Spring is here already. The grass is green, the sun glows warm, and we are all – faculty and students – waiting for finals to be over. As these beautiful days melt into cold nights in front of textbooks and laptops, I find it inescapable to question why burying myself in schoolwork matters. I am…
Wrestling with incongruous ideas is a part of the liberal arts tradition and one of my favorite parts of college. Extraordinary learning comes from dialogue – evaluating competing claims and argumentations. History is rife with vivid intellectual disagreements, and these disagreements demonstrate engaging with dissenting opinions can be more fruitful than stomping them out. Furthermore,…
This week, let’s focus on a topic that cannot seem to leave the headlines: inequality. Introduced into the popular lexicon by the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, inequality represents the expanding chasm between the haves and havenots. And it is a chasm. In 2010, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans controlled a third of…
The most important news in higher education this week comes out of rural Virginia. Sweet Briar College, a historic women’s college, announced it would close over the summer. Liberal arts colleges across the country are stunned. I have no personal connection to Sweet Briar, but I feel compelled to review this story. Students across the…
I am reminded this week of the February 11, 2005 issue of The Concordian: the top headline is “STUDENT APATHY” (capitalized, I assume, for journalistic panache). The subject of the article is the fact that the Student Association – as student government was then called – had only one team running for executive office. The…
The 2010’s are an exciting time to attend college. Since I enrolled at Concordia, armies of technocrats have forecast the demise of the American university. In the wake of Mark Zuckerberg’s fame and fortune, the “UnCollege” movement, which encourages young people to question the necessity of higher education, “create[d] a place where people who are…
I have a passion for the quantitative. I major in math. I serve on the board of a quantitative nonprofit initiative. I review metrics for another. I get inappropriately excited when I solve a tricky statistics problem or merge two disagreeable datasets. I digress, but you get the idea: I love numbers. Yet I am…
Pop quiz: how much money do you have in outstanding student loan debt? If you’re anything like me, that question made you flinch. I want to talk about student loans this week. In particular, I want to highlight the report Are College Students Borrowing Blindly by Elizabeth J. Akers and Matthew M. Chingos, both of…
Welcome back to campus. With a new semester and a new year come new aspirations. I think I got a bit too insular with my column before. I want to take this time to refine my aim. I loathe the Concordia Bubble, and I want this column to help pop it. Let’s dive in to…
December is here already. Our weather is Minnesota Mean, our campus exudes Christmas spirit, and our students prepare for break. Of course, a fog hangs over campus: finals. Researchers have linked finals to amplifying stress, feelings of depression, even asthma. In the next few days, finals will strain students’ physical and emotional health. In this…