In one of my classes I have just spent two weeks on some Afro-Cuban poetry and it is not because we are studying Blackness but because we are studying the ring of words and these poems contain some very good examples. As it turns out the class has a fairly large Black contingent. These students … More Motivos de son
I won a prize today in my piece of the academic industrial complex. C’est un valuable prize. I have won prizes as valuable before, but never when I needed them as much as I do this one. And it being the weekend, and I not having renounced pleasure for Lent, we will seriously sing. Axé.
Now Human Rights Watch has published its full report on the torture and near disappearance of Tasneem Khalil. Tasneem and I are friends 2.0, which is to say we are friends thanks to the Web 2.0. He is a Bangladeshi journalist with strong design and technical skills, and I found his blog on WordPress when … More The Tasneem Khalil News
Cary Nelson makes some of the same points I have been making about academic freedom, including that using your expertise and professional judgment to make a syllabus is part of it, that contingent faculty do not enjoy such freedom, and that the replacement of regular with contingent faculty has the effect of eroding it. On … More Cary Nelson
Lisez-le, it is a thoughtful post on Marc Bosquet and How the University Works. And the Bittersweet Girl reminds us not to mislead students on the cost of a graduate education. My addition to that is not to mislead them on the cost of an assistant professorship. Of these three posts, mine is the most … More Un Bon Post
One of my students, and one who thought she might not be advanced enough for the course, por más señas, has written this: In both films, and in the novel, the ‘natives’ are characterized by the Western narrators as convicts, enemies, or workers. When they cannot be fit into one of these categories, they are … More On Scholarship
This is Reading for Pleasure Wednesday and I have little new to report since I am still reading The Black Insider, very slowly. Logic is an attitude. It freezes us forever in the icy tumult of all the cursed attitudes they stuffed into us. But even where thoughts have died, something ghostly lingers behind. An … More Dambudzo Marechera
Obama has won more primaries and my new Obamaholism, as the Field Negro puts it, is waxing. And if teaching for change had ever been my first priority in life, I would have done something like this and not what I do now. I am considering doing it. No, I am not. Because I am … More Becoming a Professor
I wrote my original post on the teaching meme without realizing that a discussion of, or at least some remarks on academic freedom as it relates to my teaching was part of the question. Therefore I now offer some simple thoughts on this matter. 1. Academic freedom permits me to teach at the college / … More Why I Teach, Take Two
My post of Derrick Ashong speaking on Barack Obama is popular, for good reason. Chez Lumpenprofessoriat there is an excellent video by Lawrence Lessig on why to support Obama over Clinton this primary and caucus season, in case your state has not voted yet or in case you are going to the convention. It is … More Lessig on Obama
coldhearted scientist وداد 