Education board backs controversial history guidelines https://floridapolitics.com/archives/434777-crt-desantis/
The Florida state governor, our own mini-Trump, has another “red-meat for the base” bit of legislation. No surprise here at all. These people feed on the… Continue reading…
In another edition of My Stupid State, Florida now has a bill before the legislature that will change the state support for students going to universities. It is the Bright Futures program, which has been… Continue reading…
Yet another attempt by far right Florida Republicans to not let the market speak for itself, but try to predetermine what people should take in university based on a BS idea of what… Continue reading…
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/business/economy/economics-women-gender-bias.html
Economics is, of course, far from the only discipline like this. Philosophy has often been like economics in that its public meetings can be gladiatorial, but I think it has started to recognize… Continue reading…
Florida, at the forefront of being backward. There’s so much wrong with the position taken in the quote below, but for starters, the assumption that public universities must have politicians involved in surveilling… Continue reading…
A Position at the University: A Report to an Academy https://profession.mla.org/a-position-at-the-university-a-report-to-an-academy/
Long, but a good reflection on incentives or their lack in the university, getting stuck at associate professor level, and other related… Continue reading…
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/19/t-magazine/sigourney-weaver.html
“[A]ctors’ brands are now so much more narrowly defined and so much more painstakingly maintained, their presence on social media absorbing as much strategic thought as their actual professional development. [Sigourney] Weaver —… Continue reading…
I’ve been doing various sorts of online course delivery since the mid-1990s. That’s when Netscape was the only browser. That’s when you had to send your page changes to an IT admin, and wait a… Continue reading…
Well, the Board of Governors thinks everything was hunky-dory with our UCF president search, and so the person who we first heard existed one week ago, was hired 5 days ago, is now officially… Continue reading…
So, $1M to be president of UCF. All of 2 days of vetting, during a pandemic. “The value of Cartwright’s agreement … ranks among probably the top 10% [in the country], if not even… Continue reading…
Transparency. Careful consideration. Thorough vetting. Broad consultation with all interested parties.
Screw those things. They’re all for lesser schools.
We’re going to announce a candidate on a Wednesday, have one public… Continue reading…
Well, finally the third candidate for the UCF president has been announced. Alexander Cartwright, current chancellor of the University of Missouri at Columbia.
So, for those of you keeping track, this was announced on… Continue reading…
One thing I worry about, during a time like this coronavirus crisis, is what else will happen while no one’s looking. As Rahm Emmanuel said (ugh, can’t believe I’m quoting him): “You never let a… Continue reading…
Well, it’s a good thing that Vistasp Karbhari pulled out of the presidential search for UCF. He’s now also resigned from his current post as president of the University of Texas at Arlington.
This deserves to be spread around. I’m kind of obsessed with what I call “scholarly cognition”, which is the knowledge that is part of the embodied experience within the academy that doesn’t get included… Continue reading…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/25/opinion/sunday/college-professors-experts-advice.html What makes a good teacher, from a student’s point of view? The author here makes some fairly broad generalizations about researchers and teachers. He feels a bit like he cherry-picks examples to prove… Continue reading…
A report in the Atlantic tracks the decline of the humanities since the financial crisis of 2008. The decline is both in the number of students in classes and the number of majors…. Continue reading…
I’m generally not a huge fan of Ross Douthat, but I don’t dismiss him on principle the way I do some other columnists. When he talks about the humanities, though, he makes me want to… Continue reading…