Posts by Noted

November 22, 2010, 05:56 PM ET

How to Stop the Shadow Scholar

By Noted

It's simple, really, but laborious. A couple weeks ago, Ed Dante, "The Shadow Scholar," told his story in The Chronicle Review. He's a ghostwriter for a "custom-essay company," drafting paper after paper for students who can't complete them on their own. According to Dante (a pseudonym), he has written in fields ranging from labor relations to film to theology to sports management to architecture to marketing to ethics (!) to anthropology. He writes undergraduate papers and graduate theses, proposals . . . whatever: "The subject matter, the grade level, the college, the course—these things are irrelevant to me," he declares. Students come to his employer desperate and hopeless and frenzied and cynical, the "lazy rich kid," the ESL student, and the "hopelessly deficient" ones. It's a full-time job, he announces, and the courses he writes for, he suggests, have clueless... Read More

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November 18, 2010, 09:59 AM ET

Double Standards in the Egalitarian World of Work and Higher Education

By Noted

On Saturday, in the midst of a frenzied day of running errands, I stopped at a little gourmet shop to catch my breath and eat some lunch. As a former gourmet and natural food store owner, I am drawn to Mom-and-Pop places where I know that the food is prepared with an extra bit of thought and care. On this particular day, however, I found a real gem of a store owned by an energetic chef who prepared the most amazing salad I have ever tasted. Fresh, crisp greens with just the right blend of sweet and bitter flavors, succulent figs, crunchy walnuts, and two tiny rounds of creamy goat cheese - if only every salad could taste this good. Quality ingredients do matter. It was late in the afternoon—that restful time in the food business between the lunch rush and the early dinner crowd—so I had a chance to chat with the proprietor. I’m always curious to hear the story behind... Read More

November 17, 2010, 01:24 PM ET

John McCain: Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Remember Who I Was

By Noted

Senator John McCain of Arizona stands at the epicenter of the controversy surrounding the repeal of Congress’s "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" policy and everyone from Jon Stewart, to Cindy McCain (at least prior to her most recent tweet), is giving the old sailor some guff. I wouldn’t be surprised if the ghost of Barry Goldwater, McCain’s mentor, was spooking one of the senator’s many mansions, dragging symbolic chains, and intoning libertarian mantras in a haunting falsetto. Viewed in the broader context of McCain’s lengthy political career, his willingness to throw his body over a rolling grenade in defense of the Conservative Christian agenda is both ironic and significant for understanding Faith and Values politicking in the next few years. First, the irony. The senator's intervention would have been unthinkable just a little while back. To the best of my knowledge McCain... Read More

November 15, 2010, 11:10 AM ET

Pop Atheism vs. Academic Atheism

By Noted

Last month—in observance of my graduate-school vow to heed Nietzsche’s sage advice about building my city on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius—I wrote an essay critical of a recent study conducted by the Pew Forum. You may recall the study in question. Among other findings, its authors concluded that atheists and agnostics were among the most religiously knowledgeable Americans. You can read Pew’s response to my diatribe (or was it an "intervention"?) here, and my response to their demurral here. I guess it’s all done for now and I guess we’re all cool. But for me, one important point that emerged from that little scrum concerned the accuracy of information about atheists in popular culture. You see, for years I have been telling colleagues, students, clerical staff, physical plant workers, and guys prowling campus asking me if I’d like to sell them last semester’s... Read More

November 11, 2010, 11:53 AM ET

Attack of the Monster Women

By Noted

In my gender class, we list monstrous women on the board. Defining what is monstrous is really about defining what is normal. Women have always had their bodies policed by the monstrous other—the not fully human woman, the monstrously large woman, and the most dangerous of all, the woman with the vagina that will destroy you. The hybrid woman has always haunted our collective conscious and forced women to behave: Harpies, Medusa, even, until Disney cleaned up her image, the monstrously fishy and sexually seductive mermaid. These animal/human hybrids mark certain female bodies as inhuman. In our current culture, Nadya Suleman becomes Octomom, half human, half baby machine and even Tea Party darling Sarah Palin becomes a Mama Grizzly bear or a pit bull with lipstick. In addition to the half-human, half-animal monster women are the women who are too big. We cower before the... Read More

November 9, 2010, 10:36 AM ET

Joan Didion, Galileo, and the Declining Computer-Science Degree

By Noted

That's the subject of my new Chronicle of Higher Education column. It notes that the number of bachelor's degrees awarded in computer science dropped from over 20,000 in 2004 to less than 10,000 last year, and wonders whether the consequences of exposing fewer students to the rigors of programming are even worse than they seem. Over the weekend I sent the column to my father, who retired recently after a long career as a computer scientist, first as a university professor and then as a researcher for GE before returning to academia. His response is below. It strikes me as a good question and I honestly don't know the answer.

I saw, in my brief lifetime, Computer Science go from ground zero to be this intellectually exciting, creative, inventive discipline to one which, to me, was boring at the end in terms of "Computer Science" as a discipline. None of the really cool stuff needed to be...

Where Did All the Young People Go?

By Noted

After record-high participation in the 2008 general election, the Millennials have apparently settled back into a business-as-usual pattern of dismal voter turnout for the midterm election. I've read lots of commentary about this today, with most authors concluding that young people didn't turn out because politicians didn't engage them enough in this year's campaigns. Some speculated that since most young people are Democrats, and the current candidates didn't excite them, they just didn't turn out. While others said that—of course—it was the fault of the Tea Party and its lack of diversity that scared students away from the polls. I guess if you can't blame it on Bush, then it must be the fault of the Tea Party, which, by the way, isn't a party. I would imagine that I could find young people who would fall into each of those categories, but I doubt that any of those... Read More

November 2, 2010, 10:44 AM ET

Election Day: A Referendum on Black America?

By Noted

I had such a grand ol' time n ot talking about race that I decided to extend my little moratorium a few weeks longer than promised. And I took the entire thing quite seriously. Not even phone calls from journalists who wanted to write about my self-imposed racial silence got returned. I refused to engage in talk about the non-talk, which would have felt a little bit like going against the spirit of the declaration itself. This weekend, however, I decided to break my silence. Or rather, I found an interlocutor who wanted to talk about race and wouldn't accept my blank/silent stares as a sufficient response. I was participating in an ambitiously interdisciplinary conference at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. The event brought scholars together from all around the world to discuss African Jews/Judaism. Presenters talked about the genetic traits of the... Read More

October 28, 2010, 12:22 PM ET

Pride and Proofreading

By Noted

When I first started blogging, my husband said to me, “You’ll be OK so long as you stay away from cats and Jane Austen.” I’m still nixing cats, but now that a genuine and timely reason to blog on Jane has emerged—the newly released digital edition of her fiction manuscripts—how can I not defy his warning? (Danger be damned! Jane, I love you my darling Jane, and I’m finally able to say it in print!) Digitalizing the Austen manuscripts was the work of several people at such institutions as Oxford’s Bodleian Library, King’s College London, and the British Library, as well as the Morgan Library in New York (which this past year offered an exhibition of Austen’s manuscripts). Having lived with Austen’s books dancing in my head ever since the eighth grade (when I read them with only the rudest comprehension), I am always interested in what Austen scholars can tell me... Read More

October 25, 2010, 04:54 PM ET

Why Major in English?

By Noted

The Wall Street Journal commissioned an informative survey recently, asking 11,000 people who graduated from college between 1999 and 2010 about the pay they received from their first jobs. They matched them with college major, and the results aren't surprising. Here's a breakdown: Engineering $56,000 Computer Science 50,000 Civil Engineering 49,000 Accounting 43,000 Economics 42,000 Finance 41,000 Biology 38,000 Business 38,000 Marketing 37,000 Political Science 36,000 Psychology 35,000 Communications 34,000 English 34,000 I can't tell from the survey whether the researchers included how hard it was for people in different fields to find a job, but if the odds... Read More