I’m never on time in academia.  In fact, I think always trying to be on time– to be timely, fashionable, etc.– is one of the big problems of academic culture. Last year or the year before it was Tweeting; now that’s passed and we are on to Klout or, I suppose, Klouting….

Anyway, I was doing my usual behind the times reading this morning and found this passage by the ACTA, in defense of a blogger recently dumped by the Chronicle of Higher Education:

She argued on the basis of the Chronicle’s own descriptions of the dissertations that they were substituting political partisanship for objective research and analysis. Her piece was sharp, controversial, and sarcastic, but certainly not out of…

“Students and families are struggling in President Obama’s economy. Nearly half of college graduates are unemployed or underemployed, and laws like ObamaCare have only made it harder for small businesses to hire them. That’s why House Republicans voted to extend current student loan rates and to pay for it by eliminating an ObamaCare slush fund President Obama himself proposed cutting from his budget. It’s time for the president and Democrats in Congress to stop exploiting the challenges facing young Americans for political gain, and start working with Republicans to create a better environment for private-sector job growth.”

Apr 27, 2012, Press Release from the Office of the Speaker of the House, John Boehner

There’s seems to be an emerging consensus…

I just read a piece in the New York Times called “Facing a Robo-Grader? Just Keep Obfuscating Mellifluously.” According to a recent study, automated software can grades essays with “virtually identical levels of accuracy,” as human graders but at a rate of 16,000 essays in 20 seconds. It sounds scary, and you can imagine the evil administrative imagination dreaming of a college system run by a handful of professors and a legion of robots. Robots don’t want health care and won’t demand freedom of speech protections.

This is also good news to Conservatives who suspect that English professors are not doing anything very difficult. Only it’s not, really, unless you are really cynical about how far we might go in denaturing…

I see something once and then see it again and…  You don’t see anyone in a cast for months and then you see them everywhere you go for the next week… Maybe that’s why I am finding so many small-minded thinkers this week. This piece, “Parsing Santorum’s Statistic on God and College: Looks as if It’s Wrong,” by Jonathan P. Hill in the Chronicle of Higher Education, seems almost militant in its pursuit of a meaningless question.

I’m almost– not quite–shocked by Hill’s seeming lack of  perspective. He seems to have not noticed that the Republican candidates aren’t in the least worried about veracity. If all you do is try to test the truth of the hypothesis that U.S. universities are “atheist factories”…

Continental European capitalism, which combines generous health and social benefits with reasonable working hours, long vacation periods, early retirement, and relatively equal income distributions, would seem to have everything to recommend it – except sustainability.

“Is Modern Capitalism Sustainable“– Kenneth Rogoff

Mike Konczal assembles some striking quotes from Federal Reserve transcripts showing how obsessed the monetary overlords are with keeping wages down. I won’t recycle any of the quotes—check out his post for the full flavor.

“The Fed and the Class Struggle” — Doug Henwood

Here’s an juxtaposition that might be used to teach critical thinking. The contrast between these two ways of seeing the economy isn’t simply a matter of right and wrong, yes and no, or even “subject positions,” although that…

I’ve long been fascinated with what I can only call (pardon my Marx) the ideology of bourgeois individualism that underlies so much of U.S. education. It really shows up when you talk about grading and commenting on papers. Students need, it is said, what is called “individual” help. Of course, students are members of cultures, and so the help we give is often as collective as it is individual. There’s nothing unique or individual about the conventions of writing. Most students need “collective” help with their writing; they need to understand that it’s not all personal expression.

Facebook writing has it’s conventions as much as college writing .  We don’t always teach individual expression,  as often as not…