Most common administrative title at UCF: “Interim”. We are about to have another one – Interim Head of Libraries – to add to the Interim President, Interim Provost, Interim Chief Financial Officer, and various other… Continue reading…
Sure, I’m on board with there being more narrative people around, as this WaPo article suggests. The economists in this story seem to want to have them around for rhetorical reasons, though,… Continue reading…
This is an interview with Jennifer Nash about her excellent book on intersectionality. I’m interested in the ways that concepts are created for specific purposes and then drift, or get appropriated, or get… Continue reading…
I have been officially certified as “Ethical” by my institution, at least for another year. Thanks be to our lord and savior Immanuel Kant. I am also certified in the technologies of squealing and… Continue reading…
Lecturing is bad if you do it poorly. Lecturing is bad if you do it well. That’s the continuing message I see here.
But there’s something else that gets talked about much less… Continue reading…
Shall we pick apart this email (see below) sent by our university president, at 4 pm just before the university closes for a hurricane? Ok, lets do that.
1. This isn’t ethics training, it’s… Continue reading…
We’re all about the metrics at UCF. And also vague headlines in the linked piece (“among” the best?). So, being a nerd, I downloaded the dataset that Washington Monthly used for their… Continue reading…
I’ve thought that unions are overall a good thing since I was able to earn a paycheck. When I first became department chair, I recall going on a retreat with other new chairs from across… Continue reading…
There’s been a series in the New York Times about slavery and its legacy that featured an article about how the plantation grounds the forms of capitalism we find today in the US. Phillip… Continue reading…
When I have taught medieval philosophy in the past, I’ve had to describe the debate between the realists and the nominalists. It’s central to understanding the European Middle Ages. Basically, the dispute is over universals,… Continue reading…
I’ve tried to make this case to various people, usually to no avail (well, not everyone – you know who you are). I said to someone not long ago that I saw Obama… Continue reading…
This is an interesting reflection on a black man being mistaken for another black man, at a conference that was overwhelmingly white. I was at that conference. I met Gabriel Apata (and had a… Continue reading…
I’m still surprisingly affected by the news that Johnny Clegg has passed away. Here’s a really nice piece by Richard Pithouse on Juluka’s first album, that gives some good detail and context to why… Continue reading…
This is a former UCF colleague, someone I knew (although not well), and a supporter of our first and second Flickering Landscapes conferences, in Moab and in Orlando. I’m very sad for the… Continue reading…
This article (behind paywall, sorry) is about the history of politicians and administrators saying that their universities can’t be “all things to all people” (the 5-word phrase in the title). It tells the… Continue reading…
This post responds to the article here.
So, I haven’t seen the movie Yesterday, and not sure if I will. But here’s a post in which philosophers debate the central premise of… Continue reading…
At 11:54 EDT this morning we officially hit the summer solstice (winter solstice in the southern hemisphere). I used to wait for the exact minute and imagined that I could feel the earth start to… Continue reading…
I think Nature needs to work on how it thinks about interdisciplinarity. A recent article (Rafael Núñez , Michael Allen, Richard Gao, Carson Miller Rigoli, Josephine Relaford-Doyle and Arturs Semenuks, “What Happened to Cognitive Science?”,… Continue reading…
From this obituary of Rachel Held Evans: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/04/us/rachel-held-evans.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage
This is going to feel like a Sunday morning homily. Haven’t done one of those for a long time. So be it.
This person, Rachel… Continue reading…
Every time I think about writing about something on Facebook that really matters, I think about how that is even possible to do. Marshall McLuhan was surely at some level correct in saying that the… Continue reading…
Staff are now testifying that the now-former president did indeed know more about the budget scandal than he let on. That the 4 people who were fired a few months ago were possibly fired… Continue reading…
Is Email Making Professors Stupid? is an article in the recent Chronicle of Higher Education. It talks about Donald Knuth, a computer scientist, who doesn’t use email and hasn’t since 1990. Instead, he has… Continue reading…
Test.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_Polytechnique_massacre#/media/File:Mtl_dec6_plaque.jpg 29 years ago today. I remember. 14 women dead, 15 injured, plus suicides reported after the massacre, directly tied to the stress of these events. I was teaching at Trent, in Peterborough, and… Continue reading…
A Chronicle of Higher Education article on English departments, discussing among others Julie Thompson Klein and Jonathan Kramnick (and, btw, I’d love to sit in on a discussion between these two on interdisciplinarity). It… Continue reading…
On next week’s US midterm election: 1. Advance polls are meaningless. Remember two years ago. Everyone has an advanced poll, and will claim accuracy after the fact depending on what happens. Yes, there is… Continue reading…
Everywhere I look in the past week it seems like there’s death and sadness. The big obvious ones – innocent Jews slaughtered in Pittsburgh, a plane crash in Indonesia. Small ones – one of our… Continue reading…
A truism of political morality is that we should take character seriously. This is, perhaps, more of a truism on the right than the left, but it would be rare to find someone who would… Continue reading…
NYT coverage of the primary elections in Florida and Arizona. It’s been noted before, but there’s a subtle (sometimes not so subtle) slant to their political reporting. Exhibit A:
“Mr. Gillum edged out Ms…. Continue reading…