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In a hollow just north of Bennington, Vermont, near the New York state line, nineteen monks at the Charterhouse of the Transfiguration live and die in seclusion. It's the only [...]

WHEN IBRAM X. Kendi and other anti-racists take the fact of disproportionate outcomes as proof of racist practice at work, common sense asks, 'Who's doing it? Where's the bias? Show [...]

THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS AND THEIR WORLD by Robert A. Gross FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX, 864 PAGES, $40 Why concord? That's the question historian Robert Gross asks at the beginning of this [...]

ONE CAUSE OF American society's shift to the left over the past six decades has been a series of subtle acts of 'progress' that, at their inception, did not appear [...]

After Harold Bloom died in October 2019, E. D. Hirsch told a story from the early 1960s, when they were assistant professors of English at Yale. They both had lived [...]

AN EDITOR AT Viking Press once told me that there are two ways to sell books: Put on the cover either a swastika or Lincoln's face. I wasn't sure about [...]

Author(s): Mark Bauerlein [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.189967.8, 0000 0001 0941 6502, Emory University, , 30322, Atlanta, GA, USA Readers of Academic Questions are savvy enough to be skeptical of [...]

English teachers have always had a hard time getting kids to read books, but in recent years the problem has spread and taken new directions. The rejection of books by teens and young adults has become a common feature. One by one, recent studies and surveys have charted the decline. With the advent of the Digital Age, teens have more diversions at hand than they did before. A "USA Today" blog on "Generation Next" states that today's young people don't suffer from illiteracy; they just suffer from e-literacy. E-literacy is the new virtue, the intellectual feat of the rising generation. E-literacy derives not from bibliophobia, but from the miraculous and evolving advent of digital technology, the Information Age, and the Electronic Word. The more young adults master the practices of digital life, the better they succeed. However, if the young have acquired so much digital proficiency, and if digital technology exercises their intellectual faculties so well, then why haven't knowledge and skill levels risen accordingly? Digital habits have mushroomed, and kids read and write more words than ever before, but reading scores for high school seniors have been flat since the 1970s and down since the early 1990s. The author argues that, until there is an evidence from colleges and workplaces that digital habits do, in fact, yield better academic and job performance, let people hold off on proclaiming the allure of the screen and the end of the book.

How will you improve diversity at our school?' That's a question often asked in faculty job interviews today. A more elegant version appears in a University of California, Davis document [...]

Author(s): Mark Bauerlein [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (Aff1) 0000 0001 0941 6502, grid.189967.8, Emory University, , Atlanta, Georgia, USA It is now obvious that one of the longstanding criticisms conservatives have [...]

The Ross Macdonald Collection: 11 Classic Lew Archer Novels BY ROSS MACDONALD EDITED BY TOM NOLAN LIBRARY OF AMERICA, 3 VOLUMES, 2618 PAGES, $112.50 Near the end of Find a [...]

Author(s): Mark Bauerlein [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) Emory University, 0000 0001 0941 6502, grid.189967.8, , 30322, Atlanta, GA, USA On October 21, 1967, fifty thousand anti-Vietnam War protestors marched from [...]

THE SUMMER OF THEORY: HISTORY OF A REBELLION, 1960-1990 by Philipp Felsch translated by Tony Crawford POLITY, 280 PAGES, $30 FOR MANY OF today's students, the ideas of Adorno, Foucault, [...]

In one of his most irreverent moments, in the wild little book The Anti-Christ, composed not long before he completely lost his mind, Nietzsche states that there is only one [...]

Author(s): Mark Bauerlein [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) 0000 0001 0941 6502grid.189967.8Emory University, 30322, Atlanta, GA, USA The Long Crusade: Profiles in Education Reform -1967 -2014 is the kind of book [...]

Author(s): Mark Bauerlein[sup.1] Author Affiliations: Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322; engmb@emory.edu. From 2003 to 2005 he served as director of the Office of [...]

Back in the 1970s, when the humanities still set the intellectual tone for the college campus, it was common for advanced scholars to divide the personnel in two: There were [...]

If you teach high school or college students, or have kids who are passing through those places, and if your duties include grading papers, or you watch your kids struggle [...]

There are so many generous and high-sounding phrases and ambitions in "A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy's Future," the report by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), that to criticize them almost seems bilious and misanthropic. "A Crucible Moment," too, grounds its recommendations in measures of civic ignorance such as National Assessment of Educational Progress civics exams, the Civic Literacy Test (Intercollegiate Studies Institute), and surveys by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, results that cross ideological lines. It insists on "foundational knowledge about fundamental principles" and "[f]amiliarity with key democratic texts", goals a conservative and a liberal may both embrace. Reading further, however, one finds that when the report clarifies those goals, a narrow ideological outlook on civic knowledge and engagement emerges. The authors of "A Crucible Moment" advocate civic education as the facilitation of predetermined goals and rules out others in its very premises, thereby betraying one of the first principles of citizenship in a healthy republic: heed the other side, and engage its best expressions before one chooses where to stand. In this article, the author argues that the Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement and the AAC&U don't operate that way--or they don't recognize that their understanding of civic learning is partisan and tendentious at the root. (Contains 4 footnotes.)

High school students' lack of experience and practice with reading complex texts is a primary cause of their difficulties with college-level reading. Filling the syllabus with digital texts does little to address this deficiency. Complex texts demand three dispositions from readers: a willingness to probe works characterized by dense meanings, the ability to engage in a train of uninterrupted thought, and a receptivity to reflect on thoughts deeper than one's own. Schools should preserve a crucial place for unwired, unplugged, and unconnected learning. Teachers can boost students' college readiness by putting more complex texts in the curriculum.

This article contends that every chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts must advocate for arts education. The arts need a voice in power, say people in the field, someone in the corridors of influence to argue the benefits of teaching the nation's students about classical and jazz music, ballet, and sculpture. With No Child Left Behind (NCLB) emphasizing math and reading, business and manufacturing leaders calling for workplace readiness in the graduates, and politicians citing lagging international competitiveness in science and math, the Arts Endowment chairman must utilize the bully pulpit more than ever before. Dance, music, theater, and visual arts show up ever further down the priority ladder, and arts educators feel that they must fight to maintain even a toehold in the curriculum. The Arts Endowment chairman, they insist, must help. The emphasis falls on the unusual student, the difficult kid, not on the arts as a subject for study. Some students don't fit the NCLB regime and other subjects don't inspire them. Talented but offbeat, they sulk through algebra, act up in the cafeteria, and drop out of school. The arts "catch" them and pull them back, turning a sinking ego on the margins into a creative citizen with "a place in society."

Americans are reading less; comprehension is eroding. And where reading intersects with academic achievement and participation in civic matters and cultural activities, the results are dire. Thus concludes the new National Endowment for the Arts study, "To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence". A divergent group of experts weighs in. Their contributions are as follows: "A Woeful Prospect," (Mark Bauerlein); "Readers Are Doers," (Lynne Munson and Lauren Prehoda); "Content Counts," (Sandra Stotsky); "Not So Bad," (Jay Greene); and "The Hunting of the Snark," (Erin O'Connor). (Contains 1 table and 40 footnotes.)

It is only 2 p.m. on a mild afternoon in February, but the hallways are quiet and dim. Dozens of students stroll and chatter and text on the quad outside, [...]

Diversity researchers are in demand, Mark Bauerlein explains, because administrators at schools like U-Michigan need all the bogus support they can fabricate. The researchers ask students how they feel about minorities and somehow conjure their answers into a measurement of cognitive development. Those data are gathered and further processed into the "hard science" behind briefs like "Grutter", which foist racial preferences on an American population that has proven again and again to reject such unfairness.

In arts education, Visual Culture Studies (VCS) is currently at its height, and proponents of it act with all the verve of partisans on a roll. A little knowledge of history, however, should curb their enthusiasm. Academia has a way of assimilating the most extreme theories and pursuits into standard operating procedure, and the evanescence of reader response theory, deconstruction, and other schools is an important lesson. Ten years from now, practitioners will look back upon VCS as they look back upon New Historicism: as an interesting practice with lasting influence on some literary scholars, but hardly the sweeping transformation that had been predicted by theorists in the late 1980s. Whether and how VCS endures remains to be seen. Its legacy will depend, however, not on its timeliness, its reflection of larger social and cultural trends, or its usefulness to graduate students and younger scholars and teachers. Those elements will fade as time passes. What will make it last are what make any humanistic inquiry last: the cogency of its ideas, the infectiousness of its social vision, and the reliability of its judgment and taste.

A few years ago, when a group of students at Emory University prepared to demonstrate against a controversial speaker, I asked a senior why they wanted to do so. She [...]