Readers' Adversary #7
Assorted Links
Craig Gibson/Professor & Professional Development Coordinator/The Ohio State University Libraries
With the start of a new academic year, regardless of type or size of institution, we’re facing more issues than ever before about curricula, how to teach or how to work with faculty who do, and how to cross divides to create better communities for scholarship and learning. The impact of social media on students (and all of us), dealing with different values about the purpose of education and educational institutions, encouraging viewpoint diversity while learning how to counteract our own biases—these challenges are likely amplified in these times. I’ve selected seven sources here that provide different angles on this fraught welter of issues. I hope some of them spark reflection, further reading (and listening), and sharing in our new HxLibraries community space on the HxA Portal.
1. Rob Henderson, Academic Values - Rob Henderson's Newsletter (substack.com)
Note that the article Henderson cites by Glenn Geher and others on politics and academic values was submitted to ten academic journals and turned down by all of them. The authors finally self-published the article.
2. Steve Mintz, Leveraging Cognitive Dissonance to Enhance Student Learning | Higher Ed Gamma (insidehighered.com)
Methods for encouraging critical thinking and “desirable difficulties” in academic courses
3. Adam Grant, Humans Are Fascinating | Meta Bulletin
Quick summaries of recent behavioral science research.
4. [co-sponsors: Florida Humanities Council, Poynter Institute]. Your Brain on Tribal Media - Village SquareCast | Podfollow [podcast]
A recent podcast in which Cory Clark of the Adversarial Collaboration project (and others) are interviewed about the impact of social media on tribalism.
5. Katherine Brodsky, Deconstructing Beliefs - Random Minds by Katherine Brodsky (substack.com)
A quick series of prompts for examining one’s beliefs
6. Daniel Rothschild, Inter-Elite Competition and Institutional Destruction - Discourse (discoursemagazine.com)
The fraught status of legacy institutions and the rise of new elites, and what this may portend for the future.
7. Shauna Bowes, et. al. “Stepping Outside the Echo Chamber: Is Intellectual Humility Associated with Less Political Myside Bias?”
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167221997619
(full text available from Google Scholar)
A study of the role of the virtue humility in predicting political bias
Interesting piece on inter-elite competition. I suspect that many of the legacy institutions will be propped up by wealthy donors or advertising from large corporations, and those donors/corporations will reorient those institutions to their priorities. The legacy institutions will depend less on money from the public and will become boutique projects of the wealthy, with a large segment of the public fleeing those organizations to find new outlets that address their concerns.