university – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

By Scott J. Pearson | September 18, 2025September 18, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

I don’t reside in the natural audience of this book. Professionally, I work developing technologies at an academic medical center in a city. Therefore, my orientation is for technology, and I’m generally ignorant about agriculture. I acknowledge those biases. I read this book because I’ve long been curious about agrarian-type thinkers like GK Chesterton. I respect Wendell Berry’s fiction about small-town America, and I seek to understand the world better, including perspectives different than me.…

Research-Education

CV Handbook: A Curriculum Vitae Owner’s Manual

By Scott J. Pearson | April 17, 2025April 17, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

For a graduate student, making a CV – shorthand for Curriculum Vitae, a longer form of résumé – can be a daunting task. Those of us who have seen the CVs of eminent scholars might be intimidated that our first CV will look comparably weak. The CV offers an opportunity to define a professional identity, but when someone with power sees that someone else has violated unwritten rules, the CV could be quickly thrown into…

Tech Transfer 2.0: How Universities Can Unlock Their Patent Portfolios & Create More Tech Startups

By Scott J. Pearson | April 3, 2025April 3, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Tech transfer offices in American universities attempt to translate innovations from their research labs into industry and the wider marketplace. Tech transfer’s successes tend to be counted in patents and revenue, but most scientific advances run through larger pipelines of graduating students and journal publications. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 attempted to increase the transfer of patents from universities’ labs into licensing to industry. However, as Melba Kurman notes, successful tech transfer has been around…

Indie Research-Education

Writing Effective Promotion Applications

By Scott J. Pearson | March 27, 2024March 27, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

Academic life is tough because one’s professional impact is hard to put into numbers that determine success. Results extend beyond the bottom line into many intangible factors. A lot of data are involved. And there are nit-picky relationships with colleagues that will last beyond the promotion decision. Research, teaching, and service can combine into an uncomfortable triad that doesn’t always yield fruit. In this book, Anne-Wil Harzing, a professor at Middlesex University London, offers career…

Kids Sports

Raising Empowered Athletes: A Youth Sports Parenting Guide for Raising Happy, Brave & Resilient Kids

By Scott J. Pearson | October 29, 2023October 29, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Youth athletics in America is an ever-evolving landscape. People continue to focus on its educational benefits, whether learning teamwork or getting a college scholarship. However, these competitive foci can also bring out the worst in parenting. Parents often become more drawn into success than their kid-athletes. At the college level, tantalizing new constructs like the Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) marketing and the Transfer Portal require wise decision-making to avoid pitfalls. What are kids to…

Research-Education

Academic Ableism: Disability & Higher Education

By Scott J. Pearson | September 16, 2023October 20, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Historically, higher education have encountered difficulties with the community of those with disabilities. Whether from eugenics that tries to cultivate superior offspring or from an ableism that makes the most of a person’s potential skills, universities have not always been the most hospitable to this group of people. Even today, after the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), K-12 American education has many helps for those with unique needs, but those needs are often…

Biography-Memoir

Educated: A Memoir

By Scott J. Pearson | January 12, 2023January 12, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

This book stems from a profoundly foundational family squabble. Westover’s parents practice a strictly conservative form of Mormonism in Idaho. They follow the virtue of self-reliance to the point that they did not put their children into school or get them birth certificates. However, some of their children, like the author, ended up making their ways into college and eventually graduate school. This memoir tells one daughter’s life from rural Idaho into BYU and eventually…