve our grasp of it represents nothing short of a national disaster.”

Universities (even those with enormous endowments) have historically taken advantage of recessions to bring austerity to teaching. There will be hiring freezes and early retirements. Rather than replacements, more adjuncts will be hired, and more graduate students will be recruited, eventually flooding the market with even more fully qualified teacher-scholars who will work for almost nothing. When the recession ends, the hiring freezes will become permanent, since departments will have demonstrated that they can function with fewer tenured faculty members.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has William Pannapacker’s bleak prospectus for those seeking graduate degrees in the humanities.

Poets & Writers has a piece by Kevin Nance on Northwestern University’s gutting of its prize-winning journal TriQuarterly.

After the magazine’s final print issue this spring, it will become an online-only, student-run publication associated with Northwestern’s new MFA program in creative writing, located on its Chicago campus. The positions of the magazine’s longtime editor, Susan Firestone Hahn, and associate editor, Ian Morris, will be eliminated.

This year the University of Cambridge celebrated its 800th birthday, an anniversary no less secure than any other of thirteenth-century origin, with an “anniversary portrait”, a handsome volume illustrated with the reminiscences of recent and not so recent alumni. Assisted by lengthier contributions on various aspects of the place, the fragments assembled in the collection, edited by Peter Pagnamenta, enable the Master of Trinity College, Lord Rees, to predict a brighter future for the University than for “any other patch of ground in the world”.

Continue reading Peter Linehan’s piece in the Times Literary Supplement.

At The National Post Mark Medley talks to Martin Amis about teaching writing.

On Twitter Ron Charles links to an article by Christina Hoff Sommers in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Dr. Sommers asserts that errors in feminist scholarship are particularly persistent because every correction is viewed as a personal attack.

Elizabeth Taylor Ruth Padel, the descendant of Charles Darwin who was recently elected the first female professor of poetry at Oxford, resigns her post amid allegations that she engaged in a smear campaign targeting her closest rival.

In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda reviews Reynolds Price’s Ardent Spirits.

When Auden finally left Oxford, the neat and tidy Price was given a glimpse of the poet’s living quarters: “I looked round at two rooms in a state of disarray that I’d never before seen generated by any human being. And Wystan had only been in residence for two months. The desk, the floors, the tables, and every other surface were inches — if not feet — deep in abandoned books, magazines, clothing, galley proofs, dirty dishes, whatever. My face may have betrayed my literal shock; but Auden only gave a brisk wave above the chaos and said ‘If you’d like to come back later and see if there’s anything you want, by all means do.’”

The trendy notion that each person has a unique learning style comes under an especially withering assault. “How should I adjust my teaching for different types of learners?” asks Mr. Willingham’s hypothetical teacher. The disillusioning reply: “No one has found consistent evidence supporting a theory describing such a difference. . . . Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn.”

The Wall Street Journal has Christopher F. Chabris’s review of Daniel T. Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom.

In the New York Review of Books, Andrew Delbanco examines the funding of American colleges and universities.

For years, we have witnessed a growing gap between rich and poor colleges, the privatization of public universities, and aggressive if not reckless investment and spending practices at wealthy institutions, where the allure of gain appears to have overwhelmed the consciousness of risk. Now we are also witnessing drastic budget contraction at the most fragile and vulnerable institutions. Higher education has always been a mirror of American society—and, for the moment, at least, the image it reflects is not a pretty one.

Poets.org lists lots of National Poetry Month activities.

In the Times Literary Supplement, John Bowen writes of Charles Dickens’s refuge for fallen women.

Urania women were obliged to tell their story to Dickens but, once they had done so, were forbidden ever to refer to it again, either to each other, the staff at the home, or in their future lives. The parallel with the ways that Dickens handled his own family’s shameful secrets is striking.

Millions of journal articles are available online, enabling scholars to find material they never would have encountered at their university libraries. From classic psychology studies to the most esoteric literary theory, it’s all just a few clicks away.

A recent study, however, suggests that despite this cornucopia, the boom in online research may actually have a “narrowing” effect on scholarship. James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, analyzed a database of 34 million articles in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and determined that as more journal issues came online, new papers referenced a relatively smaller pool of articles, which tended to be more recent, at the expense of older and more obscure work.

In the Boston Globe, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow examines the findings.

In the New York Times Magazine, Jonathan Mahler profiles Auburn Professor of Philosophy Kelly Jolley.

He says that philosophy requires a certain rare and innate ability — the ability to step outside yourself and observe your own mind in the act of thinking. In this respect, Jolley recognizes that his detractors have a point when they criticize his approach to teaching. “It’s aristocratic in the sense that any selection based on talent is aristocratic,” he told me. “I know it offends everyone’s sense of democracy, this idea that everyone’s equal, but we all know that’s just not true.”

Slate has Sara Mosle’s review of Paul Tough’s Whatever It Takes.

[The book] is an inspirational story about one man’s efforts to boost educational achievement in New York City’s Harlem. The book is also a sobering tale of how such good intentions, alone, are often not enough. Put the two together, and you have everything you need to know not only about inner-city education, poverty, and charter schools but about the realism that is essential to ambitious reform.

In the New York Times, Motoko Rich examines the erosion of literacy in America.

Critics of reading on the Internet say they see no evidence that increased Web activity improves reading achievement. “What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading,” said Mr. Gioia of the N.E.A. “I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.”

Do you despise choppy modern forms of communication such as text messaging? There is nothing wrong with the model, Luddite. The problem is your vocabulary.

At the Los Angeles Times, Lee Drutman reviews Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation.

Writing for Slate, Ray Fisman explains why giving poor kids laptops doesn’t improve their scholastic performance.

On National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, Clark Davis covers BB&T CEO John Allison’s attempts to buy Ayn Rand a place on campus.

The New York Times is running a story on university fund-raising.

On a hilltop patio with a stunning view of the J. Paul Getty Museum, as guests sipped bubbling guava-pineapple martinis, John Sexton, the president of New York University, was far from home, chatting up the crowd.

The 70 guests assembled in Los Angeles for this event on a beautiful spring evening, had already given $5,000 or more to N.Y.U. The parking area at the top of the private street that led to the mansion, owned by Nancy Moonves, former wife of the television mogul Leslie Moonves (and mother of two N.Y.U. students), was filled with Lexus and Mercedes sedans as well as a sleek Ferrari.

“I thank you,” Dr. Sexton said, “and I ask you to do 10 times as much as you are doing.”

The Washington Post has an article on how the hideous shorthand that makes instant messaging so unbearable is seeping into students’ papers.

The American textbook publisher will be bought by Ireland’s Riverdeep Holdings, an educational software firm that sells such well-known series as Reader Rabbit and Oregon Trail.

An AP article (by way of CNN) again airs Bill Gates’s views on education.

[Gates] spoke of some creative school programs–particularly charter schools run by private companies–that should be a model for innovation in the nation’s schools.

Yes, just as in the past his primary objection to American education is that it is more than a corporate training ground.

Even after years of teaching and tutoring, it still amazes me that college students so often need basic writing advice. Students do not want to write and do not understand why they need to be able to write well.

The “Thinking” section of Michael Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing begins by addressing student attitudes toward writing:

Why do students write? Easy, most students would say: Because we have to. Honest, perhaps, but discouraging. It makes writing seem pretty trivial. How about another go? Here’s a likely second answer: To show what we know. Hmm, I’m not sure I like that much better. Isn’t there something more positive we can say about writing?

Texas grossly inflates its high school graduation numbers, masking critical dropout figures, according to studies to be presented Friday at a Rice University conference.

Academicians from institutions including Rice, Harvard, Stanford and Johns Hopkins, as well as other experts in the field, say their goal is to bring clarity to the problem, explain the implications for the state and nation and lay the groundwork for progress.

Read the rest of the article at The Dallas Morning News.

An interesting article at The New York Times exposes graft in the Department of Education.

Department of Education officials violated conflict of interest rules when awarding grants to states under President Bush’s billion-dollar reading initiative, and steered contracts to favored textbook publishers, the department’s inspector general said yesterday.

Jerome Karabel, a professor of sociology at Berkeley, reviews The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges–and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates at The Washington Post.

The study seems to be full of holes to me, such as the following attempt to divorce reading skills from writing and speaking skills:

Yet the study also found that the program did not help improve students’ scores on the city’s standardized English language arts test, a result that the study’s creators said they could not fully explain. They suggested that the disparity might be related to the fact that the standardized test is written while the study’s interviews were oral.

Read the rest of the article at The New York Times.

The University of Chicago has completed its archive of Saul Bellow’s professional papers.

In “The Lowering of Higher Education,” Christopher Phelps writes:

I was wondering what to make of this dispiriting but solitary data set when I read about the Education Department study released late last week that shows that the average literacy of college-educated Americans declined precipitously between 1992 and 2003. Just 25 percent of college graduates scored high enough on the tests to be deemed “proficient” in literacy.

Read the rest of the article at Inside Higher Ed.

I’m lazing around recovering from the paper-grading blitz, and so for today’s post, I give you: Quotes From The Land Of Semi-Literate College Students!

Some are poorly-written, some have odd typos, a few are simply bizarre…and they’re all directly from real student papers.

Read the rest of the article at Moggy Mania.