Many years ago, I asked an MBA student from far beyond these shores if people in his country understood that he was studying at a post-1992 university rather than the much older and more prestigious one just down the road. “Of course they don’t,” he chortled. The confusion over the source of his qualification served […] … learn more→

Accompanying many of the appalling accounts of Wednesday’s massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo is a reproduction of the satirical weekly’s cover. It features a caricature of the writer Michel Houellebecq, garbed in a blue wizard’s outfit, face unshaven, jowls sagging and eyes bleary (no doubt from one glass de trop), smoke spiraling from […] … learn more→

One of the reasons UNC was interested in having bogus paper classes is because writing courses, legitimate ones, are labor-intensive. It’s very time consuming to look over a student’s paper, read it carefully and in detail, determine what, exactly is wrong, and write down in detail how to fix the paper. Since education is no […] … learn more→

At last the moment has arrived to determine the ultimate Word of the Year 2014. Others have already announced their choices.The Oxford Dictionaries liked vape, having to do with smokeless cigarettes. Merriam-Webster chose culture because the word was so often looked up on its website. Dictionary.com chose exposure. And the Global Language Monitor, noticing how […] … learn more→

Verizon’s recent announcement that it was considering a takeover of AOL provoked many commentators and investors alike to express surprise that AOL still existed. The 30-year-old company that launched the same year as the first version of Microsoft Windows has a number of firsts to its name and through a series of corporate reinventions still […] … learn more→

I’ve written a few times of the incredibly exploitative system that is the fate of most faculty in higher education today: adjuncthood. Instead of teaching and research in a professional job, the reward for many of our highly educated members of society is subsistence living on the fringe, earning less than minimum wage working for […] … learn more→

As luck would have it, almost immediately after I wrote this post arguing that we should commit ourselves in our actions to making the discipline just a little bit better for those around us–in ways large and small–I came across a comment over at the Smoker that bummed me out. The comment reads: First, I\’d […] … learn more→

In response to the terrorist attacks on the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The television coverage of the terrorist attack has been quite uniform in not showing the materials that led to the attack on the magazine’s offices, and that decision seems to me to be implicitly reinforcing the point that the gunmen […] … learn more→

Literary criticism once had an outsize reach, influencing the terms and concepts of disciplines like art and legal studies. With it came an outsize ego. During the 1970s and 80s, the heyday of literary theory, scholars aimed to explode the foundations of Western metaphysics, foment a revolution of the sign, overturn gender hierarchies, and fight […] … learn more→

The battle over who should lead colleges and universities has been raging since the inception of higher education. It is most often, and stereotypically, cast as a fight between administrators and faculty members. Supposedly both interested in what students need, those parties are alternately said to be effective governors of higher education and major impediments […] … learn more→