Academia Progresses "One Funeral at a Time"

Pick up any business magazine or how-to management book, and you’ll run into words like “nimble” and “move fast” on virtually every page. The ability to change direction and shift priorities in reaction to consumer preferences or competitor actions often makes a decisive difference in marketplace success. One can’t think of an enterprise less “nimble” than the modern American university. Or a practice better designed to limit flexibility than...

 Learned VS Common Culture

In many private schools and academies, we find several things taught now which were never made the subjects of systematical instruction in former times; and in those of our universities in which it is the interest of the tutors to make their lectures of real use to their pupils, and where lectures are not mere matters of form, the professors find the necessity of delivering themselves in English. And the evident propriety of the thing must necessarily make this practice more general, notwiths...

 PhD Leaves You Unprepared for Non-Academic Work

The truth is that a life science PhD leaves you poorly prepared to get a job doing anything else: 1) Grad programs put very little emphasis on developing writing skills – you maybe write 4-5 documents (proposal, 2-3 papers, plus thesis) over seven years of grad school, with very little feedback on quality of the writing itself. 2) Life science PhDs lack quantitative and computer skills – your physicist or comp sci peers will leave you in the dust when it comes to filling non-science ‘...

 Brain Differences Between Sciences and Humanities

The areas of academic interest (sciences or humanities) and area of study have been known to be associated with a number of factors associated with autistic traits. However, despite the vast amount of literature on the psychological and physiological characteristics associated with faculty membership, brain structural characteristics associated with faculty membership have never been investigated directly. In this study, we used voxel-based morphometry to investigate differences in regional g...

 The NDEA had Broad Benefits, but Unquantifiable Benefits

The four NDEA Titles featured in this report contributed to general upward trends (e.g., in the rate of high school, college, and graduate completion; in the level of student preparedness in science, mathematics, and modern languages; in the number of teachers and degree-granting institutions; in the number of bachelors and doctoral degrees awarded; and in the number of scholarly publications by doctoral recipients) during the years that they were in force. Their provisions also contributed t...

 Museums are Cathedrals

Museums are, in a way, the cathedrals of the modern world, places where sacred issues are expressed and where people come to reflect on them. A museum is also a kind of bridge between the academy and the public.