Category Archives: Academia

Mindful of Money

Swarthmore, like virtually all American colleges and universities, is presently engaged in serious collective scrutiny of its spending habits. The hope in our case and many others is that small, incremental frugalities will head off any need for more drastic … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | 9 Comments

Suggestions for the Campus Activist

There’s an old idea in historical research that the material we find in archives often make their authors into “witnesses in spite of themselves”, that what people meant to record or note is often quite at odds with what they … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Politics | 9 Comments

Oh the Humanities

Patricia Cohen has an odd article in the Arts section of the New York Times today titled, “In Tough Times, Humanities Must Justify Their Worth”. It seems odd to me because in substantial measure, you could have published a similar … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Popular Culture, Production of History | 7 Comments

Grades as Information

A bit more on grading. One of the responses to the conversation about grading over at Megan McArdle’s blog was from David Walser, who was frustrated with the idea of flexible or situational grading because he claims that he uses … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 13 Comments

Grades

I find both of the poles in the current cross-blog discussion of grading policies a bit weird. There’s the people who say that a C is the average, and thus that should be reflected in the distribution of grades, with … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 12 Comments

Textbook Costs

Lots of cross-blog talk on this subject at the moment: why are textbooks so expensive? The answer is mostly that it’s a racket with some resemblance to some of the weird pricing that happens inside the health care system. The … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | 11 Comments

Fish Food

Let me add to the “Stanley Fish is just kind of pathetic” dogpile a bit here. In many ways, Fish’s latest column kind of reveals just how naked the emperor has become when it comes to hack complaints about the … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Blogging | 4 Comments

The Visual Bottleneck

So I finished a short movie on the third day of the Digital Storytelling workshop. I’ve got a number of reactions to the experience, which has been really interesting and useful in a variety of ways. For one, I’m struggling … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | 4 Comments

The Thing You Must Do

Over at The Edge of the American West, a cautionary tale for those of you being interviewed for academic jobs this season. A basic part of your preparation for any interview should be the preparation of a couple of syllabi … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 6 Comments

Creative Destruction, Destruction of Creativity

Right about now, a lot of North American colleges and universities, rich and poor, public and private, are realizing that the economic foundations of their enterprise have shifted rather dramatically. Historians love to argue and argue about whether there are … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Africa | 30 Comments