Jeffrey Polet is professor emeritus of political science at Hope College and director of the Ford Leadership Forum at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation.
Educating young people in a mass democracy proves no easy task. Variations in location, the abilities and interests of the students, the role of the parents, and conceptions concerning the end(s) of education create much confusion that aggregated metrics fail to capture. Continue Reading...
An old joke: A man walks into a psychiatrist’s office and says, “Doctor, my brother is crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.” The doctor ponders this and suggests that the man bring his brother in to be treated. Continue Reading...
Hope College required all seniors to take a “senior seminar,” the ostensible purpose of which was to help each student refine his or her “worldview.” Not liking, for a variety of reasons, the word worldview with its implicit relativism, I could nonetheless use the course to get students to struggle through competing “worldviews.” Continue Reading...
Since March of 2020, “at least 64 public or nonprofit colleges have closed, merged, or announced closures or mergers,” affecting an estimated 46,720 students. More than 500 have shut down in the past decade. Continue Reading...
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty never lost its relevance, but we have witnessed a resurgence of interest in it. In the latter half of the past century, many conservative writers, most notably Willmoore Kendall, provided trenchant criticisms of Mill’s arguments. Continue Reading...
My bad. When I was asked to write a review of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, I assumed we had entered a new stage in the gender wars. Having successfully worked around my undergraduate physical science requirement by taking a January-term class on Einstein and writing a paper on his philosophical ideas, I trust I’m forgiven for not knowing that the “three-body problem” refers to an unsolvable problem in physics. Continue Reading...
We have interesting classifications of our institutions of higher learning. The Carnegie classification of major research universities distinguishes between R1 and R2 schools. The well-known U.S. News & World Report Rankings separate national universities from regional ones, and also from national liberal arts colleges. Continue Reading...
Why the gnashing of teeth over the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action? Why have some schools responded by eliminating legacy admissions? What does the controversy tell us about how we understand the university itself? Continue Reading...
Some years ago, only tangentially related to the reading we were doing in our seminar class, the students and I got into a conversation about jobs we found especially unappealing. I began with “guy who sprays de-icing chemicals on planes in the middle of winter from a cherry picker,” and the students quickly followed suit. Continue Reading...
At its best, a democratic polity ought to deal well with complexity, this complexity composed of clashing ideas and principles as well as the interests of multiple actors and stakeholders. Such a polity will seek proximate solutions that require constant fine-tuning. Continue Reading...
