Norman Markowitz: Of course, intellectual freedom is not only the basis of all serious learning and teaching; it is the foundation of citizens’ democratic rights. In the attack on William Cronon, we see exactly the kind of bullying and intimidation that employers in non-union situations have always used against workers when it suited their interests. [...]
Archive | March, 2011
War on Academia (cont.)
by Brian Sarnacki on March 30, 2011 in Academia
Tenured Radical: Word out of Florida today is that a bill that would prohibit the granting of tenure at state and community colleges went through a legislative committee yesterday and is headed to the state senate. Faculty would work on annual contracts but administrators would not; only new and untenured faculty would be affected by [...]
War on Academia
by Brian Sarnacki on March 30, 2011 in Academia
Salon.com: We need our universities, public and private, to be places where academics feel free to pursue whatever line of thought they want. If that pursuit spills over to action, we should be careful about what restrictions we try to enforce. Better, by far, to err on the side of freedom, because that, theoretically, is [...]
Humanities, For Sake Of Humanity
by Brian Sarnacki on March 30, 2011 in Academia
Inside Higher Education: Nugent [Georgia Nugent, president of Kenyon College] argued that the American public has become too easily persuaded by numbers — even when those data are biased, flawed or wrong. Invoking Albert Einstein’s famous dictum — that everything that can be counted does not necessarily count, and that everything that counts cannot necessarily [...]
Blogging and Freedom
by Brian Sarnacki on March 28, 2011 in Academia, Digital Humanities
Last week’s guest post on the digital humanities and the classics really got me thinking about academic outreach (both from inside academia to those outside and spreading information about digital tools and projects within academia). Dan Cohen furthered my thinking with a good post about blogging as a medium and the resistance of blogging academics [...]
Virtual Middletown
by Brian Sarnacki on March 22, 2011 in Digital Humanities
Also very interesting from Ball State’s Center for Middletown Studies, a project attempting to create a virtual Muncie in the 1920s: Robert and Helen Lynd’s seminal investigation into the social conditions in Muncie, Indiana, during the 1920s not only marked the community as the nation’s Middletown, it also generated a substantial body of source material [...]
What Middletown Read
by Brian Sarnacki on March 22, 2011 in Digital Humanities, Urban
The What Middletown Read Project (I’d love to see them add a spatial dimension): “What Middletown Read” is a database and search engine built upon the circulation records of the Muncie (Indiana) Public Library from November 6, 1891 through December 3, 1902. It documents every book that every library patron borrowed during that period, with [...]
Academic Blogging
by Brian Sarnacki on March 22, 2011 in Academia, Digital Humanities
Dan Cohen on blogging being a dirty word for one academic who writes on a blog: There is no reason a blog has to be quickly or poorly written; also a must read is Rob Nelson’s Comment on the post: you appear to be time traveling back to confront the Dan Cohen of 2005 who [...]
Could DH save the Classics?
by Brian Sarnacki on March 21, 2011 in Digital Humanities
[Editor's Note: This week's post comes from my good friend Bill Briggs. Bill majored in Latin at the University of Michigan before moving onto law school, also at the University of Michigan. As someone not completely isolated within the ivory tower of graduate school and with experiences outside of history, I thought Bill could bring [...]
Long Form Narrative
by Brian Sarnacki on March 21, 2011 in Academia, Digital Humanities
ProPublica: Last night, ProPublica and the New School sponsored a public conversation on “Long-Form Storytelling in a Short-Attention-Span World.” The event featured This American Life’s Ira Glass, The New Yorker’s David Remnick, Frontline’s Raney Aronson-Rath, ProPublica’s Stephen Engelberg and was moderated by Need to Know’s Alison Stewart.
