“How many classes,” asked a faculty at the end of a committee meeting three years ago, “is a tenured professor at Stanford required to teach each year?” None of us gave the correct answer, which is one. The same is probably true at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, and other top Research I universities in America. I have no idea how teaching is evaluated among these folks—or if it is a category for evaluation. I’d guess, however, that teaching evaluations matter little or not at all at these institutions.
Continue reading “Explaining teaching evaluations to my first-year students”
Because of the wildfires, the Pepperdine campus in Malibu was closed for over two weeks while classes were being delivered online. Yesterday, students began to return to their dormitories and classes return to “normal” today. (After the Borderline shooting and the destructive wildfires, there will be quotation marks around the word “normal” for at least the rest of the year, and possibly longer.)
Continue reading “Reading John O’Malley’s new book during the Woolsey Fire”
Continue reading “A former student’s reflective essay on Plato and exercise”
Among my recent interlibrary loan items is a hefty volume about the Diocese of Thái Bình in northern Vietnam. There isn’t a scale in my house, but I’d guess that it is four or five pounds like a college chemistry or ecology textbook. Published in conjunction with the eightieth anniversary of the creation of this diocese, this “yearbook” or “commemorative publication” (kỷ yếu) includes over 700 pages of glossy and thick papers and many photos of people and churches. It offers basic information on both past and present of the dioceses as well as individual parishes and missions. The information may be brief, but they add up to some fascinating insights.
Continue reading “The Catholic associational culture in North Vietnam”
Continue reading “Ngô Đình Thục: anticommunist and ambitious builder”
Continue reading “Why aren’t there many Korean American Catholic priests?”
