Perhaps because we have come to assess businesses through the “bottom line,” that is, through numbers, we have begun to feel that everything can and should be quantifiable. We put grades on restaurants, as though a spot check can really tell us how safe the food is to eat (it can’t). We put grades on…
In a comment on a post of mine yesterday, someone wrote: “Adequate teaching” of any subject (humanities and social sciences included) requires: – decent texts; – teachers who understand their subjects and can explain them to students in lectures, quiz sections and seminar discussions; – relevant homework assignments and reviews; and – being perceptive to…
“My name is legion: for we are many.” Maybe that’s the faculty on Twitter these days. Including many who get themselves into ticklish situations—with no savior casting their devilish tweets into swine and herding them into oblivion in the sea. Yet they have sent themselves to Decapolis to publish, going home on their own. Maybe…
From the article: “In all this talk of drivers, stretching, and comfort zones, did anyone stop to think of the psychological risk of treating professors as though they were computer processors with a limited life and inevitable disposability? I am not a professor, but many of my friends are. They are all passionate, creative, rewarding…
An article on Inside Higher Ed today, on the threat to faculty unions through a case on its way to the Supreme Court, includes this: “If the Supreme Court rules that ‘fair share’ violates the First Amendment rights of public employees, they would transform the entire public sector into right to work, more appropriately named ‘right to…
British scholar Sara Ahmed writes in The New Inquiry (with a slightly earlier and very little different version on her own blog, feministkilljoys) an essay entitled “Against Students.” She starts out: What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts which consistently position…
The two great parts of American higher education are the students and the faculty. The administrators are only around to facilitate the learning of the former and the teaching and research of the latter. Or that’s the way we imagine it. Over the past fifty years, the students have become customers instead of learners and…