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Category Archives: Academia
More on Menand
Almost back to feeling normal, so I thought I’d return to my somewhat fever-delirious notes on the Menand talk last week at Swarthmore and see what I could pull out of them. Menand’s talk, following some of his recent writing, … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Digital Humanities, Generalist's Work, Swarthmore
2 Comments
On Diamond (Not Again!)
I don’t really mean to get drawn into recurrent arguments about Jared Diamond’s work, because my actual feelings about the actual books are rather mixed and indifferent. Guns, Germs and Steel reads well, it’s a useful teaching book for fueling … Continue reading
Shell Game
Louis Menand’s talk at Swarthmore on Friday pushed me towards some additional thoughts on the liberal arts, higher education and the humanities. My first response is to pick up on one of a number of statistics that Menand reviewed in … Continue reading
Posted in Academia
4 Comments
The Usefulness of Uselessness, Redux
Faculty who believe in the liberal arts approach and who think this means that there ought to be some kind of firewall between what students study and what they do in their careers or anything else in their lives after … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Swarthmore
10 Comments
Now
I don’t think there’s much more to say about Aaron Swartz. I didn’t know him personally but like many others I am a beneficiary of the work he did. And I have agreed for much of my life as an … Continue reading
On Lincoln and Accuracy
A Facebook friend of mine directed my attention to Eric Foner’s evaluation of the film Lincoln. Foner likes the film somewhat, but complains that it is inaccurate in some important respects. Foner comments, “The emancipation of the slaves is a … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Popular Culture
3 Comments
Danger in Numbers
Writing and reading large numbers of letters for tenure and promotion dossiers is quite a chore. On that, I agree with Don M. Chance. On almost everything else he says about such letters in his essay for the Chronicle, we … Continue reading
Posted in Academia
4 Comments
Those Who Won’t Teach
The various distinctions that institutions of higher education like to draw between themselves are sometimes important and sometimes true (not necessarily both at once). And sometimes those distinctions hold some weight outside of higher education, among prospective students and their … Continue reading
Posted in Academia
3 Comments
A Month of Blogging, Ten Years On
So as often happens with this blog, I get busy and other things occupy my attention. It’s all there in the title, folks. What also happens is I store up a lot of things I want to talk about in … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Blogging
11 Comments
Leisure and the Liberal Arts
Johann Neem argues at Inside Higher Education that the liberal arts have no economic value, that they are intrinsically tied to the achievement of a free, affluent society that is relieved of the burdens of scarcity and open to the … Continue reading
Posted in Academia
2 Comments