Pootwattle the Virtual Academic(TM) says: The conceptual logic of millennial hedonism is often found in juxtaposition with, if not in direct opposition to, the sublimation of difference. [more inside]
posted by caddis on Nov 20, 2009 - 12 comments

Zaytuna College in Berkeley, CA will accept its first students in the fall of 2010 or 2011. Founded by Sheik Hamza Yusuf and Imam Zaid Shakir, it will be the first accredited Islamic college in the United States, open to men and women of all religions.
posted by escabeche on Oct 1, 2009 - 60 comments

Louis Crompton, the author of Homosexuality and Civilization and Byron and Greek Love, has died. [more inside]
posted by dickymilk on Jul 20, 2009 - 15 comments

The 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act included funding for a pilot program that provided scholarships in exchange for recipients completing at least one summer internship in the intelligence agencies. The Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP) was praised in National Review but criticized by humanities organizations as a threat to academic integrity. The 2010 Intelligence Authorization Act [400kb pdf] submitted to Congress by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair makes the program a permanent budget item. [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese on Jun 24, 2009 - 15 comments

Digital Research Tools (DiRT) is a wiki created by Lisa Spiro, director of Rice University's Digital Media Center. Tons of "snapshot reviews of software that can help researchers" are categorized by what you're trying to accomplish ("Analyze Statistics," "Network With Other Researchers," "Search Visually"), as well as by general topic ("Authoring," "Linguistic Tools," "Text Analysis"). Via
posted by Rykey on Feb 4, 2009 - 5 comments

"What are the new liberal arts?", asks SnarkMarket, inspired by Jason Kottke's tagline and Edge. The blog post has turned into a pitch for a new collaborative book, with spirited discussions and over 100 suggestions including photography, design, relationships, mythology, intuitive thinking, synthesis, knowledge mastery, search, archiving, play, and home economics.
posted by divabat on Feb 4, 2009 - 44 comments

Dave Chalmers has just launched PhilPapers, a directory of nearly 200,000 online papers in philosophy. This is a jawdropping and amazing resource for philosophical research. For evidence of the scope of this project and the care that has been given to it, see the taxonomy of philosophy that was developed for the site.
posted by painquale on Jan 28, 2009 - 28 comments

"...the best place to hide bulls**t is in a refereed journal that’s not open-access!" The math-physics blog n-category cafe digs into the curious case of M.S. El Naschie. El Naschie is editor-in-chief of the journal Chaos, Solitons, and Fractals, published by the well-respected scientific publisher Elsevier and sold to academic libraries for US$4,520 a year. The problem? El Naschie has published 322 of his own papers in the journal -- papers that John Baez (of "This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics" and "The Crackpot Index") describes as "vague, dreamlike imagery," "undisciplined numerology larded with impressive buzzwords," and "total baloney." Is El Naschie a reverse Sokal? Or a Markov process for producing random publishable papers? One thing's for sure -- he knows how to cure cancer.
posted by escabeche on Nov 12, 2008 - 49 comments

A math professor was explaining a particularly complicated calculus concept to his class when a frustrated pre-med student interrupts him. "Why do we have to learn this stuff?" the pre-med blurts out. The professor pauses, and answers matter-of-factly: "Because math saves lives." "How?" demanded the student. "How on Earth does calculus save lives?" "Because," replied the professor, "it keeps certain people out of medical school."
posted by cthuljew on Nov 9, 2008 - 82 comments

Randy Pausch, who became famous for his "last lecture" after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, has died at 47. (previously) The last lecture video went viral in late 2007. Pausch became a minor celebrity and made a commencement address at Carnegie Mellon which also gained media attention. Homepage (currently being overwhelmed) and Wikipedia.
posted by brassafrax on Jul 25, 2008 - 75 comments

Historian Robert Irwin reviews two books critical of Edward Said's Orientalism. Irwin's own critique received positive and mixed reviews. In this brief interview, Said explains what he was trying to do in Orientalism.
posted by ibmcginty on May 24, 2008 - 8 comments

When your research subjects notice you watching.... The fine folks over at Little Green Footballs discovered "a pile of results and code" from an observation of their on-line discourse on a server at Carnegie Mellon. That led to a heated thread of sometimes paranoid speculation that eventually calmed down (somewhat) when the researcher's academic advisors posted a good-natured mea-culpa (wea-culpa?) and explanation.
posted by mmahaffie on May 18, 2008 - 92 comments

Bioculture critiques Cultural Critique Until literature departments take into account that humans are not just cultural or textual phenomena but something more complex, English and related disciplines will continue to be the laughingstock of the academic world that they have been for years because of their obscurantist dogmatism and their coddled and preening pseudo-radicalism. Until they listen to searching criticism of their doctrine, rather than dismissing it as the language of the devil, literature will continue to be betrayed in academe, and academic literary departments will continue to lose students and to isolate themselves from the intellectual advances of our time.
posted by jason's_planet on Apr 7, 2008 - 107 comments

Ancient manuscripts lost and found, Nazis, academic backstabbing, religious fundamentalism - something for everyone in this story. (And count on Spengler for some controversial thoughts on what it all means)
posted by IndigoJones on Jan 15, 2008 - 20 comments

Advice on Academic Job Talk Visits by Siva Vaidhyanathan.
posted by mattbucher on Jan 10, 2008 - 33 comments

Insightful, sociological, bitter: A scholar reflects back on her entry into the academic 'mommy track.' An interesting blend of meditation-on-resentment and just-plain-resentment, worth a read both intentionally and un-. [via] [more inside]
posted by waxbanks on Dec 2, 2007 - 69 comments

Randy Pausch is a pioneer in virtual reality, a computer science professor, a Disney Imagineer, an innovative teacher, and the co-founder of the best video game school in the world. One year ago he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and after a long and difficult fight he's been given just a few more months to live. This week he gave his powerful, funny, and life-affirming last lecture to a packed auditorium at Carnegie Mellon University, entitled "How to Live Your Childhood Dreams". The WSJ's summary, and a direct link to the complete video of the lecture (2 hours, and unfortunately streaming WMV). Warning: hilarious jokes about dying.
posted by xthlc on Sep 20, 2007 - 30 comments

Amusing notes on the requirements for a doctoral thesis in theology at Fordham University This is actually from the Graduate Student Handbook.
posted by zorro astor on Aug 10, 2007 - 42 comments

Turns out that Golden Globe-winning actress Natalie Portman (formerly known as Natalie Hershlag) is quite an accomplished scholar. In addition to being a Harvard psychology student, she worked in Dr. Abigail Baird's research lab and was the co-author of a peer-reviewed journal article investigating the neuroscience underlying the development of object permanence in infants. Quite impressive, in an age where Lindsay Lohans and Paris Hiltons dominate the headlines.
posted by charmston on Jun 19, 2007 - 101 comments

So you want to write a textbook? Take advice from N. Gregory Mankiw who got a $1.4m advance for his book on economics. Try some advice from Garrett Bauman who says no to originality or David A Rees who says the opposite. Maybe you just need a dose of reality from the bitter guy.
posted by meech on Mar 4, 2007 - 16 comments

John Hall of the University of Florida delivers a praiseworthy lecture. Part One, Part Two.
posted by rxrfrx on Sep 29, 2006 - 31 comments

Reviewing peer review.
posted by Gyan on Sep 26, 2006 - 33 comments

"... Everyone needs an escape. It just amazes me that for 1,200 people this involves sitting in darkened rooms listening to presentations on Harry Potter and the Sanctity of Everyday Life: JK Rowling's Complex Treatment of the Trope of Normalcy." Carole Cadwalladr covers Lumos 2006 for the Guardian. [via]
posted by anjamu on Aug 12, 2006 - 27 comments

Silence in class. "University professors denounced for anti-Americanism; schoolteachers suspended for their politics; students encouraged to report on their tutors. Are US campuses in the grip of a witch-hunt of progressives, or is academic life just too liberal?" From today's Guardian.
posted by jokeefe on Apr 4, 2006 - 188 comments

Camille Paglia: WHAT went wrong at Harvard? "Over the past 40 years, there has been a radical expansion of administrative bureaucracies on American college campuses that has distorted the budget and turned education toward consumerism, a checkbook alliance with parents who are being bled dry by grotesquely exorbitant tuitions."
posted by semmi on Mar 6, 2006 - 46 comments

[TotalitarianismFilter] Don't be asking your college librarian for a copy of that Little Red Book to do a class assignment, or your parents might get a visit from the good folks at the Department of Homeland Security. More evidence that the Bush administration cannot restrain itself when granted enhanced surveillance powers.
posted by digaman on Dec 17, 2005 - 97 comments

"Virtual Virus Sheds Light on Real-Life Behavior." A researcher at Tufts University's Center for the Modelling of Infectious Diseases, Dr. Nina Fefferman, is studying the behavior of World Of Warcraft players during the recent plague that broke out in Ironforge (discussed on Metafilter here.) But Dr. Fefferman is not the first academic to study MMORPGs seriously. Edward Castronova, an economist, arguably pioneered the field with his 2001 paper Virtual Worlds, in which he argues that the economy in Everquest produced a GNP per capita somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria. (He has followed up that paper with many more on similar subjects.)
posted by dersins on Oct 5, 2005 - 9 comments

Bloggers Need Not Apply A pseudonymous faculty member, writing at the Chronicle of Higher Ed. website, says that when faculty search committees do their jobs--that is, when they look for new hires--they may well find candidates who blog automatically suspect. This is true even if the blogger/applicant has never mentioned any details about his or her workplace or fellow employees, employer or students online. It doesn't mean the candidate won't! It doesn't matter if the committee just found the blog via Google either.
posted by raysmj on Jul 8, 2005 - 36 comments

Liberals, Womens' Studies, Beer Ads, and Kos.
posted by Tlogmer on Jun 15, 2005 - 91 comments

Some people make courses available; some talk about opening up learning using the Internet. The Netherlands gives itself a head start by releasing all its research material for free. (Here's links to the repositories.)
posted by bwerdmuller on May 13, 2005 - 16 comments

MIT students pull prank on conference. "In a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a bunch of computer-generated gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific conference." The paper's title? "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy."
posted by adrober on Apr 14, 2005 - 24 comments

The World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics sends email so aggresively to academics in computer science that they are thought of as no better than spammers. It doesn't appear you can make them stop sending you email. Worse, it's clear they are a place for "dead wood" faculty who just need a paper count for their yearly reviews. So, recently, the academics have been taking things into their own hands by generating bogus submissions. Some with a sophisticated fake paper generator and others with more direct statements.
posted by about_time on Apr 11, 2005 - 19 comments

The Valve, "a literary organ", is a new group blog devoted to literary studies and modelled on little magazines gone by.
posted by kenko on Mar 31, 2005 - 3 comments

Laura K. Pahl is a plagiarist. In which a blogger exacts poetic justice on a spoiled little rich girl at university.
posted by dirtynumbangelboy on Mar 29, 2005 - 579 comments

The Academic Freedom Bill of Rights is slowly making its way through the Florida Senate. This bill would give students the right to sue professors if they feel their beliefs are not being respected during a class.
posted by hex1848 on Mar 24, 2005 - 60 comments

Danica McKellar —the former star of The Wonder Years—has her own web site. It's got a great feature where she answers your math questions. No, really. She's got a degree in mathematics and co-authored a paper on percolation and Ashkin-Teller models. No, really.
posted by bbrown on Feb 25, 2005 - 43 comments

"80 percent or so of them (professors) are Democrats, liberals or socialists or card-carrying Communists." So says Ohio Senator Larry A. Mumper, who has introduced an "academic bill of rights for higher education," which would prohibit professors from "persistently discussing controversial issues in class or from using their classes to push political, ideological, religious or anti-religious views." The text of the bill is adapted from an organization founded by Marxist-turned-conservative activist David Horowitz. Similar bills have been introduced in other states. Is this a genuine attempt to foster "intellectual diversity", or a "trojan horse" to force universities to adopt a quota system for conservative professors?
posted by googly on Feb 15, 2005 - 130 comments

Hans Hoppe is in trouble. Why? In one of his lectures at UNLV, the world-renowned economist stated that homosexuals plan less for the future than heterosexuals. According to Hoppe, homosexuals tend not to have children, so they have little stake in the world beyond their own time. Other poor future planners include the very young (no concept of the future) and the very old (their time is almost up). A student filed a compaint against Hoppe for his "anti-gay" remarks, and UNLV wants to issue a letter of reprimand and force Hoppe to give up his next pay increase. So should an economics professor be forced to consider his students feelings prior to presenting economic theories? As Hoppe fights back, the libertarian community voices its support.
posted by b_thinky on Feb 12, 2005 - 88 comments

A followup on the Ward Churchill controversy by fellow CU professor Paul Campos alleges that in addition to research fraud and plagiarism, Churchill is guilty of "bullying his way into academia" by fabricating the story of his Cherokee heritage--an idea corroborated by AIM, who called him a "wannabee" Indian, and by IndianCountry.com, which also questions Churchill's qualifications for chairing the Ethnic Studies program at CU.

Churchill's prior education began at the now-defunct experimental Sangamon State University which solicited educators with ads in Rolling Stone. In his climb to tenure at CU, did Churchill's supposed Native American heritage & activism play a more important role than his academic record? Not long ago, CU was noted for its lopsided rules of dissent. Does the environment at CU embody Cass Sunstein’s "law of group polarization", ie, "when like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts toward extreme versions of their common beliefs"?
posted by jenleigh on Feb 9, 2005 - 47 comments

Comparing the victims of 9/11 to Adolf Eichmann has lead to controversy and credible threats of violence toward CU Professor Ward Churchill and the small liberal arts college where he was scheduled to speak on the "limits of dissent." A pacifist and human rights activist, Churchill claims that, as Eichmann ran the machinery behind the Holocaust, the "technocrats" of the WTC facilitated the execution of a destructive U.S. foreign policy.

A tip to Bill O'Reilly led to the death threats against Churchill and other bizarre forms of protest (PDF). Major media outlets cite the comparison of 9-11 victims to Nazis out of context without tackling Churchill's views on American foreign policy. Is this just another typical dismissive reaction against the radical left?
posted by themadjuggler on Feb 1, 2005 - 116 comments

Hypothesis as thought-crime ...Now, however, a new brouhaha has erupted [at Harvard]and it seems impossible that Summers [the president]will emerge from this one without serious erosion of his moral authority. The trigger was a statement he made at a conference, suggesting that the reason there are more men than women in the mathematical sciences at top-flight institutions has to do with a small statistical difference in inate ability, which becomes a pretty large disparity when one looks at the 'high end' of the respective distribution curves... The fatal words did not set forth his main theme, but merely constituted a brief aside, thoroughly hedged and qualified. Nonetheless, they touched off a firestorm of indignation, the most striking aspect of which was the intemperate response of a number of feminist scientists, who offered no counter-arguments, but simply declared the whole idea misogynistic and therefore forbidden intellectual territory.
posted by Postroad on Jan 31, 2005 - 71 comments

"In his talk... [Harvard President Larry] Summers also used as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral parenting. Yet she treated them almost like dolls, naming one of them 'daddy truck,' and one 'baby truck.'

"It was during his comments on ability that Hopkins, sitting only 10 feet from Summers, closed her computer, put on her coat, and walked out. 'It is so upsetting that all these brilliant young women [at Harvard] are being led by a man who views them this way,' she said later in an interview." Summers then responded with the currently in vogue non-apology apology.
posted by occhiblu on Jan 18, 2005 - 182 comments

Cut-Rate Diplomas
Laura L. Callahan was very proud of her Ph.D... and she never let her employees at the Labor Department, where she served as deputy chief information officer, forget it.

To get her Ph.D., Callahan merely had to thumb through a workbook and take an open-book exam. The whole correspondence course-which includes instruction on business ethics-takes about five hours to complete. A 2,000-word paper (shorter than this article) counts as a dissertation.
posted by trharlan on Jan 11, 2005 - 73 comments

In the past several years, some prominent Western scholars of South Asian religions have been subjected to extraordinary criticism and unprecedented attacks because of their apparent disrespect for Hindu culture. Whether another instance of post-colonial academic politics or a troubling sign of the rising impact of Hindutva on academic freedom, it isn't just the study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that is becoming polarized.
posted by felix betachat on Dec 22, 2004 - 24 comments

Rate My Professor! A searchable database of student ratings of their college professors. In what must be a wonderful reflection of the current status of the American and Canadian higher education systems, the ratings include entries for how easy the professor is and, of course, how hot they are. So click around, visit your alma mater, and let that jerk who almost flunked you in freshman comp feel your wrath!
posted by robocop is bleeding on Nov 22, 2004 - 74 comments

' "Oh, you're going to the MLA? What a riot. They're a bunch of sitting ducks." I hadn't been planning to shoot at them, I said'. Lewis Kraus attends the 119th Annual MLA Conference, and asks what it means to be an English professor after the 'crisis of the humanities'.
posted by Sonny Jim on Aug 23, 2004 - 10 comments

The Sakai Project, an open-source course-management software program for educational institutions is being publicly released today. Backed by the University of Michigan, Indiana University at Bloomington, MIT, and Stanford, Sakai hopes to free Universities from commercial products, which have reportedly become increasingly expensive. Here's a nice little write-up from the Chronicle of Higher Ed.
posted by Ufez Jones on Jul 15, 2004 - 8 comments

Arkansas Governor's School , one of over 100 "Governor's Schools," starts today. The program is going in to its 24th year despite years of controversy over several mediums.
posted by whoshotwho on Jun 13, 2004 - 17 comments

Ginsberg's Celestial Homework is the reading list Ginsberg handed out on the first day at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics as "suggestions for a quick check-out & taste of ancient scriveners whose works were reflected in Beat literary style..." Founded in 1974, Ginsberg taught at the school until his death in 1997.
posted by Satapher on May 21, 2004 - 16 comments

HR 3077 - "unprecedented federally mandated intrusion into the content and conduct of university-based area studies programmes."

"There is a great deal at stake for American higher education and academic freedom. If HR 3077 becomes law - the Senate will review the bill next - it will create a board that monitors how closely universities reflect government policy. Since the legislation assumes that any flaw lies 'with the experts, not the policy', the government could be given the power to introduce politically sympathetic voices into the academic mainstream and to reshape the boundaries of academic inquiry. Institutional resistance would presumably be punished by the withdrawal of funds, which would be extremely damaging to Middle East centres especially."

you didn't have reason to call your congressperson tomorrow? you do now. frightening.

via the excellent openbrackets.com
posted by specialk420 on Apr 16, 2004 - 67 comments