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…

The adjuncts tend to teach core classes at Duquesne, and Cech noted the adjuncts’ lack job security because if their classes do not fill up, they are not guaranteed employment. Adjunct faculty members make up 40 percent of the liberal arts instructors and can earn up to no more than $10,224 in yearly salaries while full-time assistant professors within the liberal arts make a yearly salary of $65,300.

“Part-Timers At Duquesne Unionize With the United Steelworkers“

I’m always thinking that I sound crabby if not permanently angry so I go in search of good news. This piece, from Adjunct Nation, is in fact very good news insofar as it reports on six schools in the Pittsburgh area that are unionizing in affiliation with the United Steel…

Ordinarily, when people speak of income disparity they are talking about individuals or about classes of individuals. The statistics are amazing: the U.S. hasn’t had this wide of a disparity in at least 8 decades.   The disparity is often even more shocking when you compare institutions.  I found two stories in this vein today. On the one hand, the Sacramento, California Public Library system is planning to cut hours in an attempt to prevent lay offs of employees.

In the richest state in the richest country in the world the most basic of public services, the library, has to cut hours (“Sacramento Public Library closures scheduled due to staff furloughs“).  You can just hear the austerity folks chanting their song: “We…

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 was reading around this morning via the “NCTE Inbox” and found yet another piece that seems to suggest a “teaching and education” revolution that could only happen in a dream: “Coming to Terms With Five New Realities,” by Will Richardson. (In all honesty, I probably sounded like this myself around a dozen years ago.) I thought it might fun to offer counter points to each of what the author call the “new realities” or “big challenges for schools to navigate.” It’s less a description of what’s coming than a prescription for helplessness.  Here’s the list of our apparent reality:

1. “I don’t need my own children to attend a school to learn algebra or French. More than anything,…

Most important, the system promotes driven and talented students who might otherwise be denied access to higher education: a kid in Afghanistan, a young mother in Scotland, an ignored pupil in Detroit. From Mr. Thrun’s class (translated into 44 languages) Udacity chose 200 students based purely on performance and, a few weeks ago, forwarded their resumes to companies including Amazon, Bank of America and BMW.

There are glitches, of course, including a high online dropout rate, complaints about speed, questions on accreditation and the predictable whining from old-school alumni who have gotten too cozy in their club chairs.

“Watching the Ivory Tower Topple“

Technological change in a capitalist economy often has a lot of hidden and important costs hidden by the marketing…