Gordon Haber

Writer, editor, mediocre guitarist

Month: August, 2014

Other Excuses Tried by Russian Military Personnel When Caught in Ukraine

Ten Russian soldiers captured in eastern Ukraine crossed the border “by accident” — BBC  This isn’t Poland? The dog ate my GPS The entire platoon was drunk    

The Contingent Labor System Exploits All Kinds of People. So What’s So Special about Academia?

A question from a commenter in response to my rant against academics who criticize adjuncts (and others) when they complain about academia: How is this issue the same / different than the more general issue of the have vs. have not or the powerful vs the non-powerful? What about the academic environment makes this different? […]

Let’s Raise Billions But Use None of It to Help Half Our Teaching Staff!

  Columbia University, I Love You! I’m serious! Its MFA program got me started as a teacher and a writer. And I still don’t regret that career path or that I had to borrow $35K — if it weren’t for that teaching fellowship, I’d have borrowed twice as much. But in retrospect I see now […]

More Thinky Thoughts from Tepid Academics

Generally I don’t respond to comments. More often than not they’re nasty (you should see what people say when I write about Israel) and it’s not like I am going to change anyone’s mind. But I want to make a quick response to the following comment, which appeared on 3quarksdaily’s reblog of HippoRead’s reblog of […]

Everybody Please Stop Talking About Education Like It’s Any Other Consumer Product

  The tide of bullshit keeps flowing. Techno Sapiens is a technology podcast that asks if “machines will solve our problems, or make them worse.” One host ostensibly takes a boosterish view of technology, the other skeptical. After listening to their recent podcast on MOOCs, I found it hard to discern who was supposed to […]

FYI

“The Torah mandates that one return a lost item to its owner. This obligation is limited to items which the owner has a chance of recovering, due to some identifying sign. The Mishna lists lost items that one may keep, due to their having no identifying sign, and lost items that one must announce, to […]

No Time for Social Media

Me and my big mouth. I bet the world that it couldn’t show me one example of a securely employed academic risking his or her neck for contingent teachers. And I lost. So now I am desperately learning the lyrics to Der Kommissar. Rebecca Schuman is getting in on the act. When this petition — […]

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