the chronicle’s wasted opportunity

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a reader contest recently, inviting readers to design their ideal college, from the ground up. The results are here (sorry for the paywall). This could have been a great opportunity to rethink what’s best and worst about current higher education. (In truth, I thought about suggesting a scatterplot combined […]

students helping students.

As academics we know that the way that a class goes, how much students get out of a class, and their evaluation of the course or the material depends heavily on the students themselves. How much effort do they put in? Are they prepared to learn? Do they contribute to discussions and take the material […]

majoring in football

Joe Nocera of the NYT wrote a column the other day endorsing the idea of allowing football players to “major in football.” The column begins at a lunch here at UNC. I was at that lunch, and Nocera’s claims are broader than what was actually said at the luncheon.

access to what?

As a result of the recession and the Republican takeover of the NC legislature, the UNC system has taken–and is expecting more–major cuts to its state appropriation. Unlike some other public flagships, notably Michigan and Virginia, UNC is very much a state school and we are very dependent on that state money to remain high […]

athletics and academics

As I have made clear in the past, I am a Tar Heel fan. I am also ambivalent about the relationship between big-time athletics and academics.

ask a scatterbrain: training grads in research ethics

One of the many wonderful sociologists I chatted with in Vegas was Iowa’s Mary Campbell, a loyal scatterplot reader. She asked me to pose a question to you (and I’m hoping in my post-Vegas/ASA/first-week-of-classes haze I remember its essence – if I don’t, I blame Andrew Perrin pushing appletinis at the bloggettogether): Apparently the University […]

perverse incentives in grading – exhibit a

A student forwarded me this email last week, which s/he received unsolicited from MyEdu, a company that specializes in helping students exploit grade inequality between departments and instructors: res ipsa loquitur.

of grade reform and deliberation

On Friday, UNC’s faculty council approved legislation that will put into place a series of reforms aimed at increased transparency in grade reporting. I chaired the implementation committee, charged with the details of how last year’s resolution (see discussion here) would be implemented, and I presented the legislation at faculty council on Friday. My first […]

teaching deviance by doing nothing

Below is a guest post from Nathan Palmer, creator of http://www.SociologySource.com a site focused on spreading ideas and resources for teaching sociology. Want to teach your students about norms, deviance, and the social construction of reality in a way that they’ll never forget? Try Doing Nothing, literally. Have your students silently stand in a public […]

who are our customers?

It is becoming more and more common to hear about the “customers” of higher education. I will go on record, unsurprisingly, as saying that I do not like this language. However, since it is becoming so common, I think it’s worth reflecting too on who these customers are, and also what the product is that […]

killing the messenger

UNC football is in the middle of a scandal involving improper contact with athletic agents and potential academic violations. It turns out that one of the main ways the scandal broke was that players were bragging via Twitter about perks paid for by agents, e.g, drinks, entry to fancy parties, and so on. So this […]

exam review sessions?

Does anyone have a strategy for exam reviews that aren’t tedious (for both the leader and students) and that don’t devolve into spoon-feeding of the material (or lead to frustration among students if they don’t)?

technical notes for co-authoring

I am writing up a set of instructions for my student co-authors on how to work together on a shared Word document. My own graduate education had abundant training in the word processing arts (owing to a 2nd job I had to take to make ends meet), but I find that not every graduate student […]

ask a scatterbrain: blogging for class assignments

Look, two scatterbrain questions in 24 hours! This fall I’ll be teaching my first-year seminar, “Citizenship and Society in the United States.” It’s great fun, and the basic framework stays the same each time. However last time around (Fall ’08) I added a blogging component where the students were to write weekly entries on a […]

more on grading policy

I’ve written before about my work through EPC on grading policy. After a year’s worth of consideration, we are presenting a resolution tomorrow for UNC to report grade distributions on transcripts for each class, and to report grade patterns to faculty each semester. Two colleagues wrote me a detailed and thoughtful message about the proposal, […]