An article published by the Chronicle of Higher Education last week is still making its rounds on social media. “Changing Your Teaching Takes More Than a Recipe” đź”’ is also circulating under the subtitle “Professors Have Been Urged to Adopt More-Effective Teaching Practices. Why Are Their Results So Mixed?”
Continue reading “Learning How to Teach: Beyond Recipes”This week, Heterodox Academy—an organization founded in 2015 to promote “open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement” in universities—released the results of a survey conducted in the fall of 2020 on U.S. college campuses.
This second annual Campus Expression Survey, in a report authored by Melissa Stiksma, a doctoral student in industrial-organizational psychology at George Mason University, purports to substantiate Heterodox Academy’s claim that “students and professors have been ‘walking on eggshells,’ censoring their opinions and thereby depriving others and themselves the opportunity to learn from counterarguments and constructive debate.”
Republican students are especially susceptible to self-censorship on campus, according to the report. To be sure, the report attributes this self-censorship primarily to the fear of other students’ opinions, rather than to fear of reprisals from professors or administrators. But Stiksma told Inside Higher Ed that it shows “that Republican students are not part of the conversation on some of the biggest issues” on American campuses.
These are bold claims related to heated public debates about the future of American higher education. But I find that the survey—on the whole—does not support these assertions.
Continue reading “College Students Mostly Feel Comfortable Speaking in Class, Study Finds Despite Itself”
This week, the legal scholar and sometime Obama-administration official Cass R. Sunstein published an essay arguing that American professors are mostly liberals and that this is a problem. Notwithstanding the banality of that claim, his essay seems worth a reply, if only because Sunstein is a famous example of the liberal professors in question.
But upon closer inspection, the essay is remarkable for another reason: Sunstein has co-opted boilerplate conservative talking points about academic bias in order to make what appears to be a liberal argument for changing nothing about the liberal academy at all.
Continue reading “Cass Sunstein’s Curiously Contradictory Case for Conservative Professors”
This morning, I saw a Reuters story with an alarming lede: “Only a quarter of U.S. adults in a recent survey could fully identify factual statements—as opposed to opinion—in news stories, the Pew Research Center found in a study released on Monday.”
Well, that doesn’t sound good, I thought.
This seems like important territory for history instruction to address. It might also provide a useful reading for students. So I pulled up the Pew report in question: “Distinguishing Between Factual and Opinion Statements in the News” (by Amy Mitchell, Jeffrey Gottfried, Michael Barthel and Nami Sumida, dated June 18, 2018).
There’s a lot to like about the way this study was conducted. But I have concerns.
Blue Book Diaries 