First off, some employment news. As of May 28, I will be joining the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, at Washington University in St. Louis, as professor of practice and executive editor of the center’s journal, Religion & Politics. You can read the press release here. Many of you know the journal, which has been publishing smart journalism and opinion writing for over a decade; it has been on hiatus for about a year, and I will be restarting it, I presume around Labor Day. One imagines that given current events—apparently there is news in the Middle East, and on campuses, and I have heard there is an election coming up—there will be a lot to write about, and many fine pieces to assign. I am excited.
Also, while I will not be moving to St. Louis, I will be teaching classes at WashU every other spring, which will involve some frequent flying (I shall purchase carbon offsets, imperfect as they are). Can anyone get me some direct flights from BDL to STL? That is not so much to ask, is it?
This means, sadly, that I will be leaving American Jewish University, where I have had the pleasure of directing their open learning program for close to a year. But before I go …
Take a class with me
Every Tuesday in May, I will be teaching for AJU a free online class, Jews and Antisemitism on Campus: A Century of Discord. It should be all kinds of fun, the best use of four hours spread over a month that I can think of, unless you are in some really awesome weekly therapy. Register here.
Green Mountain Failures
Apparently, small colleges in Vermont keep closing. Goddard College is the latest. Now, I have no special brief for small progressive liberal arts colleges in Vermont; to me, Goddard/Marlborough/Bennington/Green Mountain are all one school, with good local dairy in the cafeteria, high tuition, lax graduation requirements, and cows. But it does seem crazy that more people don’t want to waste their parents’ dollars in our most beautiful state. It’s a mystery why so many small liberal arts colleges are thriving in Ohio, and people keep moving to Florida, a state so terrible it hurts my fingers to type it, but Vermont is having trouble attracting students.
But actually the real mystery—as I have written before—is that none of these colleges closing across the US (and a lot of colleges are closing) is making a last-ditch effort, before giving up the ghost, to fill the many market niches in higher ed that are currently going unfilled. Here are some colleges I would gladly mortgage my second yacht to send my children to: a college that is mobile-phone-free; a great-books college, with a rigorous core curriculum, that is not the project of a religious community and is not a stalking-horse for the right-wing politics of its board members; a Jewish-oriented liberal arts college set in a beautiful state (like if Brandeis or Yeshiva U shrank itself down, took over the campus of Goddard College, and served farm-fresh, Vermont-dairy local ice cream in the dining halls); a college where you work hard, take a lot of classes, and graduate in three years (like in Europe); a bilingual college, where everyone takes half the curriculum in Spanish, or Arabic, or Chinese.
Oh, and if there were a college where everyone lived as if it were 1996, with the Gin Blossoms on the radio and a lot of people pretending to have read Infinite Jest, I would require all five of my children to go there.
Although schools like Goddard postured as different, they were different in a way the marketplace apparently was no longer interested in. But there are market failures, right now, that need to be corrected. There are schools that we don’t have that we want, or need. The lack of creativity in higher ed is astonishing.
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