Academic Writing Issues #5 — Failing to Use Dynamic Verbs

Many people have complained that academic writers are addicted to the passive voice, doing anything to avoid using the first person:  "Data were gathered."  I wonder who did that?  But in some ways a bigger problem is that we refuse to use the kind of dynamic verbs that can energize our stories and drive the …

US Higher Education and Inequality: How the Solution Became the Problem

This post is a paper I wrote last summer and presented at the University of Oslo in August.  It's a patchwork quilt of three previously published pieces around a topic I've been focused on a lot lately:  the role of US higher education -- for better and for worse -- in creating the new American …

Course on the History of Higher Education in the U.S.

This post contains all of the material for the class on the History of Higher Education in the US that I taught for at the Stanford Graduate School of Education for the last 15 years.  In retirement I wanted to make the course available on the internet to anyone who is interested.  If you are …

Academic Writing Issues #4 — Failing to Listen for the Music

All too often, academic writing is tone deaf to the music of language.  Just as we tend to consider unprofessional any writing that is playful, engaging, funny, or moving, so too with writing that is musical.  A professional monotone is the scholar's voice of choice.  This stance leads to two big problems.  One is that …