The Times Sunday Magazine is all about academia.

There are several great articles. In one, my friend Mark Oppenheimer critiques the imperious teaching evaluation:

If there’s no consensus about how well evaluations work in a class like basic microeconomics, it’s even more difficult to know how seriously to take them in classes like Byerly’s or Bean’s. An administrator must synthesize multiple ways of looking at a humanities professor — one who was given no set syllabus and no canon of knowledge to convey, just a simple charge to develop students’ minds in ways they might only appreciate decades later but are asked to describe in 20 minutes carved from the last class before vacation.

Also see the piece on Kelly Jolley, who helped build Alabama’s Auburn U. into a national philosophical powerhouse.

Jolley says his first priority is to philosophy itself. “I care about the discipline of philosophy more than the academic fate of any individual student — and I think I should,” he said. “Otherwise I’m just a baby sitter who occasionally breaks into syllogism.”

Shockingly, I wasn’t invited to the haute couture shoot.