Beneficent Buffoon — The Case of Napoleon III

History is full of ironies.  One is that sometimes buffoons can be more beneficent national leaders than great men.  A case in point is Napoleon III.  My source for this analysis is the new book by Alan Strauss-Schom, The Shadow Emperor: A Biography of Napoleon III. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was the undistinguished nephew and heir …

Michael Lind — The New American Elite

This post is a lovely essay by Michael Lind, which was recently published in Tablet magazine.  Here's a link to the original. In this piece, Lind provides a rich analysis of the history of the American elite.  The key to this story is that the elite used to be plural -- a set of local …

The Problems that Accountability Metrics Pose for Schooling

This is a new piece I wrote as the foreword to a book by J. M. Beach -- Can We Measure What Matters Most? Why Educational Accountability Metrics Lower Student Learning and Demoralize Teachers -- which will be published by Rowman and Littlefield. For me, this was a chance to provide a brief summary of my …

Karl Marx — The Fetishism of Commodities

This post is a classic piece by Karl Marx, "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof."  It's the last section of the first chapter in Capital, volume 1. This analysis had a big impact on me when I first read it in grad school, and it has shaped a lot of my own work.  …

Jonathan Rauch — The War on Professionalism

This post is an wonderful essay by Jonathan Rauch, The War on Professionalism.  It was published in the current issue of National Affairs.  Here's a link to the original. This essay is a celebration of professionalism, in a populist period when to call someone professional seems seems slanderous.  Here's how he sets the context for …

Resisting Educational Standards

This post is a piece I published in Kappan in 2000.  Here's a link to the PDF. It's an analysis of why Americans have long resisted setting educational standards.  Of course my timing wasn't great.  Just one year later, the federal government passed the landmark No Child Left Behind law, which established just such a …

Agnes Callard — A More Perfect Meritocracy

This post is a piece by Agnes Callard, A More Perfect Meritocracy, which was published in Boston Review on December 21, 2020.  Here's a link to the original. As you know, if you've been following this blog, I've long been wrestling with the idea of meritocracy.  In particular, I've been focusing on its dysfunctions and …

Cartoons about the Life of the Professor

This post is a collection of some favorite cartoons about life as a professor.  All of them are from the website PhD, which stands for Piled Higher and Deeper.  The author is Jorge Cham, who got his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford and then taught at Cal Tech. Enjoy!