Our leaders of higher education have an amazing fetish for growth of institutions. They’ve sacrificed every standard, every form of reason to pull in more, more, more, students. I have, of course, criticized all these decisions, particularly the decision to attract violent ideologues instead of scholars, but one group I’ve only mentioned a little is […] … learn more→
Blog Archives
Free housing for illegal students?
Fifty shades of conference feedback
It is a steamy intellectual moment when a conference presentation concludes and that taut, expectant silence descends. “Yes, I’ll take questions,” you reply – breathlessly – surveying the array of bored, bemused, envious and angry expressions. For ingénue PhD students and early career researchers, such raw, inescapable exposure to the merciless probing of academia’s numerous […] … learn more→
Academic publishing in English
This week I was at a sociology of education summer school. As you might expect, I was there to talk about academic writing and publishing. In this context, I wanted to situate my usual topic in a wider context, and not simply offer strategies and advice. Here’s the abstract I wrote for the ‘lecture’: Educational […] … learn more→
Why I boycotted my students’ graduation
Staring at my overdrawn bank account, I laid my head on my kitchen counter and sobbed in actual despair. That was the fall of 2013. ‘I would never be a real professor,’ I thought. ‘What the hell was I going to do?’. That time seems far away now. Six months later, I had a contract […] … learn more→
How to stop campus riots
I’m reading yet another article of the madness on campus, and once again the dog not barking gets my attention. First a quick look at the article: Who Defines What Is Racist? Our campuses are in constant turmoil from ever more shrill cries of RACISM. It doesn’t matter if you’re drinking milk, showing up on […] … learn more→
We need to talk about competition
As research students, we aim to advance our disciplines through rigorous research and intense focus on our studies. At the same time we are all too often full of anxiety and uncertainty that keep us from achieving our best. Even though other students among our friends provide support, the amount of inherent competition among research […] … learn more→
Disconnected: Can universities surpass brand image to make their social media relevant?
Universities fail to exploit social media’s most compelling features, tending to broadcast their brands instead of engaging students and the public online, new research suggests. Visualise this: smiling students and successful faculty. In the background, beautiful buildings framed by blue skies. These are the ways that Canadian universities choose to represent themselves on social media. […] … learn more→
You’re so vague…
It is important when writing about research to be specific. And by writing about research I mean writing about methods in a journal article, writing methods in a thesis or journal article, writing about research design in a research bid. See what I did there? Specific, not vague. Now I’m guessing you do know that examiners […] … learn more→
Colleges and Universities, bad news, and the media
Over the past two years, my university, Wright State, has been producing negative news stories with remarkable regularity. Our enrollment, which had been gradually increasing has dipped somewhat, and because we are in the midst of a largely self-created budget mess, any decline in enrollment makes the budget issues worse and the number of positions […] … learn more→
Jisc futures: the digital revolution and the future of science
Information and knowledge have always been essential drivers of social progress, and the technologies through which knowledge is acquired, stored and communicated have been determinants of the nature and scale of their impact. A technological milestone was passed at the turn of the millennium when the global volume of data and information that was stored […] … learn more→
