Category: Now Reading

What We’re Reading Now: The Faculty Lounges

Let’s be clear up front: The Faculty Lounges and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get The College Education You Paid For by freelance writer Naomi Schaefer Riley isn’t the most cogent book you’ll ever read. In fact, many of the links she makes between tenure and the various problems within higher education are questionable to say the least. But if you look past the tenure stuff and get down to the actual issues which she (mostly wrongly) thinks are caused by

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Is Higher Education Oversold?

Alex Tabarok at Marginal Revolution recently asked an interesting question that has spread quickly across the blogosphere – is college oversold? I think this question is going to get asked a lot more as the economic slowdown wears on, so it’s worth examining. Basically, Tabarok notes that U.S. enrolment in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects has been stagnant over the last couple of decades, whereas enrolment in “softer” subjects with allegedly (no data is provided) lower rates of

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What We’re Reading Now – The Innovative University

If you’ve had the faintest contact with management theory in the last 15 years, you’ve probably heard of Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and originator of the theory of disruptive innovation.  A couple of years ago, he teamed up with a co-writer to look at K-12 education in Disrupting Class, and now he’s done the same for universities with Henry Eyring in The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out. There are a

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