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GENERATION GAP #6: An Advice Columnist Asks For Advice
Although we all talked about keeping in touch, we knew it was really a goodbye dinner.Most of us had graduated a month earlier, and the professor who had brought us all together — a wry man with round...
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The Art of Being an Undergraduate
Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding is not actually a baseball novel; it’s a college novel, a great college novel.You have no doubt heard, by now, about The Art of Fielding—for many it’s become the new...
View ArticleTextbooks That Spy
Technology might have made studying and homework faster and easier, but thanks to CourseSmart, a new digital textbook system that tracks students’ reading progress, teachers will now have a way to see...
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The Empty-Nest Yard Sale
In some ways, I think my son was ready to say goodbye to his childhood. For a long time, during those awkward ages of thirteen to eighteen, he hung onto the artifacts of his younger days—in the back of...
View ArticleFor-Profit Schools from the Students’ Perspective
Talk about good timing: on the same day we posted Stephen S. Mills’s essay about working for a for-profit school, Racialicious reposted an essay looking at the issue from the other side.In it, Tressie...
View ArticleIs It Time to Get Rid of College Essays?
Today’s vocationally minded students view World Lit 101 as forced labor, an utterwasteof their time that deserves neither engagement nor effort. So you know what else is a waste of time? Grading these...
View ArticleI Wasn’t the White Boy Everyone Thought I Was
I stared at the line of boxes under the Race and Ethnicity section of my college application unsure of which to check. Based on my features alone, I was just another white boy: pale skin, brown hair,...
View ArticleAll Shade, Dusty Books, and Lofty Conversation
Fresh out of college, Kaulie Lewis already feels nostalgic for the 150 or so books she completed as an English major. At The Millions, she discusses what she considers some of the most important novels...
View ArticleThe Magic Building Where English Majors Work
A professor of undergraduate and graduate creative writing for twenty years, Cathy Day gives some practical advice for students at The Millions, admitting while English majors don’t work in a “magic...
View ArticleFrom Applebee’s to Published Author
Scott Cheshire explains that he started flirting with the woman who became his wife by telling her he had a novel coming out. Twelve years later, it did. Today, he is a published novelist with a...
View ArticleAdjunct Faculty Plan Walk Out
Adjunct college faculty are at last taking a stand against abominable work conditions and low pay by planning a national walk out on February 25, 2015. Unlike their tenured counterparts, adjuncts lack...
View ArticleFail Again, Fail Better
How it all got so bad is a blur. I blocked the door. I blacked out the basement windows. I remember myself curled in feral positions, sounds on repeat getting louder, climbing up and out of the window...
View ArticleSongs of Our Lives: Look Blue Go Purple’s “Circumspect Penelope”
My youthful travels—bounded by the meager means I possessed for escape: junker cars, slender bank accounts, impoverished imagination—never took me as far as I desired or dreamed. In our junior year of...
View ArticleThe Real Problem with Campus Rape
Fraternities do not have a monopoly on rapists: not at UVA, not at any frat, not even the deep Southern ones where upwards of 100 guys live in the house. (The plumbing; one shudders.) But: what the...
View ArticleOur Part-Time Labor Problem
I teach part-time. My students work. They work in fast food or slightly slower food or hospitality. Last spring semester, two were veterans, with at least four trips to the Middle East between them....
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His Greatest Masterpiece
Vampires. Zombies. Werewolves. Horror stories are overflowing with monsters whose mere touch presents their victims with a non-choice: become infected by our evil, or die. Transform into one of us, or...
View ArticlePart-Time Faculty Are Poor
Writers expecting to supplement their art by teaching college level courses might need to find a new day job. A quarter of all part-time college faculty receive some sort of public assistance, reports...
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Changing the Subject
Ma’s become obsessed with the missing baby to the point that it’s the first thing she says when I call, and it’s the subject of the very first thing she says to me when I arrive back home in...
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Reading Don Quijote with My Mother
My mother was among the first wave of women in the mid-1960s who went back to school for a post-college degree. Her goal was to earn a Master’s degree in Spanish literature along with a teaching...
View ArticleA College Education, Measured and Graded and Ranked and Weighed
The [Department of Education’s] report states: “In today’s world, college is not a luxury that only some Americans can afford to enjoy; it is an economic, civic, and personal necessity for all...
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