Tag: graduate students
The Class War at West Virginia University
Three years ago, President E. Gordon Gee of West Virginia University had a terrific idea—a career capper. As he neared retirement, he would embrace the “academic transformation” of public higher education and streamline his university.
For too long, as Gee told anyone who would listen, public universities had tried to be everything to everyone and keep up with elite private colleges. When the coronavirus pandemic shut down American universities in 2020, Gee embraced its disruptions as a gift—a “black swan
Colorado’s Snow Is Vanishing Into Thin Air
This story was originally published in High Country News.
High winds tore at Gothic Mountain as the sleeping giant watched over the cabins nestled in Gothic, Colorado, a remote outpost accessible only by skis during the valley’s harsh alpine winters. The plumes of snow that lifted from the peak briefly appeared to form a cloud and then disappeared.
To many, the snow that seemed to vanish into thin air would go unnoticed. But in a region where water availability
How to Fix American Higher Ed
American higher education is the envy of the world, and it’s also failing our students on a massive scale. How can both be true simultaneously? Our decentralized, competitive system of research institutions is a national treasure, unparalleled in human history. We have the best universities, best professors, and best systems of discovery, and we attract the best talent. But the American educational system leaves many high-school graduates woefully unprepared for work or for life, whether or not they go
Let’s Celebrate Our Failures – The Atlantic
The gathering held last June at a park in Irvine, California, was not a standard toga party. Instead of undergraduates downing beer from Solo cups, the attendees were graduate students drinking champagne from plastic jeweled goblets. Crowned with laurel wreaths, wearing togas and Roman-emperor costumes, they honored something that rarely gets commemorated: rejection. More than 100 rejections. Grants, journal articles, fellowships—you name it, they’d been denied it.
This party was one component of a larger project devised by the cognitive-science
Mob Justice Is Trampling Democratic Discourse
“It was no great distance, in those days, from the prison-door to the market-place. Measured by the prisoner’s experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey of some length.”
So begins the tale of Hester Prynne, as recounted in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most famous novel, The Scarlet Letter. As readers of this classic American text know, the story begins after Hester gives birth to a child out of wedlock and refuses to name the father. As a result, she is
Penn State’s Pandemic Denialism – The Atlantic
As the fall 2021 semester approaches, nearly 700 college campuses across the United States are requiring proof of vaccination for students or employees. If you plot these colleges on a map, the image bears a striking resemblance to one depicting the results of the 2020 presidential election. And that image resembles a map of current COVID-19 hot spots, which mirrors a map of vaccination rates. In other words, vaccination rates lag behind in the areas where vaccinations are needed