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 their ability to reach beyond … Continue reading Nobel Prizes Are Great, but Football Is Why US Universities Rule
This post is an essay by Francis Fukuyama in the latest issue of American Purpose. Here's a link to the original. It's part of a series of pieces he wrote for the magazine in defense of the Deep State, the specialized bureaucracies that allow the modern state to function effectively while political leaders come and … Continue reading Francis Fukuyama — Balancing Bureaucratic Autonomy and Political Control: Covid Lessons
This post is 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, drawing on my book, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education. The idea is that a key to understanding the strong public support that … Continue reading How Football Helped Make US Universities Great
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 their ability to reach beyond … Continue reading Nobel Prizes Are Great, But Football Is Why American Universities Dominate the Globe
This post is the text of the preface I just wrote for the Chinese translation of my book, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of the American System of Higher Education. The translators are Professor Sun Bi and research assistant Liu Zitai from the School of Education at South China Normal University. It will be … Continue reading Preface to the Chinese Edition of A Perfect Mess
This essay by Steve Lagerfeld was published in the current issue of Hedgehog Review. Here's a link to the original. This is brief piece is a striking reflection on the evolving meaning of privilege over time. In the current period of meritocratic privilege, people acquire status by getting exclusive degrees. This gives them the right … Continue reading A Different Sense of Privilege
This post is a tribute to the Normans and how they came to shape modern Europe. It draws primarily from the book The Normans: From Raiders to Kings by Lars Brownworth and also from a recent essay in Unherd by Ed West. The Normans were Vikings who in the ninth century conquered a piece of … Continue reading How the Normans Shaped Modern Europe
This post is a recent piece by Matthew Yglesias from his Substack site Slow Boring. Here's a link to the original. It's part of an ongoing series of posts here about the problems of meritocracy (for example, this, this, this, and this.) As Yglesias notes, most critiques of meritocracy are focused on the failures of … Continue reading Matthew Yglesias — Meritocracy Is Bad
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 … Continue reading Jonathan Rauch — The War on Professionalism
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 