Lindsay Waters’ essay in the Chronicle last year, “Time for Reading,” demanded a “revolution” in the way reading is taught, understood, and practiced, his prime recommendation being “Slow down.” Fast reading, he said, turns texts into information-bearers and kills the joy of books and essays and poems.

Waters also warns humanities professors that the fast-reading imperative (which he connects with a productivity demand going back to the 19th Century) threatens their work and livelihoods. “Is it any surprise that there is now a reading crisis worldwide that affects people at all levels, from preschool to graduate school, the affluent and the poor alike?” he says. “Don’t assume you are immune, people of higher education.”

Most humanities professors who never manage a freshman or sophomore classroom remain blissfully...

I only just now saw Palin’s responses to Couric’s questions and thought of THE one direct, impossible-to-ignore comparison.

First watch this:

Then watch this:

C’mon, as Larry the Cable Guy would say, I don’t care who you are, that’s funny.

1. Ragini Srinivasan, managing editor of India Currents, has crafted a powerful response to common deployments of too-narrow definitions of American identity. Here’s an excerpt from her opendemocracy.net op-ed:

“I am an American who has grown increasingly disenchanted with ‘the American story.’ Everyone seems to have one. As evidenced by the biography-laden speeches at the Republican National Convention, John McCain and Sarah Palin are running an entire campaign on the promise of the power of personal narrative: McCain’s tenure as a POW; Palin’s ‘hockey-mom’ origins and moose-hunting proclivities; and, of course, their opponent’s supposedly inferior narrative, his insufficiently American, American story.

“The Republican candidates’ crass deployment of identity politics is depressing; their attempt to lay claim to “true American patriotism” unsurprising at best. But we mustn’t forget...

I took your advice — I didn’t write back. That’s the short answer.

The long answer, as long answers tend to be, is slightly more complicated.

I did look him up, making sure that he wasn’t (as dear Maggie and a few others thought he might be) a “troll” set up to inflame, enrage, and, by drawing fire, deplete resources.

But I’m not sure looking him up was such a good idea.

He was real. Is real. A real kid, with clips of a movie he tried to write and film available at a Web site he’d set up; ambitious but maybe also lazy, having started a bunch of blog sites but letting them all run out, losing interest after a few posts; a kid on Facebook with no readily apparent college or university affiliation, or, for that matter, employment, listed; a high school graduate, lots of friends from one particular city, most enrolled at high-profile institutions (his h.s. was an independent, not...

“It seems that anyone who attempts to have a frank discussion about labor and/or capitalism finds themselves staving off the same arguments again and again.”—The Girl Detective @ Alas, a Blog

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

All year long in this space, I’ve been grappling with market fundamentalists (Why doncha go where the Market will pay ya! My big wages and your little wages are fair ‘cause the Market says so! Don’t look at the little pinstriped men behind the curtain!).

So have others trying to suggest what any actual student of economies knows: Markets are social formations, closely and carefully managed by law, power, appropriations, policy, and culture. That includes the system for proletarianizing faculty colloquially and fallaciously known as the “job market” (long since turned into a market in contingent appointments, not jobs).

As the current drama ...

Dear Professor Fendrich:

I’m sorry to write this at such short notice, but I won’t be able to be in class for my presentation on Friday. A whole lot has come up that’s really, really important that has to do with my whole college academic record. I can’t go into details here, since it would take a really long e-mail, but I just got a call from my adviser that I have to spend most of the next two days sorting out my academic record or I may not be able to graduate at all, let alone finish this semester.

I know this looks sort of bad because my performance in your course has been sort of up and down since I first started with you. Actually, I thought I was doing really well until the past few days, when I started to not do so well — all because I was distressed by the notice that my record was all in a jumble. That caused me to really slip badly in my performance in class.

Now I...

With the country and the world falling apart as I write, it is a little hard for me to believe that anyone cares about higher education. Or at least cares what I think about it. Indeed, at the moment, it feels as though the only thing that certain faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students of my acquaintance care about is that I should write letters of recommendation for them, sooner rather than later. Have you ever stopped to wonder how many letters of recommendation you have written in the course of your career? I used to keep carbon copies of such letters, but once I started storing letters in a computer hard drive I threw all of those files out — about five large file drawers, as I remember. At least with a computer record one can endlessly revise the same letter for different job applications. I kept track at one point of how many letters I had written for particular individuals...

Sen. John McCain has suspended his campaign so that he can return to Washington and help broker a legislative solution to the current financial crisis. The impulse that led him to do this is altogether commendable. During his long career in Congress, McCain has often has been instrumental in untying difficult legislative knots.

But why couple this commendable act with a call to postpone the first debate on Friday night? Understand: Postponement really means cancellation — readers of this blog’s posts on the preparations at the University of Mississippi will know that too much has been done to lay the groundwork for this debate at this day and time to reverse course now. If McCain wants to legislate all day Thursday and then get back at it on Saturday, that’s fine. But he’s the presidential nominee of a major political party, with duties that transcend being a senator. One of those...

This past Friday, theatlantic.com’s Andrew Sullivan and award-winning journalist Naomi Klein debated the ultimate cause of our current economic meltdown on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. Klein argued that America has become the newest victim of a hard-lined and ideologically bankrupt kind of exploitative capitalism that seeks out (even purposefully creates) economic disasters as a pretext for saddling those still-wobbly countries with extreme forms of privatization and free marketism that wouldn’t “sell” during better times. She blamed this “disaster capitalism” (the subject of her latest book) for our current economic crisis. It is a function, she said, of unchecked and unregulated corporate greed let loose by a philosophy of financial fundamentalism. Ordinary Americans, Klein claimed, have become the latest victims of disaster capitalism’s devastating mandates.

Andrew Sullivan...

In response to the article on slow reading, Karl Maurer sent the following citation from Nietzsche, written in 1886 near Genoa:

“Besides, we are friends of the lento, I and my book. I have not been a philologist in vain — perhaps I am one yet: a teacher of slow reading. I even come to write slowly. At present it is not only my habit, but even my taste — a perverted taste, maybe — to write nothing but what will drive to despair every one who is ‘in a hurry.’ For philology is that venerable art which exacts from its followers one thing above all — to step to one side, to leave themselves spare moments, to grow silent, to become slow — the leisurely art of the goldsmith applied to language: an art which must carry out slow, fine work, and attains nothing if not lento. Thus philology is now more desirable than ever before; thus it is the highest attraction and incitement in an age of...