http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:34:16 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en  Eric Lee's Labour Start clearinghouse for global labor news has just announced nominees for its first-ever award, Labor Video of the Year. Two of the five finalists are inspired by working conditions in higher ed. I think both are among the three likeliest to win.My top choice is the clever, ... http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/archives/247 What's worse than David Horowitz's brand of right-wing drivel giving yellow journalism a bad name? A ghost-authored Horowitz sequel, padded with over 150 witless, tendentious summaries of courses that the compilers erroneously imagine will frighten middle America into hauling the faculty up the nearest telephone pole. The current issue of American ... http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/archives/246 I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes me work and give up what I have. ... http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/archives/245 In a draft article published to its website today, Scientific American blasts some of the junk analysis bedeviling mainstream higher ed coverage and what passes for policy "thought" about academic labor. "The real crisis in American science education," the article concludes, "is a distorted job market's inability to provide [young ... http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/archives/244 Slow dissolve: Manhattan, fifteen years ago. I walk a few blocks from my place on Third Street-- next to an anarchist squat, across from the NuYorican Poets Cafe--to the headquarters of the Modern Language Association (MLA), then in Astor Place. I explain the agenda of the Graduate Student Caucus (GSC) to ... http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/archives/243 A guest post by Henry Giroux In 1977 I took my first job in higher education at Boston University. One reason I went there was because Howard Zinn was teaching there at the time. As a high school teacher, Howard's book, "Vietnam: the Logic of Withdrawal," published in 1968, had ... http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/archives/242 Ebooks are here to stay, but how will you read them? As sales suggest, dedicated reading devices--Kindles, Nooks, etc--have begun to meet the expectations of leisure readers and business travelers. (Those expectations have been changing as well, after the socialization represented by a quarter-century of reading on screen.) Providing fast, inexpensive and ... http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/archives/241 The stark contrast between recent imaginative actions by students and the decades of poor data, bad analysis, and foot-dragging by most academic institutions suggests a possibility. Could AAUP and the disciplinary associations could become the next target for the more radical students? For today's grads, socially conscious unionism no longer represents ... http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/archives/240 Okay, let's imagine the impossible of total supply-side control. Clamp off admissions to EVERY doctoral program in history immediately and what happens? They all keep pumping out new PhDs at contemporary levels for ten years. Scratch that. They actually pump out higher levels, because fewer of those enrolled will drop out, ... http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/archives/239 My piece questioning the supply-side bent to the American Historical Association's 2010 job report has gotten thoughtful replies by historiann, Alan Baumler, Jonathan Rees, Ellen Schrecker, Sandy Thatcher and others, both here and at Brainstorm. I really appreciate these thoughts, and want to emphasize how much I respect Townsend's work for ... http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/archives/238