How has modern science progressed? This is a tough question to answer for the last few generations. It is even harder if you have aspirations to go back a lot further. Lutz Bornmann and Rudiger Mutz certainly don’t lack for ambition. They look at the growth of science since the 17th Century. The growth rate…
Category: Academic Marketing
Credit Hours, Outcomes, Academic Missions And School Brand
Mark Garrett Cooper and John Marx have a lively take on the American research university in their book Media U. They discuss the linkage between academic missions and school brand. Popular Features Of Universities Allow The Intellectual The authors discuss how American research universities have always required an audience to deliver value. A key point…
Good Practice In Undergraduate Education
One of the strangest things about being a professor is that outsiders think this means you are primarily a teacher. As a researcher, you feel that you aren’t primarily a teacher. (Some snooty colleagues even find being called a teacher a bit of insult). The particularly strange thing is the outsiders do have a sensible…
Bribery Works With Students
In what might be classed as a stunningly unsurprising result Michael Hessler and his colleagues did an experiment to demonstrate that bribing students with cookies helps with evaluations of teaching. The headline is that bribery works with students. Broadly speaking I have no doubt that they are right. I have seen a few criticisms of…
Thinking Differently About Business School Cases
Bridgman, Cummings, and McLaughlin in their 2016 paper about the case method tell us that the conventional history of the development of business case teaching is missing some vital elements. Cases nowadays come from the perspective of management. There exists a management objective that the students are trying to deliver. This excessively managerial perspective is…
Net Promoter And Lessons For Academic Research
I value academic work that speaks to the issues of managers and others outside of academia. The Net Promoter Score/System (NPS) is widely used by managers and so it can be valuable when academics look into this metric. What then can we say about Net Promoter and the lessons for academic research? Reviewing The Literature…
Colleges And Universities
Andrew Delbanco’s discussion of college in the US is at its most interesting discussing the origins of college. He is keen to emphasize that colleges and universities are not the same things. He suggests that college, a place for undergraduate education, developed from early American Puritan ideals. This was a place for moral and intellectual…
The Sokal Hoax
A fascinating event in academic history was the Sokal Hoax. A physicist reacted to the idea that reality is completely socially constructed and determined he would get published in a cultural studies journal. Satirizing Academic Publishing Before we celebrate Sokal’s inter-disciplinarity it is worth noting that he was satirizing social studies. The text he sent…
A Defense Of Enlightenment Thinking
Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now is a wonderful book. Pinker’s work is precisely the sort of thing that we need more of. I.e. writing from knowledgeable people able to see the big picture. The big picture in Enlightenment Now is about the biggest picture one can have. It is a defense of enlightenment thinking. The Enlightenment:…
The Science Of Spotting BS
The authors clearly had a lot of fun writing their paper on the reception and detection of BS. They use the term “bullshit” more in the first few paragraphs than most people use their core term in the whole of any paper. That said, why not? It is an interesting and important topic. Do people…
