Agentic AI Comes for Teaching
Will agentic AI let teachers spend more time teaching, or will it remove even more of the human touch from the academy? This is one of higher education’s most important…
Against AI Prose
In C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, Queen Orual writes the story of her life to indict the gods. “Being, for all these reasons, free from fear, I will write…
Why My AI Writing Assignment Failed
AI is here to stay, the experts say. Don’t fight it. Embrace it and give students a legitimate way to use AI in their writing. I’ve heard those claims since…
World University Rankings Are a Scam
Earlier this year, a New York Times report described a dramatic reversal in global university rankings. In the early 2000s, American institutions dominated the tables measuring scientific output. Seven of…
How China Corrupts Academic Research
To understand how China has corrupted academic research in the West, including in the United States, begin at the top. China is currently headed by a man, Xi Jinping, who…
Vintage Days at an Academic Conference
“Yes, the academic conference has fallen on hard times.” So begins Martin Center editor Graham Hillard’s recent National Review Online article “Strange Days at the Modern Language Association.” Hillard surveys…
Let’s Return to Teaching Students How to Argue
We hear all the time that America is hopelessly polarized, that the electronic landscape allows us to stay in our own hermetically-sealed communities, and that no one can speak with…
The “Mindfulness” Degree
Do American colleges still teach students how to think? Or have whole programs been built on fashionable but unexamined assumptions? Increasingly, one wonders whether parts of the curriculum are outright…
“Accommodation Nation” in the UNC System
Late last year, the Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch penned a widely shared essay on campus “disability accommodations,” the practice whereby students with learning disorders such as ADHD receive extra time on…
How Postmodernism Killed Great Literature
Last week, I finished reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s bestselling 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. While I usually do not read books from the “Millennial Sad Girl Navigates Modern…