Largely lost among the succession of well-known awards for film, television, and literature was Science magazine’s annual award for Vertebrate of the Year. Pope Francis may have been Time’s consensus pick as Person of the Year for 2013, but the naked mole rat ran away—so to speak–with the Vertebrate of the Year Award. The naked…
More than 120 scientific papers have been removed from electronic databases of such papers published by Springer and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. The papers contain fraudulent research findings—but not exactly of the kind that you might expect. Apparently, the papers were generated using a program called SCIgen, or some knock-off. Developed by…
My Professional Activity Report and Self Evaluation (or PARSE) is over twenty pages long… not counting all of the required documentation. PARSE was instituted to save time and space–it’s all on computer and just needs ‘updating’ each year–but it seems to have become a repository of everything that can either be scanned or entered having…
In a well-meaning article for The New York Times, Wharton professor Adam Grant proposes trifurcating tenure, slashing it apart, essentially, in order to save it. He ends by writing: Dividing tenure tracks may be what economists call a Pareto improvement: It benefits one group without hurting another. Let’s reserve teaching for professors with the relevant passion…
Professor Peter Jaszi Washington College of Law American University Washington, D.C. January 28, 2014 FAIR USE NOW I teach copyright law at the American University law school here in DC. For last decade or so, most of my work as a scholar, an activist and (occasionally) a litigator has focused on the…
This post is cross-posted from Yellow Dog with the permission of its author, Jeff Rice of the University of Kentucky. First person narratives about the adjunct experience in academia are being published – it seems – daily. Today, I came across a link from a Facebook friend about a Fairbanks, Alaska adjunct on food stamps. A link to…
An (apparently) non-academic writer, Sarah Kendzior, has an article in the new “Vitae” project of The Chronicle of Higher Education called “What’s the Point of Academic Publishing?” Is hers a good question? I am not sure, for I am not sure what “academic publishing” means. Not any longer. Today, I believe it is becoming something of a…
The January-February issue of Academe marks a major milestone for the AAUP: It’s issue 1 of Volume 100. As we begin the celebration of the AAUP’s centennial, Nicholas Behm, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, and Duane Roen look to one of the AAUP’s founders, John Dewey, for a model of academic as public intellectual. There have been other…
This is another item that I am re-posting from Futility Closet (www.futilitycloset.com). It is re-posted with the permission of Greg Ross, who maintains the site. You can have daily updates from the site delivered to your e-mail each morning. ______________ Several years after publishing Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson was abashed to discover that he had…