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.) […]
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? […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 — […]
A couple of days ago the New Criterion published a piece on the dearth of conservatives in higher education. Now, most academics that I know would read the previous sentence and say that dearth is a good thing, because conservatives are terrible people and they’re wrecking the country. But I am going to put forward […]
1. Alice Doesn’t Work Here Anymore I left my adjunct teaching position in the middle of last semester for a job offer I received after a year of searching—applying for positions like academic advising, admissions recruiting, community education with non-profit organization, and reception at a massage therapy clinic. (This is what the job market in […]
For your weekend reading pleasure (or schadenfreude inducement if you’re one of the admins whom I suspect reads my blog), I bring you the first installment of Adjunct Horror Stories! The Seeds of Friendship and Hatred When I first started adjuncting in the early 1990s, I worked at a suburban community college. Typically, I had […]
This morning Al Jazeera ran an op-ed from one Tarak Barkawi, who teaches at the New School here in my beloved New York City.* Barkawi is rightfully upset about the “neoliberal assault on academia” — meaning the reliance on contingent labor, the budget-slashing and the combining or shutting down of entire departments. It’s an interesting […]