June 15, 2024
Being “non-judgmental” was the highest virtue when I became a professor in the 1980s. How can you be non-judgmental while grading hundreds of papers?
June 15, 2024
The impetus for my foray into curriculum building was little more than a desire to make literature old again. Culturally, we knew we were facing headwinds when it came to literature’s appeal to......
June 1, 2024
This memoir recounts the story of my education in the vicissitudes of life while at university, straight out of school, and how I reluctantly and unexpectedly transitioned from a free (and loose) spir......
May 4, 2024
Professor Slater taught me how to prepare and read as a serious student, not imposing my vain and lazy interpretation on a text but mastering the granular details of a language to make the vast s......
April 20, 2024
By all means, pursue your noble dream of improving the condition of humanity through your research and teaching. Could I do it all again, I would, but I would do things very differently.
April 20, 2024
There are only two good reasons for attending graduate school: (1) getting a degree prerequisite to a teaching career, and (2) having nothing better to do.
April 6, 2024
It would be difficult to decide which of the five Doktorväter were most influential in my development as a scholar—they all contributed in various ways by their example of humanity, exactin......
April 6, 2024
It wasn’t until I joined the faculty that I learned I was entering a somewhat foreign culture. I can best sum it up as “a culture of pretense.”
March 23, 2024
Education. What does that really mean? Does it imply certain requirements such as a university degree or a high school certificate to succeed in life? What is it exactly that makes a person educated?
March 9, 2024
Claireve Grandjouan, when I knew her, was Head of the Classics Department at Hunter College, and that year gave a three-hour Friday evening class in Egyptian archaeology.
