Lehrman American Studies Center

This is more of a confessional than it is a blog posting. I need to come clean. I’m looking for absolution. For what, you ask? I use Wikipedia.

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Liberal education for Professor Eva T.H. Brann consists of "artfully superintended conversations . . . aided by great books." It provides Americans with an education that suits its political regime, a matching, according to Brann, that Aristotle would have recommended. Studying the classics and the American founding does "not aim at a return to the past but at its re-appropriation for the present."

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In An Education for our Time, Josiah Bunting suggests that the fictional Adams College ought to hire mentors especially based on "how the candidates have lived their own lives . . . " (210).

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"Universities have no business teaching students how to be good people or good citizens."

I can still remember one of my colleagues adamantly stating this opinion almost a decade ago. Now I find myself in the interesting position of having to revisit this question in my current work of reviewing and revising my university's general education curriculum. Is there really a role for character and citizen education in a general education curriculum?

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I realize that many readers of this blog are advanced graduate students and those who have just finished the Ph.D., but who do not yet have full-time academic positions. As chair of my department, I typically head up our tenure-track searches as well as hire adjuncts on a semester-by-semester basis. Therefore, I thought might be beneficial for those who anticipate hitting the TT search relatively soon (in the next year or so) to consider adjunct work to bolster both your CV and your chances of landing a position in a difficult job market.

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A few years ago it fell upon me to become the inflictor-in-chief of assessment upon my colleagues (as chair of the relevant committee). Here I hazard to offer you all a bit of what I learned in my stint on the "other side", focusing on the positive.

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As a new academic year begins, a number of junior professors will soon be asked to serve as faculty advisors to various student clubs and organizations. There are certainly “pros” and “cons” to performing this service and, for those of you just starting out, here are some things to keep in mind.

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On the last Thursday morning in July, I stood on the Lexington green with my beautiful and sagacious wife, my five very active and somewhat mischievous children, the talented Ben Cohen (acting as Paul Revere; and who also turned out to be a supporter of Hillsdale College), the vivacious Malana Salyer of Gary Gregg’s McConnell Center, and roughly twenty-seven teachers from Kentucky.

As “Paul Revere” described the battle on the commons that morning—the Lexingtonians greatly outnumbered by the advancing British—I felt immensely humbled.

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In an article in the February Inside Higher Ed called “The Business Model is the Wrong Model,” Peter Katopes argues that the market place model of customer satisfaction and efficiency has created a culture of entitlement, instant gratification, and institutional fiscal irresponsibility.

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I confess that after much reading and reflection it is still hard to nail down the essence of a great leader or statesman. Justice Potter Stewart’s comment on obscenity and pornography is easily applicable to statesmanship: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced . . . [b]ut I know it when I see it.” While it may difficult to pin down the core of statesmanship, one knows it when one sees it.

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