Lehrman American Studies Center at ISI

Who Should Go to Graduate School?
By Phil Hamilton
Feb
4

A little over a month ago I wrote a blog entry about who should go to college. But what about who should go to graduate school? Every year around this time, I’m usually writing at least several recommendation letters for history majors who will be finishing in the spring and who wish to go to graduate school in the discipline for an M.A. or the Ph.D. This is often an enjoyable task, as I recall the growth and development of these students over the years. Over the past several years, I've been increasingly encouraging my best students to go to graduate school if they have a desire. I certainly think many of them have the potential to be fine scholars and instructors, and that they will find an academic career satisfying and worthwhile.

However, as I sadly look at recent trends in higher education (especially in the midst of the current economic downturn), I've been wondering if I've inadvertently sold some of my students down the river.

What is Education? | 0 comments
An Interview with George H. Nash
By Lee Trepanier
Jan
27
George Nash

This winter, George H. Nash, an authority on the life of President Herbert Hoover and author of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 and Reappraising the Right: The Past and Future of American Conservatism, agreed to allow me to interview him.  Dr. Nash is an independent scholar, historian, and lecturer, with specialties in twentieth century American political and intellectual history.   He is a senior fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in Mecosta, Michigan, and guest lecturer at the Lehrman American Studies Center's summer institute at Princeton University.

Read the interview.

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Open Debate Can Sometimes Violate the Freedom of Speech
Academic Freedom File on February 8

St. Louis University, a private school, has drawn some attention from Inside Higher Ed for its treatment of campus speech. According to controversial speaker David Horowitz, the university refused to allow the College Republicans to bring Horowitz on campus to speak about "Islamo-Fascism," or to debate the subject of "Academic Freedom and Islamo-Fascism" with Cary Nelson of the American Association of University Professors. Horowitz says the university would not allow him to speak unless "there was another speaker on the program to oppose his point of view," and then rejected him again in debate format, stating it would permit the debate if it included a third speaker to represent the school's Catholic values. Assuming the truth of these allegations, this move raises some interesting questions.

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Mill, Hayek, and Our Midas Plight
Front Porch Republic on February 8

Call it Factory Planet: a world in which natural processes are treated as parts of a vast world-machine operated to produce a maximum amount of wealth for humans.

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Deluge of Amicus Briefs: 14 State Attorneys General Agree that Christian Students should not be Forced to deny their Faith.
Academic Freedom File on February 5

Yesterday, a deluge of amicus (friend of the court) briefs supporting the Christian Legal Society were filed at the Supreme Court. At least 21 briefs were filed in support of CLS, and I believe there are a few more that I have not seen yet. This is a substantial number of supporting amicus briefs, although not a record for the Supreme Court.

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Throwing Student-Loan Reform Under the Bus
Brainstorm on February 5

The New York Times reports (as did the Washington Post last week) that the Obama Administration's student-loan reform package is in jeopardy. This is unsurprising. The current federal student loan system involves the transfer of tens of billions of dollars from the

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Teen Digital Media Update
Brainstorm on February 5

For teens (12-17-year-olds), blogging is down and networking is up. That's the finding in a new report from Pew Research, whose Internet & American Life Project is one of the longest ongoing survey initiatives out there. The summary appears here.

While 28 percent of teen users in 2006 claimed that they keep a blog, that number now stands at 14 percent. And while 76 percent of them claimed

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