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Tag: Books

STEM, Shortages, and the Truth About Doctoral Education

Harvard’s Michael S. Teitelbaum came out with an interesting new book last month called, Falling Behind? Boom, Bust and the Global Race for Scientific Talent.  Though it’s a very US- focused book, it’s worth a read as a corrective to the occasional hysterics that people have in Canada about our alleged STEM crisis. The book starts with a wonderful chapter called “No Shortage of Shortages”, which suggests that the current STEM-shortage panic is the sixth in the US since Sputnik.  He

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June 3, 2014 1 Comment

A Dreadful Book About Higher Education

If, for some reason, you feel a need to read the literary equivalent of sticking knitting needles in your eyes, have I got a book for you:  Henry Giroux’s, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education.  The whole book is a mixture of baseless assertions, generalizations from anecdotes, and non-existent fact-checking, an unmitigated disaster from start to finish. If you’re going to have an entire book about neoliberalism, it helps to actually define the term.  What is this thing that’s at war with

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March 20, 2014 6 Comments

Ciao, and Some Holiday Reads

Hi from Santiago, Chile, where I am doing a bit of work this week.  This last term has been an awfully busy one, and so I’m cutting the blog off for the holidays, today – a week earlier than usual.  You will, however, still get a weekly email from me over the break (except for the actual week of Christmas), and I’ll be back again full-time on Monday, January 6th. Thanks to all of you for reading over the past few months,

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December 6, 2013 No Comments

Sh*t Humanities Professors Shouldn’t Say

Two examples of ludicrous things I’ve seen/heard lately: Example #1 – A few months ago, I was in a session on the topic of, “how to defend the humanities”.  The animator threw up some quotes that were (at least in theory) derogatory of the humanities, and asked people for possible responses.  One of these quotes was from Harvard literature professor, Louis Menand’s, book, The Marketplace of Ideas (highly recommended, by the way), which ridiculed times-to-completion in humanities PhD programs thusly: “It takes three

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November 27, 2013 22 Comments

Innovation Literature Fail

So, I’ve been reading Mariana Mazzucato’s, The Entrepreneurial State.  It’s brilliant and irritating, in equal measures.  Brilliant because of the way it skewers certain free-market riffs about the role of risk and entrepreneurialism in the innovation process, and irritating because it’s maddeningly cavalier about applying business terms to government processes (in particular, the term “risk”, which Mazzucato doesn’t seem to understand means something entirely different in government, if losses can be made whole through taxation). Anyways, one thing that occurred to me

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October 17, 2013 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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