Hey guys, for those of you who don’t yet know, I’m excited to say that I have a piece in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine on the real source of campus restrictions on free expression: not coddled students, but corporatism. You can get it in print in the Sunday edition of the paper, or you can […]
Continue reading →I have always rejected the David Horowitz-style argument that our universities are indoctrination camps for left-wing politics. These claims seem to draw extensively on innuendo, rumor, and myth, with very little in the way of concrete evidence. Long, detailed investigations of such claims, such as Michael Berube’s 2006 book What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, often […]
Continue reading →I got into another discussion of trigger warnings last night that really crystallized why that discussion is so immensely frustrating for me. First is the now-ubiquitous claim that trigger warnings are only warnings, and that they have no connection whatsoever to an actual censorship impulse. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been told, […]
Continue reading →Jordan Weissmann’s piece today, discussing grad student loan debt today, is a bit of a logical pretzel. The piece is set up as a complaint about the fiscal damage grad students are doing to the budget, with a headline reading “The Newest Scourge of the Federal Budget: Graduate Students.” But as Weissmann points out, grad students are a […]
Continue reading →Hello, fellow academic traveler! If you’re like me, you’ve often struggled to know how to format your CV, which as we know is the single most important document of your professional life. So many different people give completely contradictory advice, always expressed as absolute no-exceptions rules that, if broken, will result in potential lawsuit and […]
Continue reading →Unless we demand otherwise, that is. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: a significant majority of the advice that floats around out there for people on the academic job market — the people who will, someday, make up the professorial class, though more will fail to ever ascend to that rank than will […]
Continue reading →A couple people have asked if I’ll weigh in on the latest piece on campus politics in The Atlantic. I’m not going to, because what would be the point? It’s hard to imagine a conversation that is more bound up in a useless and calcified binary. If I wrote about that piece here, it would be […]
Continue reading →Somebody once said that cruelty has everything to do with abstraction. They probably weren’t talking about the endlessly simmering debates on college learning and college teaching, but they might as well have. Here’s a piece by Mark Bauerlein in the Times that is attracting a ton of criticism, which is sensible, because it’s bad. Bauerlein seems to […]
Continue reading →This week marks the end of classes at Purdue, with finals to come next week. With the turning of that page, we reach one year of Purdue’s newest bauble, the Krach Leadership Center. The building is, of course, gorgeous, classic Purdue brick on the outside, a beautiful mix of brushed metal and glass inside, understated […]
Continue reading →Whenever I start a sentence “My dissertation…,” at least when speaking to a non-academic, I smile a little inside. It makes me think I’m in an episode of 30 Rock. I guess it’s just that I’ve absorbed the ambient cultural critique that grad students are inherently ridiculous. Like a lot of grads I have a kind […]
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