Category Archives: Academia

Afterthought (On Microaggression)

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Timothy Burke

One thing that I know annoyed many of the students is that they set out to get action and ended up instead having to tell personal stories in order to educate peers and administrators and professors. Here’s one more story, … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | 1 Comment

Fifth Thought: How (Not) to Play the Hunger Games

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Timothy Burke

I was frustrated as a student activist in the 1980s about our dependency on the narratives and grammar of activism that we inherited from the 1960s and 1970s. Sometimes it felt more like we were historical re-enactors than people living … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Politics, Swarthmore | 8 Comments

Fourth Thought: Respect Is a Two (Or More) Way Street

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Timothy Burke

One of the more frustrating struggles threading through the protests has been about who is entitled to be “an ally”. What this often amounts to is well-meaning white kids begging for a gold star, an affirmation of their goodness. Sometimes … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | 4 Comments

Third Thought: On Relevance

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Timothy Burke

One of the best threads running through the events of the last week has been a critique by some students that classes at Swarthmore that are about race, class, gender, sexual orientation, that seem to be about oppression or marginalization, … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Defining "Liberal Arts", Swarthmore | 3 Comments

Second Thought: On the Persistence of Wrong Action

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Timothy Burke

Earlier this year, the novelist Teju Cole wrote an essay for The New Yorker called “A Reader’s War”. A lot of people in my various social media feeds, on both the right and left, found its premise naive and its … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Politics, Swarthmore | 1 Comment

First Thought: On Generosity and Teaching

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Timothy Burke

In the last week, I’ve heard a lot of staff and faculty talk about how hard it is going to be to teach and advise students in the near-term future, how much they now feel that they have to second-guess … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | Leave a comment

The Humane Digital

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Timothy Burke

As a way of tackling both the question “whither the humanities” and the thorny issue of defining “digital humanities” in relationship to that question, I’ll offer this: maybe one strategy is to talk about what can make intellectual work humane. … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Defining "Liberal Arts", Digital Humanities, Oh Not Again He's Going to Tell Us It's a Complex System | 3 Comments

On the Clery Act Complaint

Posted on April 26, 2013 by Timothy Burke

I didn’t support the campaign to have fraternities restricted or banned at Swarthmore, largely for reasons I articulated earlier this academic year. I do support the students who’ve filed a Clery Act and Title IX complaint against Swarthmore, and similar … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | 36 Comments

Outside the Classroom

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Timothy Burke

One of the questions about “ethical pedagogy” that I keep circling around, as long-time readers of this blog know, is what kinds of teaching or engagement faculty should pursue with students beyond formal courses. It is a cliche to say … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | 17 Comments

If It Gets you Tang, Space Foodsticks and Miniaturization, Then Go Ahead and Fly to the MOOc

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Timothy Burke

So I remain firmly in the camp of people grumpy about the hype over MOOCs. Not so much about the reality of MOOCs, which is something that most of the hypesters remain defiantly unacquainted with. Digitization in higher education has … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy | 5 Comments