Nobel prizes are great, but college football is why American universities dominate the globe

This post is a reprint of a piece I published in Quartz in 2017.  Here's a link to the original.  It's an effort to explore the distinctively populist character of American higher education.  The idea is that a key to understanding the strong public support that US colleges and universities have managed to generate is …

On Writing: How the King James Bible and How It Shaped the English Language and Still Teaches Us How to Write

When you're interested in improving your writing, it's a good idea to have some models to work from.  I've presented some of my favorite models in this blog.  These have included a number of examples of good writing by both academics (Max Weber, E.P. Thompson, Jim March, and Mary Metz) and nonacademics (Frederick Douglass, Elmore Leonard). …

Hausmann: The Education Myth

In this post I reprint a piece by Ricardo Hausmann (an economist at Harvard's Kennedy School), which was published in Project Syndicate in 2015. Here's a link to the original.  If you can't get past the paywall, here's a link to a PDF. What I like about this piece is the way Hausmann challenges a central …

Elmore Leonard’s Master Class on Writing a Scene

As you may have figured out by now, I'm a big fan of Elmore Leonard.  I wrote an earlier post about the deft way he leads you into a story and introduces a character on the very first page of a book.  He never gives his readers fits the way we academic writers do ours, by …

Public Schools for Private Gain: The Declining American Commitment to Serving the Public Good

This post is a piece I published in Kappan in November, 2018.  Here's a link to the original. Public schools for private gain: The declining American commitment to serving the public good When schooling comes to be viewed mainly as a source of private benefit, both schools and society suffer grave consequences. By David F. …

Resilience in the Face of Climate Change and Epidemic: Ancient Rome and Today’s America

Tell me if you think this sounds familiar:  In its latter years (500-700 ACE), the Roman Empire faced a formidable challenge from two devastating environmental forces -- dramatic climate change and massive epidemic.  As Mark Twain is supposed to have said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes." During our own bout of climate …