In an essay in this month's Scientific American, Alice Gast, president of Lehigh University, makes a case for the benefits of international collaboration in the sciences:It has become cliche that great discoveries come from interdisciplinary thinking... [F]ew realize...
In addition to filling an open faculty line in international relations (IR), I was hired in 1991 by the University of Louisville with the idea that I would eventually direct the Grawemeyer Award for...
Anyone think Kathryn Lopez (of the National Review) actually reads the social-scientific articles she links to? This is from a screed attacking college co-ed housing:And, if you want to get even...
Have you heard about a new study, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, authored by academics Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa and released by University of Chicago Press? Their...
I attended a forum on the math and science curriculum last night at my kids' school and we had an interesting presentation and discussion on the general state of math and science education in the United States. Several of the parents present at the forum were math and science faculty members from Smith College and from UMass. One prominent theme was the lament that the US was falling behind China and India in the math and sciences.One of the parents referred me to an article and data published last summer in Money magazine. A key finding:As math and science talent accumulates abroad,...
I have just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's latest book Outliers. For those who haven't picked it up, yet, the key thesis is that extraordinary individuals are actually not extraordinary as individuals, but simply happen to be the lucky beneficiaries of chance, opportunity and social structures that unwittingly favor some over others by accident of birth - in ways we seldom recognize and even more seldom legislate to balance out.Bill Gates? Not a genius, just one of the lucky kids who by random chance happened to have access to an early computer terminal in the 1960s, giving him a leg up...