Journalist – Historian – Speaker
.gif from Michael Branson Smith with full credits here. The academic slices of the internet are abuzz with the retreat of Sebastian Thune, lord of the MOOCs. He thought tech could fix all our problems with higher education and blazed his way into San Jose State’s curriculum. It turns out, as now has been widely …
More thoughts on academic cattle calls Over the past few weeks, I have been watching graduate students, adjuncts, and people on fixed-term appointments struggling with the decision of whether or not to book plane tickets and hotel reservations for their academic conferences. None of them have received interviews yet, all of them hope to do …
The conference interview as cattle call. In academia, for those not in our small world, job applications in many fields work as follows: 1) Submit applications 1a) Get request for more materials. 2) Go to first-round interview at national conference (10-15 people) 3) Get on-campus interview (3-4 people) 4) Get job. Below follows something of …
Last week the Daily Mail, not my favorite U.K. paper, published a piece called “The History Girls.” Let me say up front that I respect the work of the scholars in question and I understand why they cooperated with the newspaper and its photographers (and hair/makeup artists). But here’s how I see the resulting piece …
Next week, I am speaking at Northwestern workshop on work/life integration in higher education. I do think there are specific challenges and insights that I can talk about as a male academic, and I’m looking forward to exploring them with faculty, staff, and admin at one of America’s great universities. I’ll have more to say …
Yesterday, several journalists converged on a study arguing that students at Northwestern learned more from adjuncts than from tenured/tenure-track faculty. Here’s my take: This study reveals something about the great work done by adjuncts, but also makes me think about the perverse incentive structure of R1 full-time faculty life. Every incentive – prestige, status, money …