First off, what a bizarre intractable rhetorical situation this is! There is the broad cultural characterization that professors do little work because they teach so few classes, which even in itself is accurate characterization of many professors’ workloads. This is followed by a whole sub-genre of essays describing the intense demands placed on academics, how […]
Category: Higher Education
I spent about an hour this morning responding to two different institutional surveys about technology: one coming from the library and asking about digital scholarship and the other coming from IT and focusing on their services and classroom technologies. What technologies do scholars in your field use? What do you use? What frustrations do you […]
I’m sure many of many colleagues and gentle readers have been through this experience, but this fall my daughter is headed off to college. Briefly, her college application story goes like this: she’s a national merit scholar with a load of AP classes; she was accepted at three ivies and some other very good privates; […]
Last week, Inside HigherEd reported on this study (by Susan Payne Carter, Kyle Greenberg, and Michael Walker), which shows, once again, that students who use laptops in classrooms do not perform as well as students without laptops. Steve Krause wrote about the study a few days ago, wondering what might happen in a laptop-mandated classroom as opposed to […]
Here’s the thing that confuses me the most about this DH conversation. See, for example, the recent defense of the digital humanities in the LA Review of Books (which, at least from my experience of it, needs to consider a name change) by Juliana Spahr, Richard So, and Andrew Piper, which responds to this other LARB article byDaniel Allington, […]
I seem to have developed a recent preference for the term “cognitive-media ecology.” It’s not a term one finds readily bandied about, but it references a familiar concept or at least an intersection of two familiar concepts: media ecology and cognitive ecology. Though they are separate fields with the latter including a more constellation of empirical […]
The recently published book, The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy, is probably too easy a target. As comes up in a recent Inside Higher Ed article, few are going to feel any sympathy for tenure-track, let alone tenured, professors, least of all those who work most closely with us: graduate […]
I thought some of you might be interested in this position: https://www.ubjobs.buffalo.edu/applicants/jsp/shared/position/JobDetails_css.jsp?postingId=214396 Position Summary The School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) seeks candidates for a Lecturer position, beginning with the 2016-2017 academic year. We are particularly looking for candidates who can operate effectively in a team environment and in a diverse community of students […]
I’m writing today about two unrelated events–unrelated that is except in that they both concern the MLA. The first is the election of Anne Ruggles Gere, a rhetorician, as second vice-president (which means she will rise in two years to the position of president). The second is an open letter from Eileen Joy, medievalist and […]
MLA’s Profession has a interesting new article by Christopher Newfield: “The Humanities as Service Departments: Facing the Budget Logic.” I recommend that you read it, but I will give a brief summary here. Using the examples of SUNY Albany’s closure of language programs and Middlesex’s closure of its philosophy department, Newfield investigates and critiques the budgetary […]
Alex Reid 