The global obsession with rankings of college and universities has struck again, this time from the Center for World-Class Universities   at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.  Here they are ,”the world’s top 500 universities” in unambiguous rankings, field by field --  Natural Sciences, Engineering,  Life Sciences, Medical Sciences, Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Economics, et al. .  The Social Sciences get included but not Law, Theology, or even a trace of the Humanities.   See for yourself at http://www.shanghairanking.com/Academic-Ranking-of-World-Universities-2013-Press-Release.html

This is, of course, contemptible, but that doesn’t mean that university administrators, governing boards, donors, and the often benighted foundations won’t allocate their resources along precisely these lines. Worse, students may read this “ranking” and  think that you can have a great university education without  troubling your brain about what it all means.

If you’d like to protest the contact person is Dr. Ying CHENG at [email protected]

 
In the late 1960s Sister Therese Marie Daugherty of the College of Notre Dame in Baltimore invented a game of quick recall of facts about the ancient world called  Certamen.  Now under the sponsorship of the National Junior Classical League  Certamen has reached Las Vegas, where the national competition was recently held.  The story is in today’s Boston Globe, "Translate ‘national champions’ into Latin"  

By Lawrence Harmon

 http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/08/15/the-classics-still-capture-imagination-urban-students/Dhd2zELxVjFY8jIJX5vRyM/story.html

For a description of Certamen see http://njcl.org/pages/njcl-certamen .

What tickles me most about the competition is that the winning team, drawn from various eastern Massachusetts schools, is “made up of immigrants or children of immigrants from Haiti, China, Albania and India.”

 So much for Latin as a WASP prerogative!

Duke University President  Richard Brodhead will be the featured guest on "The Colbert Report" tomorrow evening (8/15/13). 

Dr. Brodhead will be discussing K-12 humanities education and the recently published report of the Commission on Humanities and Social Sciences.

The Colbert Report airs at 11:30 p.m. eastern time on the Comedy Central network. Episodes are also available for viewing online the day after they air at http://www.colbertnation.com/

Thanks to Don Solomon of the National Humanities Center for this tip. 

There has been a lot of mystification about cheating in college, most recently “How College Classes Encourage Cheating”  in the Boston Globe: http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/08/03/how-college-classes-encourage-cheating/3Q34x5ysYcplWNA3yO2eLK/story.html.

If colleges “market” themselves as providing “certification for careers,”” and if the model for leaning is “knowledge transfer” (i.e. memorization of facts), rather than personal and intellectual growth, isn’t frequent cheating an almost inevitable outcome?