Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?

In Academically Adrift, Arum and Roksa paint a chilling portrait of what the university curriculum has become. The central evidence that the authors deploy comes from the performance of 2,322 students on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester at university and again at the end of their second year: not a multiple-choice exam, but an ingenious exercise that requires students to read a set of documents on a fictional problem in business or politics and write a memo advising an official on how to respond to it. Data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, a self-assessment of student learning filled out by millions each year, and recent ethnographies of student life provide a rich background.

Their results are sobering. The Collegiate Learning Assessment reveals that some 45 percent of students in the sample had made effectively no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing in their first two years. And a look at their academic experience helps to explain why. Students reported spending twelve hours a week, on average, studying—down from twenty-five hours per week in 1961 and twenty in 1981. Half the students in the sample had not taken a course that required more than twenty pages of writing in the previous semester, while a third had not even taken a course that required as much as forty pages a week of reading.

Published: Nov 24, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,193 words)

Obama’s Flunking Economy: The Real Cause

Indeed, the greatest confidence man of the last few years, at least going by Suskind’s definition, was not Larry Summers or Timothy Geithner, but Barack Obama. Being a confidence man is almost in the job description of the insurgent presidential candidate. Having not been president before, you must, by definition, ask the American people for a trust you have not earned.

Author: Ezra Klein
Published: Nov 24, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,573 words)

The Racist Redskins

As the 1950s arrived, more teams starting signing African-Americans. A turning point came when the great Jim Brown, from Syracuse, joined the Cleveland Browns in 1957. Brown’s domination on the field was so thorough that all questions about the skills of black players were erased—except in the nation’s capital, whose team, Marshall said, would “start signing Negroes when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites.”

Washingtonians, it must be said, did not simply let all this go unremarked. Redskins fans, then as now, were among the most passionate in the league, and many ardent supporters among both the Georgetown set and the hoi polloi urged Marshall to rethink matters. Their view was given its strongest expression by Shirley Povich, the star Washington Post sportswriter. Povich (a man—Shirley was a male name as often as it was a female name in the early twentieth century) was Jewish and a native of Maine who originally moved to Washington to study law at Georgetown. He often wrote sentences like “Jim Brown, born ineligible to play for the Redskins, integrated their end zone three times yesterday.” Marshall remained unmoved.

Published: Nov 10, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,731 words)

The Perils of Pauline

She has an underlying vocabulary of about nine favorite words, which occur several hundred times, and often several times per page, in this book of nearly six hundred pages: “whore” (and its derivatives “whorey,” “whorish,” “whoriness”), applied in many contexts, but almost never to actual prostitution; “myth,” “emblem” (also “mythic,” “emblematic”), used with apparent intellectual intent, but without ascertainable meaning; “pop,” “comicstrip,” “trash” (“trashy”), “pulp” (“pulpy”), all used judgmentally (usually approvingly) but otherwise apparently interchangeable with “mythic”; “urban poetic,” meaning marginally more violent than “pulpy”; “soft” (pejorative); “tension,” meaning, apparently, any desirable state; “rhythm,” used often as a verb, but meaning harmony or speed; “visceral”; and “level.” These words may be used in any variant, or in alternation, or strung together in sequence—”visceral poetry of pulp,” e.g., or “mythic comic-strip level”—until they become a kind of incantation.

Published: Oct 1, 1980
Length: 31 minutes (7,895 words)

In the New Gangland of El Salvador

As US immigration policy has focused on deporting the greatest possible number of undocumented migrants, no matter what their situation, a great many Salvadoran deportees, some of whom grew up in the United States and hardly speak Spanish, have found themselves back in their country of birth. A number of these unwilling returnees are mareros, who either join the local branch of their organization or try to flee back home (that is, to the United States), joining a migrant trail across Mexico used by hundreds of thousands of would-be US immigrants every year. Along the way, the mareros are often recruited by Mexican drug traffickers, who have developed highly lucrative sidelines in white slavery, child prostitution, and migrant extortion. Assault, robbery, and rape are now an expected part of the migrant journey through Mexico.

Published: Oct 21, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,194 words)

How Doctors Could Rescue Health Care

If neither party is proposing effective solutions to the cost crisis, and political deadlock in Washington is preventing the consideration of new ideas, are we doomed to witness a slowly collapsing health care system that eventually will provide adequate care only to those who can afford to pay? In his latest book on health care,7 the Princeton sociologist Paul Starr, who worked on the ill-fated Clinton Health Security Plan, despairs of any political action that could bring about major reform. However, a new movement in the medical profession might help to start such reform by reconfiguring the way medicine will be practiced.

Published: Oct 27, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,857 words)

Post-Darwinian Experiments in Consciousness and Other Stories

[Fiction] “It just doesn’t make sense,” she said. “I mean, my sisters get pregnant looking at a cologne ad. They get pregnant in pollen season.” For six months they had been trying to conceive, and still her period was as regular as the tide. She decided to see a doctor. He told her it would be a waste of money, that the fertility counselor would probably recommend treatments linked to uterine cancer. He went into obscure specifics about the effect of fertility drugs on “weak hydrogen bonds” in the DNA molecule. She listened because he was a very intelligent person who knew more than she did about most things, but in the end she arranged an appointment anyway. To her surprise, the fertility counselor told her that drugs were not necessary. Her hormone levels were fine, and her ovarian reserve was well above the baseline for her age.

Published: Sep 28, 2011
Length: 6 minutes (1,602 words)

Predators and Robots at War

Most Americans are probably unaware, for example, that the US Air Force now trains more UAV operators each year than traditional pilots. (Indeed, the Air Force insists on referring to drones as “remotely piloted aircraft” in order to dispel any suspicions that it is moving out of the business of putting humans into the air.) As I write this, the US aerospace industry has for all practical purposes ceased research and development work on manned aircraft. All the projects now on the drawing board revolve around pilotless vehicles. Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies around the country eagerly await the moment when they can start operating their own UAVs. The Federal Aviation Administration is considering rules that will allow police departments to start using them within the next few years (perhaps as early as 2014).

Published: Sep 20, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,733 words)

School ‘Reform’: A Failing Grade

Steven Brill’s book is actually not about education or education research. He seems to know or care little about either subject. His book is about politics and power, about how a small group of extremely wealthy men have captured national education policy and have gained control over education in states such as Colorado and Florida, and, with the help of the Obama administration, are expanding their dominance to many more states. Brill sees this as a wonderful development. Others might see it as a dangerous corruption of the democratic process.

Published: Sep 29, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,393 words)

Fixed Opinions, or The Hinge of History

Seven days after September 11, 2001, I left New York to do two weeks of book promotion, under other circumstances a predictable kind of trip. You fly into one city or another, you do half an hour on local NPR, you do a few minutes on drive-time radio, you do an “event,” a talk or a reading or an onstage discussion. You sign books, you take questions from the audience. You go back to the hotel, order a club sandwich from room service, and leave a 5 AM call with the desk, so that in the morning you can go back to the airport and fly to the next city. During the week between September 11 and the Wednesday morning when I went to Kennedy to get on the plane, none of these commonplace aspects of publishing a book seemed promising or even appropriate things to be doing. But—like most of us who were in New York that week—I was in a kind of protective coma, sleepwalking through a schedule made when planning had still seemed possible. #Sept11

Published: Jan 16, 2003
Length: 24 minutes (6,235 words)