Op-Eds
"A scientist who writes about a university is about as rare as a duck in a tree."
I started writing op-eds in 1997. They seemed easy to do. And in terms of getting them published I had a fairly high batting average. A few of them were syndicated and appeared in 100 plus newspapers. Sometimes I'd get hundreds of emails in response. Almost all of my op-eds were about higher education. Since I retired from Duke, I write them far less often.
I slowed down when I started to feel like a lone wolf howling in the wilderness. As a matter of fact, that's exactly how someone - who agreed with my views - described me in the Village Voice.
I've collected most but not all of my op-eds here. A lot of these were fun to write. I love the form of the op-ed quite a bit. You have 800 words to make a cogent argument. It's a format that suits my writing style. In 2003, the Duke student paper made me their first faculty op-ed columnist. I was also their last. I must have made a certain kind of impression.
I still do research on grade inflation. For some strange reason, I've become the grade inflation czar of America. I still don't understand how. If I get asked by a publication to write an op-ed on that topic, I'll usually say yes.