A couple of weeks ago, Bethany Nowviskie visited UNL and talked about adapting the model of “skunkworks” to producing research and development. While her talk included many great insights as well as the most entertaining slides I have ever seen in an academic speech, one part of my notes from the talk really jumped out to me. I wrote: “scholars used to hiding work until polished–> bad for open source collaboration,” which seems to me to be a great insight into academic production of scholarship. When debating whether or not to start a blog, I found that I too had… Read Open Source Scholarship
3 CommentsTag: academia
NYTimes: Online, professors are often highly political, deeply personal and, per the format’s wont, downright snarky in ways they are not in the classroom. Some academic blogs are pure polemic; some are substantive and scholarly, bringing to the national conversation a bit of policy perspective grounded in actual research and expertise. Some speak to their students; most aim for the widest of audiences. What the below blogs share, for better or worse, is influence.
Leave a CommentThe Chronicle: Julie: As wrong as it may feel, it’s important to think strategically about your post-Ph.D. plans early on in your graduate-student career. It’s helpful to have a plan. Be realistic about your possibilities and review them at least a couple times a year. You may find it helpful to check in with a career adviser or someone in campus counseling to help you assess what you should be doing, careerwise, at different stages of your graduate studies. We stress that because we’ve seen people drift off after finishing their degree and, because of the vicissitudes of the job… Read Managing your career
Leave a CommentFuturama: Amy: You called my thesis a fat sack of barf, and then you stole it? Cat: Welcome to academia.
Leave a CommentTenured Radical: Needless to say, one powerful message In The Basement of the Ivory Tower delivers is how profoundly different the lives of academics are, not just because our students are sorted and tracked at an early age by testing, poverty and race, but because many of the students in most need of close attention and the time to reflect, read and learn to express themselves are the least likely to have that opportunity. Furthermore, a community college campus may be running two entirely different schools in the same space. By day, tenured faculty and long-term adjuncts teach students who… Read Who is “supposed” to go to college?
Leave a CommentThe Chronicle: In a ruling that breaks from other recent federal court decisions chipping away at the speech rights of public colleges’ faculty members, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held on Wednesday that the University of North Carolina at Wilmington could not deny a promotion to a faculty member, the prominent conservative commentator Michael S. Adams, based on writings that university administrators had deemed job-related. Squarely tackling the question of whether the speech of a faculty member at a public college is covered by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2006 ruling in Garcetti v. Ceballos, which held… Read Faculty Freedom of Speech
Leave a CommentNorman 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. It is evidence that labor’s struggle and Wisconsin’s struggle are everyone’s struggle. But what can and should be done? First, University of Wisconsin officials, whose own prestige and high salaries are based largely on the achievement of Cronon and other working faculty at the university,… Read More on Cronon
Leave a CommentTenured 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 the law. So it is no accident that community college presidents, who are protected under the proposed legislation, understand what a disaster this policy is. It worth emphasizing that the right has produced a new strategy that is remarkably consistent: going after “workers” in the… Read War on Academia (cont.)
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