My most recent series of posts have been on tenure/promotion (with respect to last week’s Virginia Tech story), so I just thought that I’d continue on that theme. (I am still going to write a short post specifically on FIRE this week or next. I haven’t forgotten.)

Berkeley Law Professor Mary Ann Mason has written a Chronicle article on some of tenure’s hard-wired biases. It is worth a read.

Based on research that Mason and her colleagues conducted at the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic & Family Security, she maintains that “women with children across all disciplines are twice as likely as men with children to work in part-time or non-tenure-track positions.” And this ghettoization, she says, isn’t just happenstance.

How fair, Mason asks, is a promotion system based on the career trajectories and lived experiences of a 19th century academic moment “when only men were...

So, I’ve just finished reading through all the heated responses to my FIRE posts last week, and I wanted to finally get to the FIRE Web site and take a look (more closely) at how they represent themselves online. But the site seems to be down right now. I’ll try again this evening or tomorrow, but I just wanted to talk a bit about the nature of the responses to those earlier posts.

Some remarks were quite thoughtful and compelling pushbacks. For instance, Saucebox offered the following:

… And I’m sorry to see any academic defend the violation of a faculty member’s intellectual and academic freedom by a public university, regardless of what may be viewed as noble outcomes. If Mr. McGlamery and Prof. Jackson would likewise defend a public university imposing what might be called “conservative” ideologies among its faculty, then I could respect this consistency more (however much I...

The FIRE website has just published (online) a pointed rejoinder to my last post. I’m pasting it in quickly (from the road), but I’ll read more about FIRE this weekend and post a more substantive response to their response early next week.

I can already concede that my “conservative” label (predicated on the group’s description in The Chronicle article), isn’t nearly nuanced enough. Fair point. Civil libertarianism is not simplistically reducible to conservativism in all the many ways in which that latter position plays itself out within the academy and beyond.

But I still think that my post’s general question is a fair one (and not about ideological witch-hunting): Was Virginia Tech coercing faculty into supporting specifically “liberal” agenda points in its referencing of “diversity” in those promotion/tenure documents? (If so, that is a major problem). But are there specific VT ...

At a moment when some American universities are re-emphasizing their broad-based commitments to diversity (re-doubling their efforts at diversifying faculties and student bodies), Virginia Tech has taken an institutionalized step in the other direction.

The Chronicle’s Robin Wilson has just reported that Virginia Tech’s President, Charles Steger, has asked the school’s Provost, Mark McNamee, to remove/revise the current invocation of diversity from its official “guidelines on tenure and promotion.” The wording currently asks that faculty display “active involvement in diversity” on campus or beyond.

Conservative organizations such as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reject any and all nods to affirmative action or other diversity initiatives within the academy, characterizing them as little more than “political litmus tests.” And they’ve been lobbying long ...

A new Godfather II video game is set to be released next month. I’m not a big video gamer myself, so that wouldn’t usually be news to me, even though I am a fan of the motion picture, which is one of the only sequels (as many people have pointed out) that arguably surpasses the original.

If readers are so inclined, we can certainly get into that long-standing debate/discussion about the ramped up violence of contemporary video games. EA’s Godfather II, like Grand Theft Auto and other offerings, represents a graphic version of illegal street life. I had to watch several YouTubed trailers for the new game before I found one without the curses and graphic violence that would have possibly upset and offended many of The Chronicle Review’s regular readership.

But that ongoing debate about romanticized cyber/virtual portrayals of violent street life isn’t even the center of this...

My one-year-old and I spent the bulk of this week down at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, sitting in on both a dissertation defense and a dissertation proposal defense. It was a wonderful way to spend three days.

I always tell people that my favorite moment as a Columbia graduate student had to be during the two hours (maybe it was only an hour and a half) that I spent discussing/defending my dissertation proposal with a dissertation committee that included faculty members from Columbia and NYU, the department of Anthropology, and Columbia Law. They were critical and encouraging. They cautioned me against methodological missteps and challenged me to think more ambitiously about my intellectual endgame. I appreciated them taking the time to really engage my work, and the session gave me the nerve I needed to strike out for “the field” and begin my ethnographic research. ...

There are two recently re-named “Obama Fried Chicken” fast-food restaurants in New York City. That’s right. Instead of, say, “Kentucky Fried Chicken,” they’ve called these places “Obama Fried Chicken.”

According to the store owners, each establishment is meant as a kind of homage to the greatness of America’s newest leader, but detractors bristle at the too-ease conflation of the nation’s first African-American President with deep-fried chicken, the stereotypically racial meal par excellence.

Both stores advertise themselves as serving halal food prepared in accordance with Islamic mandates, and some defenders would like to use that fact as a way to let the owners off the hook. These are people of color, the argument goes, serving black communities and trying to express a kind of flat-footed solidarity with their customers. They might have miscalculated. Their strategy might...

The news stories have many computer users totally spooked about this Conficker computer worm, especially since nobody has a sense of what it is scheduled to do today, April 1.

So far, so good. Or at least that’s how things look. But people still don’t know how to make sense of this latent computer virus, a bug of unknown origin and equally unpredictable outcomes.

The worst case scenarios are quite scary.

The criminals behind the worm might be able to use their Trojan-horsed bug to crack passwords and steal personal information from hard-drives. The worm can further weaken computer protections, and use an infected hard-drive as a trench from which to safely send out massive amounts of spam or other worms, all of which could potentially bring down Web sites or conspicuously slow down Web traffic.

One version of the bug’s endgame casts it as a kind of “cyberweapon of mass...

I still can’t believe that John Hope Franklin is gone. I met him a handful of times, and each encounter was awe inspiring. He was the scholar’s scholar, always working, thinking, writing. His research was decidedly political without being polemical, an example of rigorous scholarship that changed the world with little need to self-righteously proclaim as much.

I only had one really substantive conversation with John Hope Franklin. It was about five or six years ago, on a plane ride from Tennessee to Durham, North Carolina. We had just spent a weekend on the same “advisory panel,” two of several scholars brought down to talk about the future of the prestigious Race Relations Institute at Fisk, Franklin’s alma mater.

I’m a Howard grad myself, and I’d never even visited the Fisk campus before that weekend. But I learned a great deal about the place as a function of listening to...

I’m FAR TOO INTO Duke Women’s Basketball, and I’ve admitted that in an earlier Brainstorm post. I’ve been a fan since 2002, but it has meant that my March always ends with the wrong kind of madness. In other words, these Blue Devils have been driving me crazy.

Hip-hop artist Lauryn Hill, of The Fugees fame, has a great line linking her dashed hopes as a New York basketball fan to an interpretation of the Old Testament’s tale about the Garden of Eden: “The serpent plays tricks, runs game like the Knicks, builds you up just to lose the championship.”

“Runs game” has two meanings in Hill’s formulation. It is supposed to signfy both playing basketball (getting a game started on a neighborhood court) and smooth-talking. In the latter case, “game” is the made-up story people proffer to convince their...