A really interesting section here from Gordon Lafer’s 2003 piece, “Land and labor in the post-industrial university town: remaking social geography” (which Zach suggested to me): The common sense definition of “non-profit” is an organization whose income just barely covers its expenses. The designation of universities as non-profit institutions encourages one to think of them [...]
It has slowly dawned on me that a huge number of universities came by their premises, by which I don’t mean their philosophical axioms but their physical environments, in exceedingly peculiar ways. Some of what follows below is hearsay and I don’t really have time to do historical research. But there’s more odd variation here [...]
This is something I’ve never seen in the United States: a bicycle rack with a roof to protect the bicycles from the elements. Not much to look at. Not even designed to take high-security U-Locks like an American university bike rack. Mundane. But unexpected, to my foreign eyes.
This may be the last of my demographics posts for a bit, as I have to leave town for this coming week. But I think this may be one of the most important for anthropologists to examine — grad students in particular. Turns out there are NSF statistics on evolving financial support over time. Here [...]
In case you ever wondered which departments dominate my discipline — anthropology — in America, here we can get a pretty clear sense of demographic dominance, at the very least. I’ve added together the total number of PhDs awarded by each of these departments over the last two decades (1987-2007, 21 years total) and we [...]
Yesterday I considered the fact that, in terms of its production of undergrad degrees, anthropology is relatively small and about the same size as ethnic studies, with sociology and economics far above, and political science (cum-public-administration) far still above that. But things look a bit different if we turn to look not at undergraduate degrees [...]
I quite liked this laconic description of a pedagogical scene. About ten years ago while a graduate student at Cornell I studied Pali with a linguist of southeast Asian languages, James Gair, co-author of A New Course In Reading Pali: Entering the Word of the Buddha. I retain little of it now but recall a [...]
“Is it worth learning quantitative skills?” I remember asking a pair of action researchers some years ago. “They’re useful insofar as they give tools for understanding social processes,” they said. But I didn’t follow up on that at all until I recently started reading the “socio-demographic” work of Charles Soulié, a Bourdieuian French sociologist of [...]
To continue this week’s project of elaborating on anthropology’s disciplinary context and structure, let’s see where we fit in relation to the other social sciences in our production of bachelor’s degrees. As with the more general university situation, all fields have been growing, albeit with a major dip in the mid-seventies to late-eighties, which is [...]
I often feel that my discipline, anthropology, doesn’t sufficiently discuss its own structural situation in the academic world. Where do we fit in the ecology of disciplines? In the national competition for student enrollments? How many anthropologists are there, exactly? And what is the structure of our academic labor system; what fraction are tenured, tenure-track, [...]