Occupation Movement Sweeps California

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:37:00 -0500

Arrests of 52 students at UC Davis and others at UCLA ended one-day occupations at both places, and at San Francisco State, but a new occupation has begun at Berkeley, where the occupiers report that police

Measuring Out Our Lives With Data Spoons

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:56:00 -0500

Humans are first and foremost attracted to the patterns we see in life because of their beauty. Only afterwards do we discover their utility. What supreme irony, then, lies in what inevitably happens next: The more we use the patterns we discover, the more we lose our awareness of the beauty that attracted us to them in the first place.

The Trixie Telemetry company is a case in point. I’d never heard of the thing until this morning, when I was drinking my morning coffee and

5 Things Professors Don't Know, Part 3

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:41:00 -0500

UConn junior and English major Timothy Stobierski adds his perspective on professorial behaviors in the classroom:

Dear Faculty,

Since I'm hoping you don't catch me as I nail this letter to your office door, allow me to take a moment to introduce myself. I am one of your disgruntled

Now That's What I Call Journalism

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:00:00 -0500

The University of California system is reeling. Crushed by the recession and the total collapse of governance in the Golden State, the UC system just raised student tuition by a mind-boggling 32 percent. A few weeks ago, New York Times Magazine interviewer Deborah Solomon sat down with UC Chanchelor Mark Yudof. Naturally, she asked him tough,

Oprah's Reign

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:28:00 -0500

Later on today, Oprah Winfrey is supposed to announce that she's closing up shop on her wildly influential daily show. The lights go out on that televisual institution in 2011, and that will be the end of a pop-cultural era.

Of course, Oprah didn't invent the genre (and she wasn't the first person to ratchet its stakes up to national prominence), but she has owned that format for much of the last two decades, using it as an amazingly powerful platform, one that has made her the most

California Is Burning

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:57:00 -0500

x-posted:

Glenn Beck: The Advantage of the Gadfly

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:17:00 -0500

I was sitting in the Fargo airport awhile back, and there was Glenn Beck talking with David Horowitz about Jimmy Carter. People were watching, some smiling and some grim. I couldn't tell whether they agreed with Beck or not, but they paid attention. He's a gadfly.

Gadflies prosper in particular circumstances. They gather fans when elements of public life strike enough people as strange, perverse, or just plain wrong, but those people don't feel that they have the access or the

Diversity: A Dirty Word?

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:48:00 -0500

Former United States Senator Rick Santorum penned an op-ed in this morning's Philadelphia Inquirer that questions the military's commitment to "diversity." Santorum's "The Elephant in the Room: Diversity, but at What Cost?" argues that the Naval Academy's characterization of diversity as "highest personnel priority" is not just silly (as manifested

Waiting for Sputnik

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:00:00 -0500

In the course of presenting a very interesting paper on international college rankings at an accountability conference I co-hosted yesterday, Ben Wildavsky made an observation that I strongly endorse: international competition in higher education isn't a zero-sum game. In fact, I think there's a good

5 Things Professors Don't Know, Part 2

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:17:00 -0500

One of the excellent students in my creative writing class, Michelle P. Carter, tells us more about what students would like their instructors to know:

1. We make lists of all your weird-ass mannerisms.

You start every sentence with "that said." You say "literally" when you mean "actually" or "I'm not exaggerating." You squeak "m'kay?" at every lull in your lecture, just to make sure that the crickets you hear and the tumbleweed you see

Barack and Hillary

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:00:00 -0500

Garry Wills' article in this week's New York Review of Books is stark and chilling. "A One Term President?" Wills is talking about Afghanistan and argues that Obama should pull U.S. troops out, even if it risks any chance of his being re-elected. "I'd rather see him as a one-term president than have him pass on another unwinnable war to the person who will follow him in office." Whether

The MLA Job List

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:00:00 -0500

The MLA Newsletter has a helpful but depressing count of jobs listed this year in languages and literature. According to the numbers, the drop in job opportunities from 07-08 to 08-09 was 24.4 percent in English and 27 percent in foreign languages.

In total numbers, the MLA Job Information List this year had 1,380 jobs in English and 1,227 in foreign languages. A full analysis of the figures appears in this MLA

Can Consultants Save Universities?

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:14:18 -0500

Yesterday The New York Times ran a piece by Tamar Lewin reporting that major universities were hiring consultants (like Bain & Company) to help them reduce redundancy and administrative cost, just as “many executives in private industry do.” That

Pay to Work? GEO Says No

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:08:00 -0500

5 Things Professors Don't Know: First of a Series

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:00:00 -0500

I asked the brave and astute students in my upper-division nonfiction creative-writing class what they'd say if offered the chance to address the faculty. They responded with alacrity, sending in their work before the deadline and writing with a sense of authority derived from many years of classroom observation.

This is the first in the series. Written by Alana Wenick, it offers an excellent introduction to what is now known as "The 5 Things Assignment":

Professors: Some

Brainstorm