August 13, 2012, 3:10 pm
By Gina Barreca
Dear —–,
Thanks for your note today; your mom told me you’d be writing to me to get some advice about how to make your second year at college better than your first.
Let’s begin: The best way to get off to a good start with your professors is to call them “Professor,” and, if they’re women, not “Miss” or “Mrs.”; “Ms.” is preferable to either of those, but I’d stick with “Professor” since you know the person whose advice you’re asking happens to be one of those.
It’s also good to spell that person’s name correctly. You didn’t. Not even close despite the fact that you had the correct spelling right there in the email address.
If I mention these details early it’s only to begin our relationship the way I hope it will be built: I’m delighted to help you determine what’s best for you at UConn–and UConn has a great deal to offer–but I’m not going to coddle you or let you off…
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August 8, 2012, 11:25 am
By Gina Barreca
11. “Have you ever wondered about the stupidity of the term ‘o’clock’? Americans have happily incorporated into our everyday speech a term that makes us sound like leprechauns.” Gene Weingarten, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for The Washington Post, from The Hypochondriac’s Guide to Life. And Death.
12. Voice-mail prompt: “After the tone please leave your I.Q. or your blood pressure, whichever is higher.” Lewis Frumkes, author of How To Raise Your I.Q. by Eating Gifted Children.
13. On health foods: “To strengthen their argument [about eating unprocessed foods] they tell you that peasant boys in Cuba, those kids out in the fields, eat raw sugar cane and they have perfect teeth. What they don’t tell you is that they develop rickets. ‘Look at me, Ma! No cavities! But I can’t walk too straight.’…After you eat all this, you can wash it down with tiger’s milk. So help me…
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August 6, 2012, 7:33 pm
By Todd Gitlin
In the arresting words of an Atlantic headline, ”We Now Have Our Smallest Government in 45 Years.” The proportion of government workers in the population is down to where it was in 1968, a decline of about 10 percent from its peak in the year 2000. Since the official end of the Great Recession alone, there are 600,000 fewer folks on government payrolls.
If you’re a fan of Arthur Laffer, whose eponymous curve was the most deceptive geometrical form since the Stars and Bars, and who still enjoys the embrace of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, you ought to rejoice that an immense burden has been lifted off the collective shoulders. If you think that government is a swarm of leeches crying to be chased, this should be wonderful news for the unemployed, not to mention taxpayers whose lifeblood for so many years has been drained into unproductive channels. All the capital…
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August 6, 2012, 2:55 pm
By Carl Elliott
Jenny Dyck Brian
It is no secret that many academic physicians work for the pharmaceutical industry as speakers and consultants. Less widely known is that the pharmaceutical industry also employs academic bioethicists.
Beginning in the 1990s, a number of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies began to set up bioethics advisory boards, ostensibly to obtain guidance about controversial ethical issues. Over the years, the ties between industry and bioethics have gradually grown closer, with companies setting up endowed chairs and hiring bioethics consultants. Yet very little is known about how bioethics advisory boards work. What exactly is their purpose? Do they prevent ethical wrongdoing, or do they provide ethical cover? How many bioethicists are involved and who are they?
Not many people are…
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August 1, 2012, 2:15 pm
By Marc Bousquet
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
As you may well not have heard on your corporate nightly news, the Obama-era National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has been near-paralyzed by years of Republican dirty tricks leading to resignations and scandal that included frequent leaking of confidential board proceedings to former Republican board members advising the Romney camp. With the Department of Justice eyeballing the corporate hacks in question, however, the NLRB may finally be set to address academic labor issues.
Several of the regional NLRB panels have already decided core higher ed cases; just last month a federal judge spanked Chicago’s Columbia College for interfering with faculty union activities, ordering them to the bargaining table, posthaste.
Evidently the national NLRB plans to make up for lost time. Over the next few…
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July 30, 2012, 10:42 am
By Gina Barreca
(Photo by Marcin Wichary via Flickr/CC)
On November 30th of 1984, I let a Macintosh computer into my life. Do you remember your very first computer? If you’re anywhere close to my age, I bet you do.
I was a graduate student living mostly on what I made from teaching two sections of basic comp at Queens College and on loans. But I was also working at the Development Office at Queens where, at six dollars an hour, I wrote most of what turned into a hugely successful grant for the place.
I received a small bonus from the boss–out of his own pocket, I’m pretty sure–but I decided it was all I needed to bring me to what we would now call “the tipping point”: it was the tip money I used to buy a computer. (Please don’t write in to correct me, okay? I’m kidding around.)
Of course the computer cost way more th…
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July 27, 2012, 5:49 pm
By Laurie Essig
By this point in time it seems clear that something went really, really wrong with Mark Regnerus’s study arguing that gay and lesbian parents are bad parents. Regnerus claimed that gay and especially lesbian parents had too much “household instability” to make them a family form worth investing in (by which I assume Regnerus meant that such families deserve no state benefits or privileges). Immediately there were questions about the study and Social Science Research, the journal that published it.
For one, there were rumors that the article had been pushed through too quickly, that the outside reviewers were closely connected to Regnerus as well as strong public opposition to gay marriage and should have recused themselves. Then there was, by Regnerus’s own admission, the fact that he labeled parents “gay and lesbian” when in fact all he really had was data on children of divorced…
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July 24, 2012, 1:39 pm
By Gina Barreca
(Photo at SI.com)
In an interview with The New York Times on Monday July 23, National Collegiate Athletic Association President Mark Emmert was asked, “So with the Freeh report coming out about 10 days ago, did you already have options on the table or did all this happen in a 10-day crunch?” to which Emmert answers, “It all happened in a 10-day time period.”
He didn’t pretend, he didn’t waffle, and he didn’t prevaricate. And he didn’t use the word “crunch.”
Mark Emmert took action swiftly, without apology, and authoritatively. He not only told truth to power: Emmert actually had the guts to take away power from those who misused it.
And he did it without spending 15 years arguing with rich people–donors or powerful alums–or dealing with the letters I’m sure he was getting from the lawyers of rich people about…
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July 21, 2012, 2:30 pm
By Gina Barreca
A conversation on Friday morning about the killings in Colorado by, allegedly, a 24-year-old “former honors student” went something like this:
Friend: “The shooter was a medical student? Don’t they still test for ability to handle stress? What happened to the rigorous standard for the mental health of those entering medical programs?”
G: “For this kid to get into medical school, he had to have recommendation letters saying he could work as part of a team. To find out who wrote those letters would be interesting. How would you feel if you said ‘This is one great kid who’ll be a boon to humanity and save lives?’”
Friend. “In the first year of medical school, this guy would have been surrounded by people driving him crazy but he wouldn’t have had time to go plan a highly-structured massacre. My nephew is in medical school now. He says doesn’t have time to shower.”
G: “You’re…
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July 20, 2012, 3:06 pm
By Michele Goodwin
Last week, Judge Louis Freeh, a former director of the FBI, released a copiously detailed, lengthy report about Penn State’s role in Gerald Sandusky’s sexual abuse of boys on campus. The report notes that there was a “total disregard” for the young boys who were the sexually abused victims of Gerald Sandusky—the former coach. According to Freeh, the most senior members of the university’s governing structure, “failed to protect against a child sexual predator harming children for over a decade.”
Indeed, to those closely following the investigation, indictment, and trial of Sandusky, the report provided important details, but was no surprise. Last year, when I first blogged about this issue, I wrote, “More curious is the statement released by Penn State’s president, Graham Spanier, who claims the perjury charges against [Tim] Curley and [Gary] Schultz are …
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July 19, 2012, 10:29 am
By Carl Elliott
Near Dunedin, New Zealand
Another spectacular winter morning in Dunedin, New Zealand. Clear blue sky, frost on the ground, lush green hills plunging into the South Pacific. It is hard to complain about the setting, still less about the kindness and decency of the inhabitants. It has been nearly 22 years since my wife and I first landed in Dunedin, in August of 1990, when I began a postdoctoral fellowship at the newly established Bioethics Centre at the University of Otago. I still wonder why we ever left.
It was an extraordinary time for bioethics in New Zealand. In 1990, the country was still reeling from the shock of a medical research scandal – the “unfortunate experiment” at the National Women’s Hospital in Auckland. In that study, which had begun in 1966 and continued for a…
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July 16, 2012, 1:49 pm
By Gina Barreca
(photo by Drew Coffman via Flickr/CC)
1. Only you can figure out how to manage your personal and emotional life; as advisers we can listen, challenge comfort, and offer guidance. The guidance we can offer most effectively is of the professional sort.
You must handle your domestic conflicts in the appropriate arena while keeping a check on how they affect your productivity. Please don’t ask us to assist you with anything apart from your work too often, too regularly, or with too much of an emphasis on the thought that we are somehow responsible for getting you into this in the first place (we didn’t get you “with doctorate” the way some fly-by-night lover might get a woman “with child”).
It’s imperative that you learn to find out what works for you and this is the time to learn it. This is the…
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July 9, 2012, 10:55 am
By Gina Barreca
Dear PK,
Your letter about how amazing it was to talk with your graduate student–the one who really GOT what you were saying and changed the direction of her plans–and then asked me why I recognized earlier in life the pleasures that teaching provides made me incredibly happy.
I’m not saying that only because it’s incredibly generous to me. You’ve always been that. But I’m saying it because you helped to remind me why teaching–good teaching– matters.
Coming to the profession as someone who has accomplished much in her own field and so was asked to teach it at the graduate level, you’re seeing clearly what makes teaching worth all the rest of the trouble. I needed the reminder and I’m grateful for it.
When you teach well, you know you’ve been useful. When you’re teaching really well, you know you’re doing something nobody else could have done as well as you did.
That’s …
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July 5, 2012, 10:56 am
By Gina Barreca
1. “I have never allowed my schooling to interfere with my education.” Mark Twain
2. “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” Mark Twain
3. “I base most of my fashion taste on what doesn’t itch.” Gilda Radner
4. . “Why are they called illegal immigrants? They’re undocumented workers. If someone broke into my house and vacuumed my rug, I might be puzzled. But mad?” Wanda Sykes
5. “Laughter rises out of tragedy, when you need it the most, and rewards you for your courage.” Erma Bombeck
6. “’Deep’ is a word like ‘theory’ or ‘semantic’ — it implies all sorts of marvelous things. It’s one thing to be able to say ‘I’ve got theory’ quite another to say ‘I’ve got a semantic theory,’ but, ah, those who can claim ‘I’ve got a deep semantic theory,’ they are truly blessed.” Randy Davis
7. “The nice thing about being a celebrity…
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June 30, 2012, 10:42 pm
By Gina Barreca
Grown men with teddy bears? A new movie with Mark Wahlberg? The 1981 Granada series with Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons? A heartbreaking poem about a teddy bear– mentioning Adler, Jung and Freud in its final stanza?
Okay, so my first thought, when faced with grown men and furry toys, is of the terribly well-groomed Aloysuis belonging to Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited.”
Then I think immediately of Archie, a.k.a. Archibald Ormsby-Gore, the strict Baptist teddy bear belonging to John Betjeman, upon whom Aloysuis was based.
Only after these furry figures do I think of adorable Mark Wahlberg and the trailers I’m seeing everywhere about the new movie, Ted, in which Wahlberg stars with a stuffed bear of his own.
I love Wahlberg (and Matt Damon, with whom I will sometimes confuse him, even in print) and I am a big Family Guy and…
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June 27, 2012, 4:18 am
By Carl Elliott
Not the Harvard Commencement Ceremony
We’re on the road, my son Crawford and I. It’s time to visit colleges, and our schedule is brutal. Hot car, blinding sun, 12 colleges in 10 days, Ann Arbor to Sewanee. Onward we drive, Zevon on the stereo, afternoon into night, our mission fueled by gas-station coffee and Doritos. When we stop, it is for college admissions tours, barbecue, and, on one occasion, a broken alternator belt. I don’t even like to think about how far we have traveled.
The trip has revealed aspects of university life previously unfamiliar to me. Based on our extensive research, I am prepared to summarize the primary objective of the American university in two words: Lawn Care. Never have I seen such careful attention to landscaping. The clipped shimmer of the grass at…
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June 20, 2012, 10:14 am
By Laurie Essig
Gans (photo at talkinnewyork.com--click on image to get to hosting page)
My dear former professor, Herb Gans, has written a piece in Identities that is causing quite a stir among sociologists, especially cultural sociologists such as myself. The piece, which Gans himself admits is a “polemic” and therefore often unfair, is a rant against cultural sociology for separating itself from what he calls structural sociology. Although this might seem like a purely academic argument, I think it has much broader implications as we look around at the mess this country is in and ask “what is to be done?”
The problem with dividing culture from structure stems from Karl Marx’s base and superstructure. Because not just academics, but many activists, accept this distinction, it continues to haunt how we respond to…
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June 12, 2012, 1:30 pm
By Todd Gitlin
If an unanticipated earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale had just sunk the island of Manhattan, I’d like to think that departments of geology worldwide would be feverishly reexamining their research priorities, curricula, and syllabi. But I have the impression that no such urgency is evident in the profession of economics after most of it resoundingly failed to anticipate the global meltdown of the last decade (and continuing).
Poking around the Web to see who else is interested in this academic default, I came across this February 2012 openDemocracy piece by Philip Mirowski, a historian and philosopher of economics at Notre Dame. Mirowski asks why the economics profession has been so sluggish about reforming itself now that its dismal failure to anticipate the financial meltdown is apparent to everyone but, well, economists. His answers are, in brief: 1. Top economics…
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June 5, 2012, 3:27 pm
By Marc Bousquet
Cary Nelson
Cary Nelson completes his third consecutive term as AAUP president next week. No one serving in that role has accomplished so much with so little against a mountain of obstacles that would have sent weaker personalities scurrying back to their carrels and laboratory benches. During his tenure, he averted near-certain financial collapse, calmed near-annual rebellions from the union affiliates, appeased traditionalists, weathered the unionization of the staff, oversaw the departure of two general secretaries, rode out nearly-continuous irrational litigation, renovated an appallingly dysfunctional membership operation, herded the cats of Committee A, and brought communications to the very brink of modernization.
He never gave up on his efforts to refashion the organization into an institution…
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June 5, 2012, 11:30 am
By Carl Elliott
- Jeffrey Beall
If your incoming flow of email spam looks anything like mine, it probably features a regular invitation to submit an article to a journal you have never heard of, or to be a part of its editorial board, or maybe even to edit the journal. The names of the publishers vary, but the invitations usually look something like this one, which arrived last week.
Deae Carl Elliott,
I am very pleasure that you can read this letter. Given the achievement you made in your research field, we sincerely invite you to join the Editorial Board for the Advances in Bioscience and Biotechnology (ABB). We are looking for Editorial Board members and Editor-in-Chief with renewal options.
And if you attempt to find out more, very soon you will find yourself looking at Beall’s List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers, a sardonic, highly informative guide to a particular sort of publishing …
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