BY KELLY HAND You’re probably all too familiar with the common misperception that academics have a cushy schedule. If you are only in class fifteen or fewer hours per week and do not teach at all during winter, spring, and summer breaks, the assumption is that you can do whatever you want with your abundant…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL There is some truth to the saying that those who fail to learn from the past will be doomed to repeat it. Essentially, this was the message that former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers delivered recently as part of his larger concern that Massachusetts not become complacent despite U.S. unemployment hitting a…
Four recent incidents have made me aware again of one of those itches it seems impossible to scratch, the valuation of “content” as a product rather than as the culmination of a process. Scholarship, today, becomes simply the thing for sale. The first of these was the resignation of Jonah Lehrer from The New Yorker. The second…
When I teach my technical-writing students about executive summaries, I tell them to imagine that their boss is either too dumb or too hurried to look carefully at the material behind the summary. They laugh, but they get the point: the boss (who is probably smart, actually, and a good judge of time) doesn’t want…