Prof. of Higher Ed. & Dir., Museum of Ed. at @UofSC. Historian of higher education. Los tweets son míos y no se reflejan a ninguna otra persona u organización.
Columbia, SC
Joined January 2013
- Tweets2.3K
- Following804
- Followers485
- Likes6.2K
See it here on the Department of Oral History's website: digital.library.sc.edu/exhib…
This is a great podcast episode!
The exhibit is up for a couple more days (last day is this Thursday). However, if you don't get a chance to see it, you can read or listen to the oral history interviews with the alumni and see some of the materials from the exhibit online.
On this episode of Remembering the Days, we look back at University High School, formerly housed in Wardlaw College. Former students and @ProfGamecock chat about the many happy memories and the school's importance @UofSCEducation.
Give it a listen: bit.ly/4AYSWcM
ALT Students at University High School
Christian Anderson retweeted
Imagine if Kamala Harris became the first female president of the United States and then tore down the East wing, obsessed about a ballroom, started a losing war with Iran, took away health care and food from children, raked in billions, fired everyone to put her friends in their positions, fell asleep on camera consistently, mouthed off on social media, openly prosecuted people she didn’t like without real cause, started a slush fund to fund domestic terrorists, and generally lied every second of the day. She wasn’t even allowed to laugh.
I'm cutting out this piece to hang on my office door.
Maybe not the most effective place to proselyte my anti-A.I. message, but it will be a reminder to me should I ever be tempted to succumb to lure of using A.I. instead of my very own brain.
I’m on board 100%. This is a great anti-A.I. manifesto.
Historian here I have always said that Bret Stephens is the only conservative columnist I read in @nytimes even when I disagree with him vociferously. He is honest about where he stands and smart unlike others. I am going to post this in my syllabus nytimes.com/2026/08/04/opini…
Christian Anderson retweeted
I spent the last few months talking to people across the political spectrum, and to people who want nothing to do with politics at all. Here is what I learned.
We are not a divided country. We are a country being divided, on purpose, by an American oligarchy that profits from the fight. They’ve captured our government, denied our healthcare, looted our treasury, and saddled us with crippling debt.
I believe in a New New Deal. Healthcare as a human right. The right of every family to a decent home, and an end to endless wars.
And a dividend paid to every American from the AI economy, because these machines were built on the whole of human inheritance. That inheritance belongs to all of us, and not just to the handful of men playing God with our very existence.
And none of it happens if we just move on. Donald Trump, his family, and his administration are robbing us blind, not just of our money, but of our faith in one another, and they have to answer for it. Truth and reconciliation, not revenge. Then we break the system that let them do it.
The question is not whether we will lose our democracy. The question is whether we will fight to take back what has already been stolen.
I learned in recovery that you can’t heal what you won’t name. Neither can a country.
Christian Anderson retweeted
It was the middle of the night, at about 1.30am, when Norway lost to England.
Yet thousands of Norwegians went to the Palace in Oslo and celebrated with one final Viking row.
They did not riot. They did not burn cars. They did not smash bus stops or glass windows of shops.
They smiled. The laughed. They saw the positive in their performance. They celebrated their heritage. They were proud of who they have been in the past and who they are today.
Norway might be out of the World Cup 2026 but they are in our hearts.
In the last three weeks, I think we have all fallen a little bit in love with Norwegians.
I enjoyed chatting with @byAustinMeek about college football in the '90s.
One more example of how understanding college football is central to understanding American history and the history of higher education.
@ProfGamecock shares with @TheAthletic about the best decade in college football. Click to learn how advertising, the streaming age and more contribute to dynamics in the sport across decades.
🏈 nyti.ms/44iWxU0
Christian Anderson retweeted
The Lessons I Learned from My Dad
I am not the man my father is.
I am trying. Some days closer. Some days farther.
He never sat me down and explained these lessons. He lived them. I’m still learning them.
Show up.
The kitchen table. The hospital room. The funeral. The picket line. The call from the son who won’t answer.
Show up.
Most days that’s the whole job.
My whole life I watched him do it. Not for cameras. Not for headlines. Not because there was something in it for him. He showed up because someone needed him.
I learned that grief doesn’t make you special.
My father buried a wife and daughter. He buried a son. Yet he never treated grief as a claim on other people’s sympathy. Instead, it made him notice theirs.
A mother who lost a child. A father sitting beside a hospital bed. A kid scared about what comes next. A son who lost his mother, his sister, his brother.
He always noticed.
I learned that power is not the point.
The people who chase power eventually confuse the office with themselves.
My father never did.
Whether he was a county councilman, a senator, vice president, or president, he was the same man.
The title changed.
He didn’t.
I learned that family comes first.
The train from Wilmington wasn’t symbolism.
It was every night.
He read to us. Showed up to games. Sat through hospital rooms. Waited up for children who were lost.
And when the day came that the country and the family could not both have him at full strength, he chose family. He relinquished the last chapter of how he wanted to be remembered. And he never complained about it.
Most of all, I learned that love is not soft.
Love is discipline.
Love is showing up at one in the morning when nobody is watching.
Love is answering the phone.
Love is staying.
Love is getting back up after life knocks you down and doing it all again tomorrow.
That love saved my life.
I’ve failed at many of these lessons, sometimes in very public ways.
He loved me anyway.
That’s the last lesson.
I am not trying to become my father.
I am trying to carry what he gave me.
And if I can do that, even imperfectly, that will be enough.
Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I love you.
Amazing story. 💛 📚 💛
I never met Gordon Wood, but I have a story about him.
In one of my grad school seminars, we read Wood’s Creation of the American Republic. The sheer erudition and evidentiary depth of the book bowled me over.
Back then, before kids and before life accelerated to warp speed, I used to call my mother every Sunday to catch up. Lots of times, we ended up talking about what I was reading that week in my grad seminars or for leisure. Mom had an omnivorous mind, and she was always looking for something else to read. She was a true intellectual—curious about almost everything, always eager to integrate new arguments or ideas into her existing schemas of how the world worked or to have those schemas challenged and changed.
When we talked that particular Sunday, I think I tried to describe to her part of Wood’s argument about the relationship between the state constitutions during the Articles of Confederation era and the federal Constitution. Maybe I was tired, maybe I didn’t completely understand her questions, but the end result of the conversation was that Mom had questions about Wood’s argument that I didn’t answer satisfactorily. I told her that she should probably just read the book, and we said goodbye.
She did eventually read the book, but the next Sunday, Mom started our conversation by saying, “Well, I had a lovely conversation with Gordon Wood this week.” For a split second, I thought she was joking, but then I remembered who I was dealing with. I started to sweat. “How?” I asked. A whole variety of unlikely scenarios in which the foremost historian of the American Revolution and my mother, who lived in Wichita, Kansas, might have met ran through my mind. “Oh, I just looked up his office phone number on Brown’s website and called, and he picked up!” Mom said. I decided I would have to find another profession.
As it ended up, Gordon Wood spent about an hour on the phone with my mother answering her questions about the Constitution. Ever since, I’ve had a soft spot for the man when I imagine him picking up the phone in Providence and finding Becky Elder from Wichita on the other end of the line. His generosity in that moment spoke very well of him.
Rest in peace, professor.
