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The academic life

Arizona State University and Trump

On November 26, Arizona State University featured in a Wall Street Journal article written by Elizabeth Collins, one of their national political reporters based in Phoenix, and Douglas Belkin, a Journal higher ed reporter. This was not the first time my university employer has been prominently mentioned in a Journal article in 2025: On June 20, President Michael Crow’s op-ed argued for […]

Applying to doctoral programs

37 years ago, I was writing applications for history doctoral programs. I was a senior in college, had one of my professors give me the “tenured jobs in history are shrinking, regardless of what others are saying” talk (he was right), and had no clue what doctoral admissions committees look for. I applied to a […]

Barbara J. Shircliffe, 1968-2023

Over the summer my friend, fellow historian of education, and former colleague Barbara Shircliffe died while biking in Asheville, North Carolina. I last saw Barbara at the 2019 conference of the History of Education Society, where she was presenting with Deanna Michael and a graduate student. We met while moving into our offices as new […]

Finding external reviewers in the wild (for promotion and tenure)

In April, I wrote about finding peer reviewers in a journal context. This blog post is about a task that seems similar but isn’t: finding external reviewers of scholarship for promotion and tenure purposes. In most American colleges and universities with any research expectations for tenure, part of the process includes asking tenured faculty to […]

Finding peer reviewers (for journal submissions)

My individual process of finding peer reviewers