Category Archives: Ch-ch-ch-changes
January 20, 2012, 6:40 pm
By Claire Potter
Changing jobs has reminded me that there are lots of things I am not good at. I am obviously a good enough scholar to get another job, which is nice. I am also a good ordinary housekeeper: I cook (well); I do laundry (frequently); I cut the grass just often enough that we don’t have to make haystacks out of it afterwards; I would rather make the bed than not (and view a well-made bed as the key to an orderly frame of mind); I dash out to shovel snow before someone falls and sues the bejesus out of us; I manage to take (my) car in for regular maintenance; I get my teeth cleaned twice a year; and I occasionally whirl through my study and to put it into spic and span order after I complete the writing projects that cause it turn into a Salvation Army bargain bin. (more…)
December 1, 2011, 10:52 pm
By Claire Potter
I was at the Zenith post office today, mailing a large box of books to a former advisee now in his first year of graduate school. As usual, I had to wait in line. Students, who have little access to ordinary household supplies, have a tendency to purchase a box at the post office for whatever they are sending and then pack the box right at the counter. This means that when a personal appearance at the PO is called for, and you don’t feel like driving downtown, it is usually a good idea to bring something to read: each customer ahead of you can take a while to finish up. When I got to the front of the line, the Mistress of Post rang up my shipment at the Media Mail rate, and I held out my debit card. (more…)
November 13, 2011, 4:55 pm
By Claire Potter
We return to guest blogger, historian and former Zenith provost Judith C. Brown. Her full biography and Part I of this series can be viewed here. Brown ended the first section of her essay by reflecting: “in the early 19th century, it was in the relative ‘backwater’ of the German universities as well as in the newer universities of Europe, where imagination and flexibility with regard to change were able to flourish, that we see the beginnings of the modern research university.” She then asked: “Are we in that kind of turning point in American higher education?” The answer is yes.
American higher education is at a major turning point. We are in the midst of enormous social, political, economic, and technological changes that are part of big long-term shifts in the economic and political position of the U.S. in the world, shifts that began several decades ago. While the U.S….
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November 9, 2011, 10:09 am
By Claire Potter
Lecturing in a Medieval University by Laurentius De Voltolina (14th Century). Courtesy of digitalliteracyproject.com.
Today’s guest blogger is Judith C. Brown, who has been a professor of history at Stanford, Rice, and Wesleyan universities. At Rice she also served as Dean of the School of Humanities and at Wesleyan as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs. As a professor emerita at Wesleyan she continues to work on issues of higher education and of history.
Prompted by contemporary debates about the worth of a college education in today’s labor market, she decided to publish her reflections on the state of higher ed following Paul Krugman’s column “Inequality Trends in One Picture,” (New York Times, November 3 2011). Her essay will appear in Tenured Radical in three parts.
When…
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October 29, 2011, 9:47 am
By Claire Potter
Illustration/Design Fran Luck; Special Collections, Duke University Library
SUNY-Stonybrook economist Michael Zweig has a great piece up at the HuffPo (October 28 2011), linking the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement to a longer history of radical youth protest. “In challenging the 1%,” Zweig writes,
“OWS has taken the moral high ground at a time when our country seems to have lost its moral compass. The growing movement holds corporate elites and their political representatives responsible for the moral failings exposed by the great and growing inequalities between the 1% and the 99%, and the widespread suffering of mass unemployment and home foreclosures in the midst of highly concentrated personal wealth and political power. OWS challenges the deep immorality and total unacceptability of the economic a…
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September 17, 2011, 1:46 pm
By Claire Potter
"Danger, Will Robinson!"
This is the first in a series of posts that addresses labor conditions in the academy, and the potential problems attendant to replacing people with machines.
In case you have wondered where Tenured Radical has been in the past week, we have been getting our classes up and running. One of the things we have been thinking about, as we worked 14 hour days (probably a modest 6-8 on the weekends) during the first two weeks of school, is that we do not even work close to a 40-hour week during the term.
Do the math: at minimum, I would say that we are currently clocking a 90 hour week, which leaves us no time for blogging, reading, going over the copy edits for the new collection, going to the gym, or cooking those gourmet dinners that some of our friends like to post…
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September 4, 2011, 10:50 am
By Claire Potter
Do faculty and students get burned when the academic calendar ignores federal and religious holidays?
Oh sure, write it off to the selfish impulses of a persnickety faculty member who is unwilling to sacrifice for the common good (think again.) Tell me that I just had twelve paid weeks off (not true: I have a nine month salary that is paid over twelve months), and that compared to such a luxury, one little day can’t possibly matter. Tell me that this calendar was approved at a faculty meeting I failed to attend (true) and that if I had really cared I would have attended the faculty meeting and made one of my impassioned, fruitless speeches (which would have embarrassed everyone and changed nothing.)
Let’s repeat it for emphasis: I hate teaching on Labor Day. Hate. It. (more…)
December 20, 2010, 3:13 pm
By Claire Potter
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| “Simply because you’re near me, I’m in the mood for love!” Credit. |
This is my rifle, this is my gun;
One is for fighting, one is for fun.
– The Rifleman’s Creed, 1941
Want to know whether repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is good policy? Why listen to the generals or the Secretary of Defense? Go ask an expert — an 18 year-old boy in South Carolina.
In today’s Grey Lady, James Dao goes to Jacksonville, South Carolina to do just that. Although a few young soldiers offered indifferent or positive responses to the question, “Would you want to share a foxhole with one?” (another version of, “Would you want your daughter to marry one?”) others are worried. Among the memorable quotes are:
From an 18 year-old soldier who says he is socially comfortable with gays: “They won’t hold up well in combat.”
From a 22 year-old soldier who has served a tour in Afghanistan: “Coming from a combat unit, …
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August 12, 2010, 3:17 pm
By Claire Potter
Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, Higher Education: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids – And What We Can Do About It. New York: Times Books, 2010). 271 pp., index; $26.00 hardcover.
For those of you have aspirations to publish for a popular market, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus’s contribution to the contemporary national debate about higher education does a lot of things right. The title poses a question and answers it – enticing you into a text that proposes to tell you the details that link the two. It has been cannily released in what is normally a slack summer book season (in other words, after the Summer Reading List issues of the Nation, the New York Review of Books, and the New Yorker; and right before these same publications announce what should be on your agenda for the fall.) Best of all, it is designed to freak out a…
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August 3, 2010, 2:01 pm
By Claire Potter
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