Curiosity in and out of the Classroom, Intellectual and Otherwise

James Lang has a penetrating article over at The Chronicle of Higher Education this week exploring contemporary student culture outside of the classroom.  Beginning, as many of us do, with fond memories of those late-night discussions of the grand meaning of it all when we were undergraduates--and how naively ambitious those discussions were!--he takes stock of where those discussions might be found today.  It can be a depressing, if not altogether surprising, conclusion:

(...) most students do not have a curious and thriving intellectual life outside of their courses. The late-night discussions that I imagined my students having in their dorm rooms about the meaning of life, according to Small, are simply not happening.

In novum statum: The Next Stage of Our Lives

With the slight embarrassment that I am so tardy in sharing this news, I am nevertheless pleased to announce that my wife, Heather, and I have embarked on the next stage of our lives.  Over the summer, Heather accepted a tenure-track position in the Biology Department at the University of the Cumberlands.  At the beginning of August, we packed a great U-Haul and made the eight-hour trek to settle into our new home: Williamsburg, Kentucky.  Nestled in the western foothills of the Appalachian mountains and a bare eleven miles north of the Tennessee border, it has certainly marked a change of scenery from South Bend.