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Category Archives: Academia
On Swarthmore’s Sorority
There’s been a running discussion at Swarthmore for a year now, mostly among the students and some between the students and the administration, about the effort to get a sorority established at the college. National media recently reported on the … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Swarthmore
23 Comments
Commentary on Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind
We had the first of four symposia on Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Righteous Mind last night at Swarthmore. The hope is that we can demonstrate the distinctive advantages that a “liberal arts” approach can yield when many different scholars … Continue reading
Tweet Away
I refuse to use the hashtag, but the bubbling-up of a long-standing conversation about live communications from academic conferences over the last three days has been interesting to read. While I can’t disagree with Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s pragmatic advice to concede … Continue reading
The Frenzy
I like the idea of “entrepreneurship” a lot when it describes the compression of several complicated things into one concept or practice. The first would be a structured kind of practical creativity, a purposeful or directed path to having and … Continue reading
Better Pedagogy, Less Cheating: Three Ideas
So Stuyvesant High turns out to have a cheating problem–or perhaps all selective high schools do? If the high schools do, I’m sure the colleges and universities that receive their graduates do as well. And so in turn do the … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Politics, Swarthmore
5 Comments
Welcome to Academia! Now Get Out!
No aimless wandering in this entry: institutions that invite applications for tenure-track assistant professorships and specify that they only want candidates with very recently minted Ph.Ds (2009, 2010) are behaving abominably. Yeah, you, Colorado State University and you, Harvard. It’s … Continue reading
Posted in Academia
4 Comments
Bad Research and Informational Heresies (Draft Syllabus)
Still polishing this a bit, but I think it’s at the point where we can share it and get comments. I’m co-teaching this with my totally awesome colleague Rachel Buurma in the Department of English at Swarthmore. I’m really excited … Continue reading
Grading on the Curve Is Always a Bad Idea
Via Teresa Nielsen Hayden, a smart overview and response to an upcoming recent Vanity Fair article about Microsoft’s “lost decade”. The main culprit, according to the article, was apparently the rigid use of “stack ranking” in assessing the work of … Continue reading
Posted in Academia
10 Comments
A Scholar, An Expert, An Intellectual
…walk into a bar and…. More seriously, though, I’ve been thinking a lot about the minimum qualifying attributes of these three roles. There’s a big Venn diagram overlap of all three in the labor they perform and the sensibilities that … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Politics
14 Comments
Social Networks Then and Now
Reading through the old notes and papers that I’ve stuck in a closet and not touched for almost a decade, compiled from the decade of professional work before that (so the 1990s), is a sobering experience. On one hand, I’m … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Digital Humanities, Swarthmore
1 Comment