Archive for the 'ordinary life' Category
Thursday, March 4th, 2010
Here we have a second testimonial of precarious life in French universities, one that comes not from a temporary worker but from a doctoral student struggling to finish her thesis. This one has to be filed under the genre of the public lament: a political genre which, it comes to mind in passing, deserves further [...]
Posted in france, ordinary life, translation | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
When the report on precarity in higher education was first publicly released, the presentation was followed by a number of panel discussions. Here I’m going to try to translate a few people’s personal tales of precarity. Today we’ll start with that of Aurélie Legrand.
Moderator: We have all been precarious at one time or another… perhaps [...]
Posted in france, ordinary life, translation | No Comments »
Thursday, February 11th, 2010
I’m about to post a few things about precarious jobs and political responses to precarious jobs in French higher education, but before I do that, I wanted to call a bit of attention to this fragment of a personal narrative of precarious work in American higher ed, which I came across by chance in an [...]
Posted in america, ordinary life | 8 Comments »
Saturday, January 9th, 2010
I was a little bit stunned to realize yesterday that my working conditions — as a lowly graduate student at the University of Chicago — are in a sense markedly better than those of a typical French public university professor. You see, the University of Chicago owns a building in Paris where they give us, [...]
Posted in absurdity, america, france | 9 Comments »
Thursday, December 31st, 2009
Here in the airport at Boston it’s dark. Not yet night, but a gristly dusk. A man in an orange vest is standing almost motionless on a yellow platform next to our aircraft; periodically he climbs up and down a ladder; periodically he pushes buttons on a console. The runways are white with snow and [...]
Posted in ethnography, ordinary life | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
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 string of [...]
Posted in america, ordinary life | No Comments »
Monday, May 4th, 2009
Kind of amazed to read this article, “The Power of Place on Campus,” by one Earl Broussard, in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (temp link). Striking because it is so obviously a further step in the marketization of every aspect of campus life. The sacred is invoked as a new fund-raising activity. Is this what [...]
Posted in absurdity, america, space | No Comments »
Saturday, April 18th, 2009
From a post on a New York Times blog specifically about college admissions:
My daughter is a senior from a public school with a class size of 589. She has a 4.0 GPA with mostly advanced and AP classes, except required classes. She has an SAT of 2,250, ACT 36. So she is a National Merit [...]
Posted in absurdity, america, gender | 14 Comments »
Saturday, March 28th, 2009
Marc Bousquet has commented in great detail about the deliriously bad conditions of student employment in some places (particularly at UPS in Louisville, TN). As of his figures of last year, in 1964 it would have taken 22 hours of minimum-wage work per week to pay for public university education (room and board and all), [...]
Posted in absurdity, america | 4 Comments »
Thursday, March 26th, 2009
Always strange what one can find in the more obscure corners of the academic world. I get the impression that there are a lot of academics who have written one or maybe two odd articles on academic culture, seldom as their primary research project, and left them to languish in odd corners of the literature.
In [...]
Posted in ordinary life | No Comments »