History Writing News at Concord Review

By Mary Grabar, posted on January 16, 2019: Long-time friend of the Dissident Prof, Will Fitzhugh, is passing the baton of editorship of The Concord Review, his internationally recognized quarterly journal of academic research papers in history by high school students, to Charles Emerson Riggs, a scholar of American intellectual history at Rutgers University. Mr. Riggs will be defending his Ph.D. dissertation about "the confluence of religion, existentialism, and psychoanalysis in mid-twentieth-century American thought, with a focus on the German-born theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich," this spring. Like Mr. Fitzhugh, Mr. Riggs graduated from Harvard College with honors. Although he was born in 1987, the same year Fitzhugh began The Concord Review, Riggs has worked as an editor, researcher, historian, and educator for a decade. This past summer, he began serving as as dean of The Concord Review's summer programs in San Francisco, Boston, and Seoul.

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Why College Students Can't Write

Guest Post by John Maguire, Posted August 22, 2018: That American students and college graduates write lousy prose is not disputable. The Chronicle of Higher Education runs op-eds about it all the time.  The Washington Post published at least three big blog posts on the subject in 2017.  The New York Times ran a well-reported 2,000-word story by Dana Goldstein called “Why Kids Can’t Write.” However, the headline we’d like to see (“Business Owners Say College Grads Writing More Lucidly Than Ever”) will appear only in The Onion.

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Contraries: The Swamp at DOE, Diversity, Retirements

Posted March 12, 2018, by Mary Grabar: It is with increasing dismay that I read missives from the Department of Education. On Friday, arriving in my mailbox was the Teachers Edition newsletter with a recommended link to an article about the winners of a New York Times contest for teenagers to connect classic literary works to articles in their newspaper. It does not take much imagination to guess what the results might be. The headline announced, "Student Contest Results in Eye-Opening Connections in Classical Texts" and linked back to the Times article, "Making Connections: 50 Teenagers Suggest Creative Ways to Link Classic Texts to the World Today." I'll say they were creative. Here are the winners:

Fahrenheit 451 and Trump: Zoe Georgulus connected President Trump's policy on language in CDC budget documents to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Writes the 17-year-old, "Our government has become a Mind Flayer of sorts: it sees itself as a superior race of thinkers and feels a need to dominate others to the point of mind control." Zoe connected the novel to the New York Times article titled, "Thought Control, Trump-Style."

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