Steve Fuller, a social epistemologist I have some acquaintance with (and who is extremely controversial for defending intelligent design in the Dover school board case), has for some time had one of the more interesting takes on “bad writing” in the humanities. One of his earlier diagnoses appeared in Philosophy & Literature ten years ago; [...]
Dean Dad argues that “the whole prestige hierarchy/pyramid model – basically an inverted funnel – is based on weeding people out. If you buy into the model early and set a goal of succeeding within it, the entire educational process becomes a game of failure avoidance.” In other words, that the whole system of evaluation, [...]
Last year at Rethinking the University, John Conley argued that politically engaged pedagogy was a political alibi that the academic labor can’t afford to indulge in. Here, in a curious essay that has appeared in Social Text and also on interactivist, Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey argue something similar: that critical pedagogy is only the [...]
Just discovered an interesting blog by a law professor, Jeffrey Harrison, called Class Bias in Higher Education. He comments on how elites signal their status through a visible non-engagement with others, a sort of bodily disdain, a “stiff upper lip”; he remarks on how people choose to spend or invest their social capital (suggesting that [...]
This is the scholarly lion at columbia university. It cannot roar. It can’t charge. It can’t even move. It is only a statue. One wonders, frankly, what kind of comment on scholarship is implicit in this puzzling object, with its ruffled main, its gnarled lips, its green face the color of sea-beaten algae or refrigerated [...]
I did a bit of research yesterday about the national effects of the economic crisis on the university system. A few interesting overviews are available: Timothy Burke predicts a permanent end to continuing university growth; Christopher Newfield comments on the debilitating effects of student debt; P. T. Zeleza has a big overview of the situation. [...]
I’ve been casting around for a place to start thinking about the workings of masculinity in universities. Ron Baenninger has come to the rescue, having just published “Confessions of a male presidential spouse” in Inside Higher Ed. Baenninger was a professor at Temple U., and his spouse, MaryAnn Baenninger, is now president at the College [...]
At NYU. This is a picture of an art gallery from the street. The street reflected in the background. Some random art in the bottom. But really I was just tremendously entertained that the DEPARTMENT OF PHOTOGRAPHY & IMAGING stuck its name right next to a surveillance camera. I guess they are afraid someone might [...]
These are the books I got from George Stocking‘s office when he decided to give away his book collection in December. They are a strange memorial to the ending of a scholarly career.
“After you take classes, you mostly stop having a relationship with the department, and your main relationship is with your committee,” a friend of mine said last year. So the relationship with one’s advisors is the institutionalized moment of semi-autonomy from the institution, a moment in which one’s academic situation is governed by the contingencies [...]