As you’re aware, I’m someone who often counsels people against getting a PhD, because the academic job market is so brutal and tenure track jobs so scarce. It’s how I start and end the conversation. It’s a reflexive, constant reminder I make: you are far, far more likely to end up without a tenure track […]
Continue reading →I try not to write about politics as politics here, but I do want to write about language, and language and politics are deeply bound together. Here’s a good example. I have recently been struck by the near-total demise of the word “sexist” in online political interaction, at least from my own anecdotal vantage point. […]
Continue reading →Well gang, I am home in Connecticut with my siblings and their spouses and kids. It’s nice to be home. I just wanted to wish you guys all the best and a merry whatever it is you are merry about, this time of year. Thanks for your readership, your feedback, and your support. It’s been […]
Continue reading →A lot of people really hate Armond White. No less than Roger Ebert declared him a troll. It’s hard not to suspect, at times, that he really is declaring opinions on movies just to piss off other people. I can’t go that far. I’ve known far too many fans of difficult or unappreciated art who […]
Continue reading →Updated January 26th. So, for the massive, massive throngs of people in the world who are on the edge of their seats in anticipation of what my dissertation topic will be– at this stage, I am still working on being able to get access to a particular data set, and I still have to go through […]
Continue reading →I have been arguing for some time now that there’s a fundamental and essential missing step in our educational debates, which is trying to better understand how dependent individual student outcomes in performance metrics are on teacher inputs. It’s an immensely important question. For all of the effort school reformers have invested in treating education […]
Continue reading →Since it seemed like everybody was writing some overwrought article about why they left such-and-such fancy city, I figured I would do my bit and contribute to the genre.
Continue reading →I wrote a piece a little while ago about some analytical and rhetorical failures that are common to critics of the political economy of the American university, and this Rebecca Schuman post is a pretty perfect example of what I’m talking about. I agree with some of the specific proposals she’s discussing; it would indeed […]
Continue reading →Since this is a conversation I just can’t drag myself out of– this brief post by Alan Jacobs, about yet another person claiming that teaching kids to code will be our salvation, inspires me to highlight a point I’ve made a few times before. Many people are making some version of the argument that, in […]
Continue reading →the issue I have with the callout is that personal reactions to it are coded as irrelevant defense mechanisms. when the personal is totally and only political, it ceases to exist as a category worth paying attention to. so the only valid response to a call-out that you think is unfair or cruel is to […]
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