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.
this is the university’s skin. at the university of illinois-chicago. some building on the south side of roosevelt road. the branches creeping up across the brick and flung in the sun while the wall is in shadow, the brick stained and blurred and colored, the brick covered by creeping vines, the vines dripping down as [...]
Stanley Fish argues directly against an instrumentalist view of higher education: I have argued that higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world. This is a very old idea that has received periodic re-formulations. Here is a statement by [...]
Here is a diagram of how students arranged themselves around the room, on the first day of a seminar that happened to be on space and place. It reveals an obviously gendered system of spontaneous spatial organization.
This is going to be crude and quantitative, but I want to give a bit of concrete evidence bearing on a trend that, I suppose, must already be subjectively apparent to everyone who pays attention to gender in academic life: the tendency for males to speak first, or in particular, to be the first to [...]
Department Head “His kingdom isn’t large, but still He rules it with a royal will And, as his colleagues sometimes moan, Needs but a scepter and a throne. Part teacher only, he’s between A full professor and a dean. More like a congressman, by rights, He represents his field and fights For added space and [...]
Last month I read in the New York Times that, as the costs of college rise and rise again, “college may become unaffordable for most in U.S.” That struck me as a wretched situation. It’s probably also false. What’s actually happening, according to another article a few weeks later, is that applications to expensive private [...]
At sunrise, even the droll ornamental lakes of the university acquire a certain glimmer. The pond weeds become shadows. The shadows wash over the shores of the lake and hide them, which is much for the better, as this lake is populated by geese who have draped the banks with their droppings, each one about [...]