New Feature: Student Reading...

Music: My neighbor's lawn mower. (seriously)

For years now, I've been reading The Chronicle of Higher Education, a great daily newspaper which deals with all kinds of issues that relate to students, academia, colleges and universities, teaching, etc. The articles cover a very wide range of topics. While the Chronicle is online, unfortunately, it's not free. It's subscription-based.

As I peruse the Chronicle each day, I often come across pieces which I think would be of interest to students. Thus, I am initiating a new feature of this blog. I will occasionally or randomly post links to articles that I think will be of interest to students. These pieces will come from a range of different sources, as today's first three do. There is NO requirement that any of my students read these pieces. I post them purely for your interest, with a one-sentence annotation of each so you can decide if the article/editorial is something which you deem worth your time:

A Death in the Family

A moving piece by a famous writer...a young man from California read his columns on the importance of the Iraq war, enlisted, went to Iraq and was killed this past January. The writer got wind of this and works through his feelings about his role in this young man's death. This one brought a tear to my eye, if you want to know the truth.

4-Word Editorial Proves Costly for Student Paper

Wow! A student at a Colorado university writes an editorial in which he drops the F-bomb. "The editorial, in The Rocky Mountain Collegian on Friday, read “Taser this … F- BUSH,” with the vulgarity spelled out." This piece contains a long and follow-up of posts where readers carry on an interesting debate about the first amendment, student newspapers, speech and appropriateness.

The New College Try

A NY Times Op-Ed piece about whether or not colleges really do serve the American creed about upward mobility. Here's a quote from the piece: "Despite their image as meritocratic beacons of opportunity, the selective colleges serve less as vehicles of upward mobility than as transmitters of privilege from generation to generation." Provocative and will, I think, challenge many of our notions about what college is for and how it works.

Enjoy!