Journalist – Historian – Speaker
Jordan Weissmann, Slate columnist on business and education, is really happy that your small private college might be closing. Here’s why: These are agonizing times for small, private colleges. Enrollment is falling. Debts are rising. Tuition is high as it can go. And since the financial crisis, schools have been shuttering more often than normal….“What we’re …
Here’s a very brief Twitter discussion with Julia Baird. She wrote a lovely piece for the NYTimes the other day about Queen Victoria (I blogged here). Twitter is a medium that encourages quick hits, but this is just not correct. Mindboggling debate over whether an ancient papyrus proved Jesus had a wife. http://t.co/Wi9b0hVt6m — Dame …
Over the past few years, a number of books and essays linking adjuncts to other historically oppressed peoples have been published. I’m writing an essay on the topic (that’s largely critical). Here’s some of the material with which I’m working, starting with the most recent. Equality for Contingent Faculty: Overcoming the Two-Tier System, edited by …
Emirates Airlines First Class Cabin I don’t like falling into the admin vs faculty dialectic. My administration may not share the perspective of an individual faculty member, but that’s by design. I trust them. I have a brother who has been the chair of a big department at a big public university and is currently …
A few weeks ago a friend alerted me to a job ad for a Renaissance/Early Modern English professor at Texas A&M – Kingsville (TAMUK). The job summary read: PROVIDE EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE. I reacted (with some hyperbole) with a blog piece about why the retail model of customer service, in particular, didn’t serve the students …
Yesterday a piece in Inside Higher Ed on a rescinded job offer raised quite the twitterstorm on the academic net. And with good reason. According to a post on a philosophy board, a woman received a job offer from Nazareth College, in Rochester NY, then began to negotiate over terms of the contract. The department responded by …
This is an essay about code-switching as a college skill. It starts, though, with questions about privilege and clothing. In a few minutes I am heading off to teach a class on Crusade and Jihad in the Middle Ages. We’ve just reached 1200 and I’ll be asking the students to break into groups and tell …
I’m working on an essay about the corporate language in higher ed as a followup to the big response I got to this post on EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE in a job advertisement for a Renaissance English professor. One paragraph of my draft currently reads: Take the syllabus. Many faculty (in my experience) and some teaching …
Texas A&M University – Kingsville is hiring an early modern English Professor. A friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, alerted me to this. This is what the end of the world (of Higher Education) as we know it looks like. Here’s a screenshot. According to this, the most important aspect of the professor’s job, …
Last year, as I recounted in this Chronicle of Higher Education essay, I submitted a book manuscript to a publisher, turned in my tenure file, and started writing for public media. It happened by accident, driven by the unlikely medieval relevance of the surprise papal resignation and enabled by my friendship with Bruce Schneier. CNN …