The Blackboard

Early-Alerting Early-Alert Systems on College Campuses

The university’s best, most utopian aims must not beget dystopian early-alert policies that infringe on students’ personal liberties while turning campus into a place where everyone is an informant, and deviations from the norm beget Orwellian intervention.

Recapturing the Real: Physicality, Imitation, and Tradition in a Digital World

Our educational approach should include the validation of physicality, the imitation of the master, and the celebration of tradition.

Online Learning Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be

There is certainly a place for online learning in undergraduate education, but we should not undercut traditional higher education for the sake of innovation or profit margin.

Optionality and the Intellectual Life: In Gratitude for the Real World...

Something about Taleb’s emphasis on practical wisdom unleashes in his readers a sense of humility, a renewed trust in reason, and a spiritual hunger courageous enough to move beyond the cynicism and skepticism typically bred in schools.

Two Forms of Despair

What I’m writing is not an exposé of the Christian college, nor a bitter and defiant account of my triumph over an evil system, but a confession of my own failures, faulty motivations, and despair.

Learning to Read “the Book in Front of Us”

As the fall semester looms, the minutia of meetings and syllabi revisions threatens to drain the excitement from my impending return to the classroom....

Fierce Velleity: Poetry as Antidote to Acedia

In “Lying,” the late Richard Wilbur diagnoses one of our age’s endemic ills with the paradoxical phrase “fierce velleity.” For those of us who...

What Groucho Marx Can Teach Us About Liberal Education

The world wearies of defenses of liberal education and the humanities. What cannot be denied is that all over the country the liberal arts...

Educating Humans to Subvert Technocracy

Alan Jacobs’s new book, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, traces a fascinating intellectual debate that arose...

Dissecting Hospitality

The virtue of hospitality has enjoyed something of a minor renaissance. Over the last few decades, theologians and ethicists have sought to make a...