I can tell it is January because I am spending a certain amount of time giving people tips for handling their first campus interviews. Mostly what I am telling them is to calm down. If there is anything they forget to ask now, they will have a chance to ask it later. I am good … More On Being Where One Is
This is the twelfth day of Christmas and the feast of the Kings. I am buying a fishing license and going fishing. It may do me good. I am plagued with nightmares about the coming semester which wake me each hour, so that I do not sleep. This has been going on for six days. … More Fishing
1. As we know, in Reeducation I was considered unfeeling. To prove I was not, I was directed to renounce the intellectual life. 2. I have already realized before that “unfeeling” only meant “not histrionic” and “frighteningly bright to a man like me.” Now I realize that what it meant more fundamentally was that I … More Repaso
The number of myths now masquerading as fact are very tiring to refute, so I am glad when other people help to do it. Right now I am glad the NYT has refuted a few myths about religion, the Founders, and the Framers. The article refers to Mitt Romney’s speech on the matter earlier this … More Refuting Myths
From 02138: Because, in any number of academic offices at Harvard, the relationship between “author” and researcher(s) is a distinctly gray area. A young economics professor hires seven researchers, none yet in graduate school, several of them pulling 70-hour work-weeks; historians farm out their research to teams of graduate students, who prepare meticulously written memos … More More Outsourcing
Here is a small excerpt from one chapter of a book by Robert Jay Lifton. The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of … More Robert Jay Lifton
I Here is the First Amendment to the United States Constitution: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of … More On the Right to Opine
As the assiduous reader will know, a great deal of my intellectual, emotional and creative energy is spent on two activities: irrigating a desert and understanding what follows here. Notes 1. Abused people are under the illusion that if they learn to obey more perfectly, accept abnegation more completely, the pain will stop. 1.1. If … More Et encore…
PZ: These students refuse to learn. WM: They do not share your views on the value of learning. PZ: But they are in school, so they are on the turf of learning. They should play by house rules. WM: Not necessarily. PZ: So the house rules no longer emphasize the value of learning? WM: … … More A Corporative Whiteman
… Interpretation of the Constitution to the Christian Right I thought that the way in which my academic freedom was curtailed was in the need to cater to the tendentious religions and politics of the students. I have long been aware, to give one very clear example, that I as a professor cannot criticize Creation … More On Outsourcing
coldhearted scientist وداد 