Category Archives: higher education

May 9, 2012, 9:45 pm

Let’s Go To The Videotape

In case you missed this on April 14 2012 (which you did if you weren’t one of about 200 people at TEDx Connecticut College, “Rethinking Progress”) my talk just got posted to the TED site by the fabulous students who put on this event. Enjoy. And admit it: like me, you’re grading. You don’t want to read anyway.

May 1, 2012, 11:50 am

It’s Always Football Season In Florida: Computer Season? Not So Much

By Claire Potter

Every time the state of Florida expresses its contempt for education you wonder how things get worse for students in that state. But they can. Although Education Week gave the state high marks for standards, assessment and accountability, and good marks for equity, two big F’s stand out: funding and college readiness. However Education Week forgot what the F in Florida education really stands for: football.

Steven Salzburg at Forbes reported last week that the University of Florida flagship plans to save a cool $1.4 million by cutting its computer science department. (Hat tip to Comrade PhysioProffe.) As Salzburg pointed out, this is a strange way for the state to prepare students for the demands of a 21st century technology and information economy. ”The school is eliminating all funding for teaching assistants in computer science,” he writes, and is “cutting the…

April 17, 2012, 11:16 am

When Is Competition a Positive Force?

By Claire Potter

Thomas Eakins, Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (1871), Metropolitan Museum of Art

Yesterday morning I was gliding down the river in my single scull. I was ten to fifteen minutes from the dock, workout complete, leg muscles burning slightly, warming down and starting to think about the rest of the day. After I navigated the last turn, a long bend that can make you or break you in the annual 3.5 mile race our rowing club hosts in October, it would be a straight shot back to the boat house.

Then I noticed another sculler on my port side: I was about a half length ahead.

I don’t wear my glasses on the water (more than one rower has sent an $800 pair of specs to the bottom of the river) so I identify others by how they row and the color of their boats. It was Jackson, a 70-something masters’ rower who…

March 31, 2012, 4:20 pm

Republican Policy for Higher Ed: Starve It, Bleed It — While You’re At It, Build A Football Stadium

By Claire Potter

Those of you who have friends at Rutgers University, New Jersey’s flagship R-I, know that, like many public institutions, it has had to absorb deep cuts in state funding over the past few years: last year it lost 15% of its budget.

Those of us who have been in the position of managing cuts at the departmental and divisional level for the last few years have all kinds of stories to tell. Personnel cuts are often directed at the most vulnerable workers: remaining secretarial staff and administrative assistants have to take on more work; food, sanitation and maintenance services get “outsourced” to for-profit companies; and the adjunct teaching force is cut (see how flexible it is to hire faculty by the course? Milton Friedman told you this was a good idea!) Best case scenario for all non-administrative staff is that positions vacated through retirement or other voluntary means (this…

March 14, 2012, 1:38 pm

Ernest Hemingway and the Promise of Popular History

By Claire Potter

Ernest Hemingway, perhaps in Key West with cotsies at feet

If there is anything better than spring break, it’s spring break in a warm place. And if there is anything better than shaking off the gloom of our Northeastern non-winter with a little southern sunshine, it is visiting places that you have imagined through the study of literature and history.

Wait — being an adult means not being dragged around to museums, national landmark homes and other edifying places whenever you go on vacation? Aw, c’mon.

This year’s break is in the Florida Keys, where I have never been but have always wanted to go as I am a fan of Everything Ernest Hemingway. For those of you who have only gone to resort-y places in Florida, or whose visits are confined to relatives living in planned communities, it is a truly…

March 9, 2012, 9:58 pm

Campus Report: When Students Protest Speakers On Human Rights Grounds…

By Claire Potter

Maybe students at Cambridge and Zenith should have had a Tea Party instead?

…They usually get squashed, whether the protests are violent or non-violent.

British university students, who revived their reputation for radicalism last spring after unprecedented budget cuts and tuition increases, took it to the streets again today to make a point about sexual violence and women’s rights. The Cambridge University’s Women’s Campaign staged a large demonstration outside the Cambridge Union during a speech given by former head of the International Monetary Fund Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was accused last year of raping a hotel chambermaid in New York. Perhaps because of elaborate security precautions, the protest turned violent: two students were arrested in scuffles with the police, and two other…

February 6, 2012, 2:11 pm

From Little College to Big Grad School: Reflections From a Graduate Student

By Claire Potter

By Herlin Hathaway

Today’s guest blogger is Herlin Hathaway, a pseudonymous graduate student and future tenured radical. I asked Herlin, who is in his first year of coursework, to reflect on his trajectory from a small liberal arts college and to a Ph.D. program at a top North American research university.

Heavy on the scholar, light on the activist

Little College students have a reputation for being politically aware and active. While this is not actually the case for the majority of the student body, it is also not difficult to become politicized through coursework and by joining a student organization. This is exactly what happened to me when I began studying the history of the U.S. prison system, volunteering at Little College’s Center for Prison Education and discussing race and class discrimination with older students. By the time I was a 3rd year I was in…

January 30, 2012, 7:26 pm

Oooooooh Nooooooooo! Vassar Lays a Big Admissions Egg

By Claire Potter

One of the ways that colleges and universities have adapted to the stress that they are responsible for creating among applicants is by making information about acceptance and rejection available over the Internet. This, of course, would be better than watching the mailbox for the envelope that is fat or thin, because for several days the applicant would know that the decision had been made but be burdened with the rage and anxiety that s/he did not know what the decision was.

For those of you who were moose hunting with Sarah Palin and her family over the weekend and missed the news, imagine the surprise of early decision applicants at Vassar who first learned over the Internet that they had been accepted (yay!) and an hour later discovered that they had not been accepted (wahhhh!) As the New York Times reported it on January 28, Vassar is describing this mistake in the passive…

January 4, 2012, 11:07 am

History and the Politics of Scholarly Collaboration, Part II: What Is To Be Done?

By Claire Potter

I won’t be at this year’s American Historical Association Meeting in Chicago, but I did promise you a follow up to this post in which I addressed the ongoing discussion about the crisis in academic hiring. For those of you who don’t want to go back and read it, I made the following points:

That the market in tenure-track history jobs went into crisis in the mid-1970s and has never recovered. And yet, as a profession we continue to organize doctoral training around a teacher-scholar model that represents an increasingly smaller fraction of what might count as professional historical labor.
That most of us have a significant number of contemporaries who pursued alternative careers based on their historical training. Yet we continue to write and speak about this problem as if the only solution to underemployment and the proletarianization of academic labor through adjunctification…

November 23, 2011, 12:09 pm

Radical Thanksgiving II: the Top Ten Turkeys for 2011

By Claire Potter

Back in 2007 I gave out awards to institutions and individuals in education who had gone above and beyond the call of duty to make turkeys out of themselves during that calendar year. At the time, I imagined that this would be an annual event. What was I thinking? That the Tenured Radical blog would collapse and I would never have to write such a long post again? That I would give up academia for a well-paid job as a writer for Rachel Maddow?

I dunno. But four years later, here we are at the Chronicle of Higher Education feeling inspired by the year’s hijinks. The task of giving awards is also less burdensome than you might imagine: after all, while every year in education has its turkeys, consistency would require that we only do this again in 2015. So with that, we will start with Turkey #10 and proceed to the Big Turkey in the #1 spot (as I write, the committee is…