academe
jrosenhouse | September 20, 2012I had originally intended to devote this post to discussing some of the minutiae in Massimo Pigliucci's essay. In light of some of the comments on the previous post, however, I've decided it would be more useful to speak generally about why I get so annoyed when charges of scientism are casually thrown around.
I actually agree with some of Pigliucci's specific criticism's of Krauss. For example, in his exchange with Julian Baggini, Krauss said this:
Ultimately, I think our understanding of neurobiology and evolutionary biology and psychology will reduce our understanding of morality to…
jrosenhouse | June 24, 2012Among the side effects of all the asinine hand-wringing over the phony problem of “scientism” is that it distracts attention from the real threat facing the humanities. I am referring to the corporate mindset that has come to dominate many aspects of higher education.
That threat is on full display in the current fracas at the University of Virginia, where the Board ousted the popular President, basically because she wasn't moving fast enough to gut the humanities. HuffPo has a useful run-down:
Members of the board, steeped in a culture of corporate jargon and buzzy management theories,…
jrosenhouse | June 19, 2012Over at Kevin Drum's blog, there is an interesting exchange between Drum and an unnamed college professor. In a post that was primarily about issues related to paying for a college education, Drum wrote:
The fact is that UCLA provides undergraduates with an education that's just as good as Harvard, and the country might be a better place if we all faced up to that and took Harvard and the rest of our super-elite universities off the pedestal we've placed them on. That pedestal has long since become corrosive and damaging to the public welfare.
Alas, the unnamed professor provides provides…
jrosenhouse | January 3, 2009I will be leaving town tomorrow to spend most of this coming week in Washington D.C., participating in the annual extravaganza known as the Joint Mathematics Meetings. This is quite simply the place to be if you have any interest in mathematics.
Of course, this means I will only have limited internet access for the next few days. So I will not be blogging, and I will not be making detailed replies to comments. Try to soldier on in my absence!
jrosenhouse | September 25, 2008My friends, I have just read one of the dopiest essays I have ever seen in my life (and regular readers of this blog know that's really saying something.) It is called “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education: Our Best Universities Have Forgotten that the Reason They Exist is to Make Minds, Not Careers,” and was published in The American Scholar. It's author is William Deresiewicz, who, we are told, English at Yale University from 1998-2008. It is the latest representative of a tiresome genre: “You Ivy Leaguers think you're soooooo smart. But you're really just a bunch of spoiled rich…
grrlscientist | January 8, 2008tags: academe, professor on food stamps, academic poverty, streaming video
I thought my employment situation was solely due to some mysterious and horrible flaw that is obvious to everyone except me, but here is a man who has the same complaints and problems, almost word-for-word as I have, except he actually managed to get tenure -- after ten years of living in poverty in the academic system. However, I doubt I will be so lucky as to get a tenure-track position (provided that I manage to survive that long)! [5:17]
Like this guy, I was also told not to take money from the public coffers (in…
jrosenhouse | October 9, 2007As if worried that fellow lunatic Michael Barone might receive the honor for the silliest attack on universities in recent memory, Dennis Prager steps in with his own worthy pretender to the title.
His jumping off point is the recent “editorial” in the Colorado State University student newspaper that said, in its entirety, “Taser this -- F*** Bush.” Mentally healthy people look at such incidents and see an unsurprising instance of college students showing poor judgment. For Prager, by contrast, this editorial tells us something profound about the rottenness of modern universities.
Prager's…
jrosenhouse | October 9, 2007Town Hall columnist Michael Barone has a bee in his bonnet about universities:
I am old enough to remember when America's colleges and universities seemed to be the most open-minded and intellectually rigorous institutions in our society. Today, something very much like the opposite is true: America's colleges and universities have become, and have been for some decades, the most closed-minded and intellectually dishonest institutions in our society.
Fox news pundits like Barone really ought to be more careful describing other institutions as closed-minded and intellectually dishonest.…