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…
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…
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…
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…
My university is getting a new president, after 26 years of the previous one being in that position. The new president was our provost (there was a national search, but it’s pretty clear that he… Continue reading…
https://www.chronicle.com/article/An-Insider-s-Take-on/242235?cid=wcontentlist_hp_5 My inclination in response to this article is to say, yeah, we’ve been making all these points for 10+ years to deaf ears. Lisa read parts of this to me this morning, interspersed… Continue reading…
from Dec. 15, 2017
http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-french-invasion
We don’t have many events in philosophy, not “EVENTS” at least, you know, those earth-shaking seismic changes in intellectual culture. The October 1966 Johns Hopkins conference that was the… Continue reading…
From Nov. 14, 2017
Who is this Cathy O’Neil person and how is it possible that she is this clued out? “Where’s academia when it comes to helping us make sense of this?” Um,… Continue reading…
from Nov. 11, 2017
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/12/women#.WgZ48EZa1Wo.facebook
Some specifics in this article about a report on womens’ experience in universities. Some of the comments add to the discussion, for a change, rather than being the usual… Continue reading…
From Nov. 9, 2017
http://induecourse.ca/affirmative-action-for-conservative-academics/
Problems with Haidt, and against affirmative action for conservatives in higher education. The categories of “left” and “right” are often not all that helpful, and especially in university settings…. Continue reading…
from Sept. 18, 2017
http://jxyzabc.blogspot.ca/2017/09/the-genius-fallacy.html
Wise thoughts for students in this post. I spend a lot of time talking to grad students about finding the question that motivates them. They often come with an… Continue reading…