Gordon Haber

Writer, editor, mediocre guitarist

Category: Adjuncting

7 Quick Facts about the Pagan Festival of Imbolc

  It marks the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. The “b” in “Imbolc” is silent. The day is associated with Brigid, the Irish goddess of poetry, who also, while mourning for her son killed in battle, invented keening. Brigid is a “triple deity”—she has two sisters named Brigid. The day […]

More Crap About Adjuncts Masquerading as “Straight Talk”

N.B. I’ve gotten a nice response to the post below, so I want to remind all adjuncts and other contingent types that they are invited to email me (firstnamelastname at gmail) for a free copy of my novella about the adjunct life, Adjunctivitis. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t want to blog about adjuncting anymore, […]

Blah Blah Blah Higher Ed Technology Blah Blah Blah

Wired Magazine—that is, the magazine that takes any idea seriously so long as technology is involved—has a piece up about how to fix higher ed: 4 Radical Ideas for Reinventing College Drawn from Stanford Research. Let’s parse that title. (Yes, I know journalists don’t write the titles, editors do. That changes none of my points.) […]

On the Breathtaking Hypocricy of Lobbyists and Politicians

This little gem was in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal: From a Dec. 6 speech by Ed Gillespie at the Republican Party of Virginia’s annual meeting in Chantilly, Va.; the former Republican National Committee chairman was the GOP’s 2014 U.S. Senate candidate from the state: We can see an influence economy starting to take shape. CEOs […]

The Honest Resume

Education 1990: BA in English and Fine Arts (double major!) from a state school whose English and Fine Arts departments were the opposite of rigorous and mostly staffed by bored, detached tenured faculty. 2002: MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction Concentration, from an Ivy League institution (Columbia if you must know), which I am still paying […]

Great Moments in Paying Artists with “Exposure”: December, 1970

Mitzi Shore made [the Comedy Store] a place where comics could be seen, get exposure, commune and confer with their comic brethren, and workshop their material in front of an audience. She did it for all the comics. Which is why she thought she didn’t need to pay them. (from Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and […]

Oh Lord Here We Go Again

One of the truly horrible things about the Internet is how it has professionalized trolling. A day does not go by without click-baiting nonsense appearing in the guise of informed opinion. Last week The Chronicle of Higher Education published Confessions of a Young Prolific Academic, one more example of the growing genre of “tenuresplaining,” that […]

Your Tax Dollars at Work (or Lack of Tax Dollars to Help Corporations but Not Necessarily Anyone Else)

  According to the Queens Courier, York College is negotiating with private firms to build on 3.5 acres of the the college’s free land. The deal is that companies can use the land without paying any New York City taxes at all for 10 years—no corporate, sales or property taxes. What nobody can tell me […]

Adjuncts in Space!

There’s a fascinating piece in The Economist this week on how satellites search for planets. Not surprisingly, it’s an expensive endeavor—one French satellite cost about $220m; an American one cost $600m. And both satellites are now, of course, defunct. Four graduate students from Germany’s Stuttgart University have a better idea. They want to utilize more […]

Great Moments in Nonprofit Chutzpah

Here’s a really wonderful example of nonprofit chutzpah: The Taproot Foundation is advertising — on a job board — for pro bono copywriters. And what is the Taproot Foundation? “A nonprofit organization that makes business talent available to organizations that are working to improve society.” In other words, you (hereinafter referred to as “the sucker”) […]

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