Author: William Schumacher

I often wonder if there is a relationship between philosophy and social change. As I both study the humanities and want to further positive social change, this question is practically important to me. One way in which philosophy is thought to be able to generate new political and ethical ideas

Consider the most common method of teaching courses in the humanities and social sciences at most liberal arts colleges. Generally, courses such as these are built around three activities: reading, writing, and discussion. Students are supposed to do the reading to prepare for discussion, and both readings and discussions are

It’s fairly common to invoke the term “free speech” to criticize campus activism. The obvious problem with this criticism is that protests are not suppressions of free speech; they are examples of it. Campus activists are not engaging in systematic violence or censorship against people with political opinions that differ from

The field of psychology is in crisis. A recent project designed to test the veracity of many experiments in social psychology has returned disappointing results. The Reproducibility Project, an organized effort to reproduce the effects of several studies published in the psychological literature, only succeeded in replicating 36 percent of the studies

Students at the Claremont Colleges are often troubled by the trilemma of sleep, academic success, and a social life. While I don’t doubt that a heavy academic workload can make it difficult to live a healthy and balanced life, I think that the supposed divide between academic achievement and social interaction is, to

A common criticism of liberal arts colleges is that they do not teach practical skills. The implicit contrast in this criticism is with vocational schools, which teach technical skills in preparation for a particular job. The corresponding defense is that these schools aren’t meant to teach technical skills. Rather, they

Two weeks ago, TSL published an opinion piece by Chuck Herman PO '14 decrying Pomona College's most recent batch of application essay prompts. According to Herman, these essay questions—focusing on Pomona's academic offerings, such as ID1 seminars and the Summer Undergraduate Research Program—gives unfair advantage to those from more privileged backgrounds in Pomona's

The Claremont Colleges have the virtue of being reflective about the education that they provide. Students, administrators, and faculty all often publicly engage in soul-searching about both what the purpose of education is and how successful the 5Cs are in achieving it. A theme common to most of these reflections is the

Grade inflation is a topic that has a special importance to the Claremont Colleges. At Pomona College, for example, a faculty committee recently implemented a policy designed to control grade inflation, as the grades that the college gave out were overall higher than the grades given out by its peer