It’s the first day of spring, rebirth, and the equinox, that turning point of the world, and it is beautiful and clear, luminous, springlike in all senses, in a way we rarely get here. I stayed up too late and life’s events and the semester have created turmoil, but I can see the spring so … More Spring equinox
The new (and last) piece will follow on this one and will start out talking about the question of trust and solidarity: do we really have these, are we really one faculty? Part of why we are not is hierarchical management and part of it is that in situations where basic survival is at stake, … More Writing about the university as a site of class struggle
My third post to this blog of a professional organization could start out talking about the argument I had with New Faculty Majority people, about adjunctification and related matters. They kept saying they did not want tenure, only long contracts and good pay, and that people like me were utterly antiquated, unfair, and “tone deaf” … More An answer to my other post
I wrote this, and with Clarissa wrote a sequel, but there is a third that must come. Some questions: does anyone believe in shared governance any more? or academic freedom (or do they only believe in free speech)? If the university is corporatized and the administration ignores mechanisms for shared governance, do institutions like Senate … More That third post
I don’t believe in this test but setting that aside, on the P-J axis, I think I am a J. I always thought P, because while I like having an idea of a schedule, priorities I honor, and goals I fulfill, I then like to violate that schedule according to how I feel. I like … More Meyers-Briggs
People get angry at leaders and accuse them of things. I know this about teaching and about being a department chair. New teachers are shocked when students oppose them because they are the teacher, and new chairs are surprised at the hostility they discover–especially when really, they are working hard to support the department and … More Leaders
For my article. Reichman points to Newfield, whose work is central to my discussion. University administrators “[i]n lockstep with politicians and profit-seeking corporate managers … oversold the private benefits of education and downplayed higher education’s role in serving the public good.” Axé.
I did not discover until recently that I was so well known among the Russian cousins, or why. It was because they were having severe problems with my aunt, because she was suffering from age and from being in the USSR. They could solve many problems for her but not the facts of age and … More Sobre los rusos
I will get rid of my photocopy of this book since our library actually has it, and others do, too. I like Martín-Barbero’s work a lot, even though this book seems old now. The book, very loosely speaking, is about the poverty of progress, as E. Bradford Burns put it in a related context, or … More Al sur de la modernidad
I am perfectly well, perhaps the best ever, but so introverted. It is possible that other people have these phases as well, when they are on sabbatical. I am not working on teaching, research or service, I am going through my books and creating a more amenable, and also more up to date work environment … More Le vendredi
coldhearted scientist وداد 