Category Archives: Academia

Rock and Hard Place

When I was in graduate school, I had a strong reaction to Susan Harding’s ethnography of American evangelicals. Partly but not entirely for the sake of argument, I wrote a critique where I claimed that this was a case where … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Politics | 9 Comments

One Story Is Enough

Why aren’t individual stories good enough? This is a question that has occupied a lot of my time for the past decade. I have a good sense of why various concentrated kinds of intellectual projects (such as social history) have … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Miscellany | 6 Comments

All the Information You Need

I’ve said many times before that I’m sympathetic to families and applicants who find it difficult to get the information they really need to make a decision about where to go to college. At the same time, I’ve suggested that … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 1 Comment

Hester Prynne, Schmester Prynne, or Sarah Palin’s Ressentiment Clubhouse

A friend of mine recently remarked that her 16-year old was frustrated by having to read The Scarlet Letter and other works of classic literature being pushed at him in his high school English class. She’s helping him stick to … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Politics, Production of History | 9 Comments

Whose Dime?

I meant to talk about this compelling post by Brian Croxall back when I first read it via 11d. Croxall has a lot of interesting things to say about the problems of academic labor but I want to focus on … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 16 Comments

Reading the Not-Yet

I really like John Holbo’s point about teaching Descartes’ actual writings as an introduction to “modern philosophy” in this Crooked Timber post. There’s a general pedagogical point here about intellectual history. When we teach canonical texts that are commonly held … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Production of History | 3 Comments

Bring Out the Dead?

BloggEd, a really excellent blog by a family who are all involved in higher education one way or the other, has been talking about William Pannapacker’s Chronicle of Higher Education column that advises potential doctoral students in the humanities to … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 7 Comments

Disposed to Propose

I’ve done a fair bit of judging proposals for grants over the years, and a recent experience doing so pushed me to finally assemble some notes and thoughts I’ve been collecting. These are specific to undergraduates: graduate and faculty proposals … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Africa, Politics | 2 Comments

The Problem of Organizations

This is an old idea, particularly in the branch of sociological thought that descends from Weber, but it really seems to me that the political problem of the 21st Century is not a problem of markets or capitalism, not of … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Politics | 3 Comments

Chagnon (Again)

I was toying a bit with going to the American Anthropological Association meetings again this year given that they’re right here in Philadelphia, but I’m up to my ears in overdue work of various sorts, and I’ve had a busy … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 3 Comments