Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
Social media platforms like Twitter are useful for all sorts of things, including making connections with scholars/writers “out there” in academia and beyond. But these platforms aren’t very useful to host/sponsor a more thoughtful discussion about some complicated topic. Twitter is particularly bad at this. This is why I thought it’d be useful (at least for … Continue reading “Expanding on a Twitter Talk with @saragoldrickrab”
Texas passed a law last year that makes it legal to carry concealed weapons on college campuses in that state. The University of Houston faculty senate put together a controversial slide show offering some debatable and/or dubious advice that became a story in Inside Higher Ed, the AAUP blog, local Mark Maynard’s blog, and lots of other … Continue reading “About that slide show at the University of Houston on how to be a professor and avoid being killed: a few miscellaneous thoughts”
There’s been a lot of talk in the social networks I travel about tenure lately because of the mess in Wisconsin. For example, there are these two pieces from the New York Times, “Unions Subdued, Scott Walker Turns to Tenure at Wisconsin Colleges” and “Tenure Firmly in Place, but Colleges Grow Wary of Lasting Commitments.” Both of these … Continue reading “Seven Observations About Why Tenure is not “All That””
One of the clear motivations behind MOOCs (not to mention earlier distance ed technologies like correspondence courses, radio and television courses, and traditional online courses) is to do something about the costs of (and also access to) college. So naturally, I’ve been interested in the series of articles and blog posts that have come out lately speculating … Continue reading “A few “why is college so expensive” links (and my own theories on that)”
This post was born out of this exchange with Marc Bousquet: As I say here, I don’t disagree with the often cited figure that 75% of instructors in higher education are are not tenure track, and it’s certainly not that I think everything is hunky-dory on the good ship academia. It’s just that I think this … Continue reading ““75% (more or less) of college professors are not tenure track:” can we get more specific on that?”
I’ve got at least two other blog posts in mind to write (not to mention lots of end of the semester/school year stuff), but I thought I’d try to write something this morning about Marc Bousquet’s CHE commentary “The Moral Panic In Literary Studies.” To very briefly summarize: Bousquet notes a fairly long-standing and well-documented … Continue reading “Don’t Panic and Bring a Towel”
Let me start with what I think Ann Larson and I both agree about, at least as she discusses it in her post “Rhetoric and Composition’s Dead.” I think collective bargaining/unionization for academics is a good thing: faculty, lecturers, part-timers, and grad students ought to all organize, along with other units on campus. I’ve been in … Continue reading “Not Dead Yet”
About a month ago, Annette and I both received a Facebook message from a grad school friend of ours asking if we were going to MLA this year. My smart-ass reply was “What is this ‘MLA?’” As I have mentioned many times before, I have zero interest in the agenda/program for the conference, so I … Continue reading “What is this, “MLA?””
I’m still procrastinating on getting ready for the start of the winter term (we call it winter and not spring here– and for good reason– and it starts next week), and for whatever reason, I can’t quite let go of trying to respond to the kind of rage about the terrible academic job market I … Continue reading “Three things that could (maybe) change the academic job market in small, medium, and large ways”
Boy, mention Rebecca “pan kisses kafka” Schuman in a post about a fight on the Chronicle of Higher Education site and the hits just pile up! All of this and some tweets from Elizabeth “@badcoverversion” Keenan about trends in higher ed and non-tenure-track hiring and a whole bunch of tweets from Schuman this morning! Follow the link/follow Schuman … Continue reading “As long as I have your attention: one more addendum on the state of the job market and decreasing tenure-track jobs in “the humanities””