Dialogues@RU

An excellent resource for those trying to get a sense of how to write a research paper is Dialogues@RU: A Journal of Undergraduate Research.  Published as a peer and faculty edited scholarly journal from 2002-2007 by the Writing Program at Rutgers, Dialogues exhibits some of the better work produced by students taking the Research in the Disciplines (355:201) course at Rutgers.  Papers published here generally received a grade of B+ or A and offer some good models for how to do the scholarly research paper.  They also show you a wide variety of ways a successful paper might be written.  We may look at a paper or two from here in class, but I urge you to check it out on your own.

Higher Education Bubble?

I finally read "Will Higher Education Be the Next Bubble to Burst?" (The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 22, 2009) which has relevance to anyone whose project touches on the economics of higher education -- including those writing on community colleges, online courses, privatization, and many other topics.  Published last year, as academics began to understand how the housing market's bursting bubble may have been the main contributor to the global economic downturn, it paints a scary picture of the ways in which inflation in higher education parallel the inflation in the housing market that preceded the crash.  Along the way, the authors offer useful insight into the larger economic forces driving students to community colleges, online courses, and public institutions -- and perhaps making possible greater privatization of public schools (which remain a bargain even if tuition goes up by 30% or more).

Michael Moffatt's Book in Google Books

You can read Chapter 3 from Michael Moffatt's Coming of Age in New Jersey, "A Year on Hasbrouck Fourth," at our Sakai site for the class.  But it turns out you can "preview" most of the rest of the book (but for a couple chapters) online at Google Books.  Check it out.

Moffatt's book is a valuable resource for discussing such topics as sexuality, male/female power dynamics, race, "student life" and student attitudes toward academic work.  It is especially useful for offering a historical perspective, comparing today to the 80s.  I hope students check out some of the other chapters that apply to their topics and do not rely only on the chapter we are reading together.  By the way, Moffatt also wrote the Rutgers Picture Book which is a great historical reference.