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...

 Professors Come from a Select Few Universities

The evidence is not only anecdotal. A recent study by Aaron Clauset, Samuel Arbesman, and Daniel B. Larremore shows that “a quarter of all universities account for 71 to 86 percent of all tenure-track faculty in the U.S. and Canada in these three fields. Just 18 elite universities produce half of all computer science professors, 16 schools produce half of all business professors, and eight schools account for half of all history professors.” This study follows the discovery by political s...

 How Poverty Affects IQ

In a series of experiments, the researchers found that pressing financial concerns had an immediate impact on the ability of low-income individuals to perform on common cognitive and logic tests. On average, a person preoccupied with money problems exhibited a drop in cognitive function similar to a 13-point dip in IQ, or the loss of an entire night's sleep. But when their concerns were benign, low-income individuals performed competently, at a similar level to people who were well off, said...

 Sid Myer's "Civilization" as an Educational Tool

[Kurt D.] Squire has studied middle school kids who played Civ3. He found that some students who were able to spend the hours needed to learn the game began to identify “rules” by which history progressed; rules that apply to such issues as resource allocation, the tradeoff between aggressive military expansion and diplomacy, and technological exchange among societies. Weir, who had college juniors and seniors playing every day for three weeks in a summer course, says some of the game sce...