In our next Tips for Teachers meeting of the Fall 2009 semester, we read and discussed "The Millennial Muddle: How Stereotyping Students became a Thriving Industry and a Bundle of Contradictions", by Eric Hoover. It was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, on October 11th, 2009.  This article can also be located online at

http://chronicle.com/article/ The-Millennial-Muddle-How/ 48772/

We started our conversation by talking about the "dumbing down" of some American students, and how they seldom read, and how even the Harry Potter series, which gave so many people such hope that it would inspire children (especially boys) to read, did not seem to have many spillover effects. One member present quoted Philip Roth as saying that in about 25 years, novelists and readers will be in a definite minority. 

In our next Tips for Teachers meeting of the Fall 2009 semester, we read and discussed "The End of the University as We Know It", by Mark C. Taylor, which was in the Opinion Column of the New York Times, on April 26th, 2009. It can be read online at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/ 04/27/opinion/27taylor.html?_ r=1&scp=1&sq=end%20the% 20university%20as%20we%20know% 20it,%20by%20mark%20c.% 20taylor&st=Search

We started our discussion by talking about how graduate studies, which focus on more and more about less and less, are derived from the Medieval system of education, and there was agreement with Taylor that it perhaps is time for a change. We also mentioned how we agreed with Taylor that many dissertations which become published as a book have hardly anyone actually read them, so perhaps they should be published as a series of articles instead. However, we did agree that the newly accumulated body of knowledge could certainly be useful in conferences. And one person made the point that even if a graduate research topic seems entirely obscure, almost to the point of ridicule, as mentioned in the article about the person who was looking at punctuation in a theologian's work, that the findings might ultimately be discovered to be useful in unexpected ways. And after all, in this particular case of punctuation,  don't we all, as writing teachers, say how much punctuation can affect meaning itself? (This is something that Lynn Truss talks about in humorous ways, in her book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves.)

In our next Tips meeting, we discussed "Dehumanized: When Math and Science Rule the School", by Mark Slouka. It can be found in the September edition of Harpers Magazine, and also on the web at http://www.harpers.org/ archive/2009/09/0082640. We started our discussion by questioning whether the dichotomy Slouka presents between "MathandScience" (as he puts it) and the Humanities is real or exaggerated. After all, we only need to consider some of the author scientists in The New Humanities Reader, such as Oliver Sacks or Steven Johnson, to refute this dichotomy. And what about Bertrand Russell, who was not only a mathematician and philosopher, but also an essayist? But then we wondered whether it is true that some scientists try to incorporate the humanities, but the reverse is not true. After all, how many in the humanities know or understand the Second Law of Thermodynamics, whereas most, if not all, scientists know Shakespeare.

We talked about the role of values in the different disciplines, and some said that although science is often presented as being value neutral, there are many values incorporated, especially in the teaching of evolution. And we looked at how Slouka almost went overboard in his criticism of several New York Times columnists, but thought he lacked a historical perspective. And we found the irony in his statement that education is fundamentally job training and therefore should be in math and the sciences so that we can compete with developing nations such as India and China, when Slouka himself is in a privileged position as an eminent university professor, so the humanities did not hurt his job prospects. That being said, however, it was still undeniably true that often there is a relationship between industry and the university, Johnson and Johnson with Rutgers being a case in point. But many other universities are funded by corporations and capitalists, such as Carnegie Mellon and Stanford.

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