Last summer, on a road trip from Minneapolis to Kansas City, I passed through a town in Iowa where I lived from age two to five. Here is a picture. I have limited memories from these years, and most of them are filtered through home movies that I watched later or stories my father told … Continue reading The Death of My Old Hometown: Sucking Out the Wealth, Filling the Gap with Fecal Pollution
What follows is lightly revised from a talk I gave in 2009 on the occasion of my teacher, David W. Noble, retiring from the University of Minnesota. David died on March 11, 2018. Here is an obituary, and no doubt David’s many friends and colleagues will weigh in with more ambitious scholarly reflections about his legacies. … Continue reading David W. Noble, Beloved Mentor, Rest in Peace
In the strange world we inhabit, the insights I can offer as scholar seem (at least for the moment) to be assigned significant value. Sometimes I complain about the relative value ascribed to scholarship compared to a whole range of other things—say, building prisons or price-gouging people who need life-saving medicines—yet at the end of … Continue reading A Song to Dishonor Joe Arpaio
Without strong Democratic leadership, without mass protest, and with the economy so disrupted that I become confused as to how strikes could work, how do we fight for what we need? I have been distracted lately, like many others I know. But my main anxiety is not about immediate effects of the coronavirus, in its … Continue reading Coronavirus and the Shock Doctrine
Paul Manafort just received a 47 month sentence for multiple crimes, a slap on the wrist from a judge who was appointed by Ronald Reagan and gave an impression of bias during Manafort’s trial. Likely Manafort will serve time in a white collar prison, and quite possibly his associate and frequent co-conspirator Mr. Trump will … Continue reading Ashamed…in a Land Where Justice is a Game
I hope I was clear in my last post, and in any case it bears repeating, that the logic of “assessment” is not tied narrowly to “student outcomes.” There are many levels: Teaching—not just classroom dynamics and teaching evaluations, but also determining curricula. This includes balancing resources across departments. levels (undergraduate vs. graduate), and colleges … Continue reading Assessment Part II: Drones Vs. Teachers, Prisons Vs. Students, and Universities Vs. Another Tax Subsidized Hockey Stadium
MBE: Mark's blogging experiment 