Dear Educator Hating Strangers: Your Opinions Belong in the Comments Section. Not in my Inbox.
This is now the third time I’ve written about being harassed for being an educator, but clearly the message isn’t getting through, so I will try one more time to reason with those who spend their lives making it their duty to share their opinions regarding my profession, my areas of expertise, and the work…
Matt Dillon Is Dead: Why We Need Videos on the Academe Blog
A Link to "The Trouble With Textbooks: A Great American Rip-Off"
The following is a link to an article I published about textbooks. I resolve to do something concrete about this problem, and one part of the solution will be abandoning the practice of using textbooks for certain courses. I hope others will follow and offer suggestions. I hope others may already be teaching without “required” textbooks. http://dailycaller.com/2014/08/22/the-trouble-with-textbooks-a-great-american-rip-off/
Aaron Hernandez: What Does It Mean When Academics "Like" Something?
One of the advantages, I suppose, of living now is that we can access “academic” items immediately and participate in a “discourse” about these items, supposedly. I am not saying I want us to go back to the times when monks illuminated manuscripts to let future generations know exactly how they felt about many things…
Flat Funding? Not in the Reality-Based World
It’s been a little over two weeks since Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett delivered his annual budget address. Corbett’s office signaled in advance that his proposed 2013-2014 budget would not be as draconian as the previous two. I think it would be fair to say that the governor would have to work extraordinarily hard to try…
First-Year Composition: Teaching or Service?
The November-December issue of Academe looks at faculty service. It is perhaps the most ambiguous of the traditional triad along with teaching and research, and the articles in this issue seek to describe the different ways that faculty conceive of service, and the different ways that service is (or is not) recognized. Read the issue…