Academics
pharyngula | February 16, 2006Here is a serious problem:
Here's the thing, Gabriela: You will never need to know algebra. I have never once used it and never once even rued that I could not use it. You will never need to know—never mind want to know—how many boys it will take to mow a lawn if one of them quits halfway and two more show up later—or something like that. Most of math can now be done by a computer or a calculator. On the other hand, no computer can write a column or even a thank-you note—or reason even a little bit. If, say, the school asked you for another year of English or, God forbid, history, so that you…
pharyngula | February 1, 2006…but my university actually supports me. There's a profile of yours truly that's part of a random rotating collection of links on UMM's main page (if you don't see it there, reload the page; it'll appear eventually.)
I am aware that I am slightly harsher and more radical than many of my colleagues on some issues (others have their own domains of expertise and radicalism), but one of the great things about UMM is that even if they don't explicitly endorse all of my opinions—and that acknowledgment on the main page is not an admission that this university is a hotbed of militant atheist…
pharyngula | January 30, 2006
I will join the chorus in praising Bérubé's essay on academic freedom. It's excellent; now if only the people most desperately in need of reading it weren't barely literate anti-intellectual thugs, it would be an awesomely persuasive rhetorical tool.
That Mannion fellow explains why the Republicans don't want us to fight Alito. I always thought Linus was a prissy apologist for the status quo, and that that blanket was a symbol of his inability to stretch his mind beyond his narrow Judaeo-Christian bias.
pharyngula | January 30, 2006An Angry professor led me to an article on Inside Higher Ed, which discusses a document by the Wingspread Conference by the Society for Values in Higher Education (pdf). I knew when I saw the word "Values" up there that I was in for some platitudinous academe-speak slathered around a set of bland pieties, and I was. Poking around on their website, I see that the Society for Values in Higher Education seems to consist of a lot of well-meaning and rather wordy types who see religion as an important "value" to inculcate in higher education—a nest of those liberal Christians everyone tells me I'm…
pharyngula | January 29, 2006As is their habit, the Chronicle of Higher Ed has published another cockeyed article, this time arguing that the problem with the budgets of universities are all those expensive faculty, and suggesting that a solution would be outsourcing the instruction and turning the professorate into a collection of market-efficient middle managers. Profgrrrrl takes that whole idea apart, so I don't have to.
The whole purpose of a university is to provide a space for the play of ideas among those faculty, in an environment where young men and women students can be participants and learn to contribute. The…
pharyngula | January 19, 2006Maybe the right wingers will be interested in expanding this UCLA program to pay student Quislings.
A fledgling alumni group headed by a former campus Republican leader is offering students payments of up to $100 per class to provide information on instructors who are "abusive, one-sided or off-topic" in advocating political ideologies.
The year-old Bruin Alumni Assn. says its "Exposing UCLA's Radical Professors" initiative takes aim at faculty "actively proselytizing their extreme views in the classroom, whether or not the commentary is relevant to the class topic." Although the group says…
pharyngula | January 17, 2006You wouldn't know it to see it, but we aim to make Morris, Minnesota the Mecca of science blogging. How else to explain how we could draw Grrlscientist away from that boring dump of a town, New York, to visit our lovely prairie village for a week? It's true: a whole two of us ScienceBlogs people are chattering away from this lonely outpost in the rural wilderness.
Any other science bloggers who want to stop on by, feel free. We've got a roomy house with a zippy wireless connection, and who needs anything more? Jay Manifold has been here, Radagast once drove by within a few hundred miles, and…
pharyngula | January 13, 2006If ever you've looked yourself up on Rate My Professors, you'll appreciate Rate Your Students.
(via Crooked Timber)
On a related note, check out this praise for the ideal teacher: Severus Snape. I'm going to have to work on my style.