Category: Academia
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War on Academia
Salon.com: We need our universities, public and private, to be places where academics feel free to pursue whatever line of thought they want. If that pursuit spills over to action, we should be careful about what restrictions we try to enforce. Better, by far, to err on the side of freedom, because that, theoretically, is…
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Humanities, For Sake Of Humanity
Inside Higher Education: Nugent [Georgia Nugent, president of Kenyon College] argued that the American public has become too easily persuaded by numbers — even when those data are biased, flawed or wrong. Invoking Albert Einstein’s famous dictum — that everything that can be counted does not necessarily count, and that everything that counts cannot necessarily…
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Blogging and Freedom
Last week’s guest post on the digital humanities and the classics really got me thinking about academic outreach (both from inside academia to those outside and spreading information about digital tools and projects within academia). Dan Cohen furthered my thinking with a good post about blogging as a medium and the resistance of blogging academics…
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Academic Blogging
Dan Cohen on blogging being a dirty word for one academic who writes on a blog: There is no reason a blog has to be quickly or poorly written; also a must read is Rob Nelson’s Comment on the post: you appear to be time traveling back to confront the Dan Cohen of 2005 who…
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Long Form Narrative
ProPublica: Last night, ProPublica and the New School sponsored a public conversation on “Long-Form Storytelling in a Short-Attention-Span World.” The event featured This American Life’s Ira Glass, The New Yorker’s David Remnick, Frontline’s Raney Aronson-Rath, ProPublica’s Stephen Engelberg and was moderated by Need to Know’s Alison Stewart.
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March Madness
The Men’s NCAA basketball tournament, better known as March Madness, is about to begin. I thought about writing a thoughtful piece on sports and the university, but, perhaps due to lack of sleep or being on a research trip and working all day (yes I’m trying to rationalize a short post this week), I decided…
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Defending Peer Review
The Aporetic: What strikes me about arguments in support of open peer review is that they are often premised on a utopian vision of our digital future and a dystopian view of our analog present. The utopianism is neither surprising nor problematic. Proponents of change are understandably enthusiastic. Once experiments are launched, some of this…
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A Few of My Favorite Things
With some fudging on how many items can be in a “top five”, here are my top six “top five” lists (in no particular order): 1. Top Five History Books (Listed in the order in which I read them) 1. Rats, Lice & History: The book that really made historical thinking click for me in…
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Gates Friend of Some of the Humanities?
The Chronicle: That meeting led Mr. Gates, founder of Microsoft, to support a free online syllabus of Mr. Christian’s unusual course, called “Big History,” that gives a sweeping multidisciplinary overview of world history from the Big Bang to the Industrial Revolution. Another educator chosen by Mr. Gates to speak at TED was Salman Khan, a…
Brian Sarnacki 