Academia
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Postmodernists and Scientists, partying together
In the nineties, after the infamous Sokal “Social Text” Hoax, it became fashionable to lambaste post-scructuralist/postmodernist academia for its misunderstanding and misappropriation of science and scientific terms — from “relativity” to “uncertainty principle” to “paradigm shift”. The latter itself is of course a term from the history and philosophy of science: Thomas Kuhn‘s description of…
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Teaching
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Regular readers may have noted a slackening of my posting pace over the last couple of weeks. For the first time in life, I’m earning my keep doing what most people think a “University Lecturer” (a.k.a. “College Professor” in the US) gets paid to do: teaching (in fact, most of our professional stature and advancement…
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Working hard for our money
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OK, academic scientists are clearly upper-middle-class, and on a day when it’s more obvious than ever that the poor in this country get a raw deal in everything up to and including disaster relief, I don’t want to bellyache too much about how hard it is to do a job I love in an interesting…
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The Liberal Arts
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Joe asks ‘what exactly is a “liberal arts college” (the writer [Ivan Tribble] works at one, it says)?’. According to the wikipedia A liberal arts college is an institution of higher education found [mostly] in the United States, offering programs in the liberal arts at the post-secondary level. They encourage — and often require —…
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Yet more on blogging academics…
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The buzz has died down, but I thought I’d respond to some comments on the last post about the perils of academic blogging. First, I should probably point out that I’m in a safe situation, with a permanent position in a good University (which I got well before I started this blog). Finally, Jerry correctly…
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Academics and blogging don’t mix?
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The Chronicle of Higher Education has an offensive article on the pseudonymous Ivan Tribble’s experience on a (reactionary, shortsighted, but perhaps not unusual) faculty search committee which rejected all the bloggers who applied. Aside from the obvious “don’t blog”, the lessons don’t seem to be restricted to the internet: Don’t have any interests outside of…
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Academics: blogs and publishing
The Village Voice has an article about academic blogs. And BlogScholar is attempting to organize the joyous but chaotic noise we make (but I’ll wait to see how serious it is before I sign up). Meanwhile, after a discussion of various models for academic publishing over on CosmoCoffee, moderator Antony Lewis has set up a…