There have been a bunch of articles on the borders of campus spaces. One thing they all have in common is an insistence that universities in some way manage their boundaries, and usually the surrounding neighborhoods too. People have chronicled how universities put up fences to keep out the poor, how they tinker in urban [...]
Yesterday was the big day of student elections at Paris-8, just as there were elections in Aix that I covered a few weeks ago. But in the thick of the afternoon I was delighted to see that not all the groups were handing out election fliers, for right at the campus entrance was a new [...]
This is the last installment of my translation of some preliminary results from Charles Soulié’s study of religion among Paris-8 students, and this is going to be the post where I out myself as some kind of rationalist and modernist… Or at any rate where I express surprise at the non-negligible rates of magical and [...]
I see that Mike has already inquired as to the methodology of the report on student religion that I began posting yesterday. Most of his methodological queries are settled by the below section, which was actually the introduction in the original French version, but which I’m posting second because I wanted to start with some [...]
The main point of this post is as follows: One of the most left-wing universities in France is composed of a majority — a very slight majority, mind you, but still a majority — of religious believers. Charles Soulié, of the Paris-8 sociology department, kindly shared with me some unpublished results of a survey project [...]
John Curtis of the AAUP Research Office was kind enough to provide me with their current compilation of government figures on instructional staff in the U.S. 1975 1995 2007 % Change 1975-2007 Full-time Tenured 29%227,381 24.8% 284,870 17.2% 290,581 27.8% Full-Time Tenure Track 16.1%126,300 9.6%110,311 8.0%134,826 6.8% Full-Time Non-Tenure 10.3%80,883 13.6%155,641 14.9%251,361 210.8% Part-Time Faculty [...]
In case you wondered what campus activists look like in Aix, here are some people who were distributing tracts for the election I wrote about earlier. This fellow was from UNEF. As I asked to take his picture, an older man he was talking to edged back out of the frame, and the activist drew [...]
Befitting the title and the subject of this post, I’ll try to be brief. Stanley Aronowitz, in his 1998 essay on faculty working conditions called “The last good job in America,” tells us the following: “Organizations such as the American Association of University Professors originally fought for tenure because, contrary to popular, even academic, belief, [...]
As someone who’s young, as someone who hasn’t known the academic world for decades and decades and decades, this hadn’t occurred to me, but it turns out that something as seemingly innocuous as the campus newsletter may have a political history. At least that’s what I infer from this fairly bitter critique of campus newsletters [...]
I was just finding out how much it would cost to attend the European Association of Social Anthropologists conference this summer, and the costs and fees run something like this: Accommodation €105 (€35/night * 3) Student conf. registration €90 Obligatory EASA membership €50 Roundtrip airfare to Dublin €150 Very cheap meals from restaurants €45 (€15/day [...]