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1 week ago | 
firstthings.com | Mark Bauerlein
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2 weeks ago | 
theepochtimes.com | Mark Bauerlein
CommentaryIf a business were losing money fast, sinking into debt, suffering from inefficiency, and engaging in some dubious financial practices, nobody would question the need for new leadership to step in and implement fundamental reforms. Some people would lose their jobs, some units of the business might be shuttered, and money going out the door would be reevaluated and, perhaps, trimmed here and cut there.
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2 weeks ago | 
firstthings.com | Mark Bauerlein
Higher education is much in the news, assailed by the right and the left (for different reasons, of course), and held in low regard by the general population. A few new books have come across my desk that address the subject with a due sense of crisis and/or opportunity. “Don’t trust the Ivy League to produce well-educated students.” That’s the opening sentence of Slacking: A Guide to Ivy League Miseducation.
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3 weeks ago | 
firstthings.com | Mark Bauerlein
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3 weeks ago | 
firstthings.com | Mark Bauerlein
Mark Twainby ron chernowpenguin, 1,200 pages, $45When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Sam Clemens (not yet “Mark Twain”) didn’t know where to stand. He was twenty-five years old, a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River—a job he’d obtained by paying an experienced pilot $500 to train him.
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1 month ago | 
americanmind.org | Mark Bauerlein
When conservatives discuss the books that drew them to the Right, they typically mention God and Man at Yale, Witness, The Closing of the American Mind, or The Road to Serfdom (a favorite of President Reagan’s), among a few others. I read those books, too, as I drifted from being a Clinton Democrat to holding a low-level post in George W. Bush’s Administration.
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1 month ago | 
modernagejournal.com | Mark Bauerlein
When my guide and I enter the classroom and loiter inside the door, the teacher continues with a lesson on the grammar of interrogatives without a pause. A dozen kids turn their heads our way with a curious expression, but only for a moment. One of them, however, a small fellow in spectacles, sweater, and tie, rises from his seat and walks toward me with an official demeanor. “Hello,” he begins, reaching out for a handshake.
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1 month ago | 
theepochtimes.com | Mark Bauerlein
CommentaryWhen I was teaching in the university in the 1990s, I always had two or three kids in a class of 30 who didn’t fit the high-achiever, go-getter mold. My institution was a selective one that sent a lot of undergraduates to law, medical, and business schools, but not these students. They didn’t seem to worry very much about grades.
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1 month ago | 
sltrib.com | Mark Bauerlein
Two weeks ago a friend of mine at the National Endowment for the Humanities told me that a team from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency had arrived and was reviewing the books. Last week the hammer came down, as N.E.H. leaders told their staff members that cuts in personnel were coming, eliminating perhaps 80 percent of the agency.
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2 months ago | 
mindingthecampus.org | Mark Bauerlein
If you were to imagine an ideal year of humanities education, it might include:Immersion in Greek or Latin, bolstered by many weeks in Greece or Rome;Coursework in philosophy, literature, and political theory, all the readings counting as canonical works;Small classes taught by experienced and charismatic instructors in a Socratic seminar style;And, finally, a small community of peers who share a similar interest in reading and discussing monuments of Western Civilization.
