A Brutal Review of My First Book

I don't know about you, but I love reading brutal book reviews.  It's a lot of fun to watch a skilled writer skewer someone else's work with surgical precision (see here and here).  In the interest of balance, I thought it would be right and proper to present a review that eviscerates one of my …

The Five-Paragraph Fetish

This is a piece I published in Aeon several years ago about the persistence of the five-paragraph essay, which has evolved into the five-chapter dissertation and the five-section journal article.  Formalism reins supreme.  Here’s the link to the original. The essay is included in my new book, Being a Scholar: Reflections on Doctoral Study, Scholarly Writing, and Academic Life. …

Links to All My Publications and Course Materials — An Updated List

For anyone who’s interested, I’m posting below an updated list of all my publications and course syllabi, including links to these works and to full course materials.  Here’s a link to the list as a Word document, which is way more useful. Feel free to share. Links to Publications and Course Materials March 31, 2023 David …

My New Book Is Out: Being a Scholar

This post is a preview of my new book, which I just published with Kindle.  It's available on Amazon both as an e-book and a paperback.  The title is Being a Scholar: Reflections on Doctoral Study, Scholarly Writing, and Academic Life.   Below is the book's introduction, which provides the rationale for the book and summarizes …

Adventures in Scholarship

This piece is an essay about my life in scholarship and some of the lessons I learned from it.  It was written in mid career, after publishing The Trouble with Ed Schools, and it first appeared in print as the introduction to a 2005 book called Education, Markets, and the Public Good: The Selected Works of David …

Adventures in Scholarship

This piece is an essay about my life in scholarship and some of the lessons I learned from it.  It was written in mid career, after publishing The Trouble with Ed Schools, and it first appeared in print as the introduction to a 2005 book called Education, Markets, and the Public Good: The Selected Works of David …

The Esthetic Pleasures of Academic Writing

Here's a piece I just published in Inside Higher Ed. Here's a link to the original. Hope you like it. The Aesthetic Pleasures of Academic Writing While it may seem unlikely, such writing can actually provide a great opportunity for playing with the meanings and the music of language David F. Labaree To talk, as I …

Sermon on Educational Research

This is a piece I published in 2012 in Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education.  It draws on my experience over the years working with doctoral students in education.  The advice, basically, is to approach your apprenticeship in educational research doing the opposite of what everyone else tells you to do.  Hope you like it. Sermon on Educational …

The Lust for Academic Fame

This post is an analysis of the engine for scholarly production in American higher education.  The issue is that the university is a unique work setting in which the usual organizational incentives don’t apply.  Administrators can’t offer much in the way of power and money as rewards for productive faculty and they also can’t do …

Writing as an Exercise in Arrogance and Humility

This post is a piece of mine that was published last year in Inside Higher Ed.  Here’s a link to the original. It's about an inherent tension in the act of writing between arrogance and humility. An Exercise in Arrogance and Humility To be a good academic writer, you must deploy a judicious mix of two …