As a community service to students, for those periods of downtime and the really boring courses, this page points to reading material that I have found interesting on computer science, teaching or higher education in general. Opinions are those of the authors and my comments (between square brackets), if any, only reflect my own view, not that of UNH or the Computer Science department.

Students have limited financial resources and some URLs may require a magazine subscription that they don’t have. Therefore, I’ve tried to include the full text of each article as a pdf. If an author or a publisher feels that this is a copyright infringement, he should let me know and I will remove the article immediately.

• Thomas Sowell, Artificial Stupidity, Townhall, March 10, 2010. (full article)

  [A bit old, but if anything, even more relevant today.]

• Charlotte Allen, So You’re Getting a Ph.D., The Weekly Standard, November 16, 2015. (full article)

  [This is a bit old—it fell behind a dresser from my reading pile and was found again when painting the wall—but still very relevant.]

• Chris Sweeney, How Liberal Professors Are Ruining College, Boston Magazine, January 2017. (full article)

  [Similar theme as the Kaufman article below, but longer article, different magazine, and a focus on a disparity between New England and the rest of the country.]

• David Harsanyi, When Driving Is Obsolete, National Review, December 19, 2016. (full article)

• Elliot Kaufman, Hotbeds of Groupthink: The Shrinking Viewpoint Diversity on Our Campuses, National Review, November 3, 2016 (full article)

• James Lileks, STEAMed about STEM, National Review, September 26, 2016. (full article)

  [This one is funny. The “BLAT” joke cracks me up.]

• John Tierney, The Real War on Science, City Journal, Autumn 2016. (full article)

  [More “science” than “higher education”, but a very interesting read. The author fears that the kind of “policy-driven science” we see all too often will damage scientists’ reputations. I sometimes wonder if this is such a bad thing.]

• James Piereson & Naomi Schaefer Riley, Ridicule Didn’t Work, The weekly Standard, January 30, 2017. (full article)

  [The aftermath of the Sokal hoax. Not very encouraging…]

• Marc A. Edwards and Siddhartha Roy, Academic Research in the 21st Century: Maintaining Scientific Integrity in a Climate of Perverse Incentives and Hypercompetition, Environmental Engineering Science, January 2017, 34(1): 51-61. (full article)

  [“If the work you propose to do isn’t virtually certain of success, then it won’t get funded.”]

• Elliot Kaufman, The Next Right-Wing Populist Will Win by Attacking American Higher Education, National Review, July 13, 2017. (full article)

  [Could make life interesting around here….]

• Kyle Smith, Too Many Americans Are Going to College, National Review, December 15, 2017. (full article)

  [Am I teaching something useful or just filtering?….]

• Stuart Reges, Why Women Don’t Code, Quillette, June 19, 2018. (full article)

  [Hot topic.]