One psychology professor, looking at the oversupply of PhDs for a very limited number of academic jobs, thinks that programs should simply
stop admitting PhD students, and has decided not to add any others to her own lab.
posted by grouse
on Aug 18, 2010 -
119 comments
As translation contretemps go, the one surrounding French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) and her foundational work of modern feminism, Le Deuxième Sexe, first published in two volumes in French in 1949, remains one of the most tempestuous and fascinating. For decades, Beauvoir scholars in the English-speaking world bemoaned, attacked, and sought to replace the widely used 1953 translation by H.M. Parshley (1884-1953), a zoologist at Smith College who knew little philosophy or existentialism, had never translated a book from French, and relied mainly on his undergraduate grasp of the language. A few years back, they succeeded in getting the rights holders [...] to commission a new translation. [... But] Norwegian Beauvoir scholar Toril Moi, a professor at Duke and one of the foremost critics of Parshley's translation, savaged the new version in the London Review of Books. [...] How everyone involved got from vituperative discontent to hopeful triumph and back to discontent makes an instructive tale in itself and offers some lessons for what matters and doesn't in the evolution of a classic.
posted by No-sword
on Jun 27, 2010 -
38 comments
The Real Science Gap: “There is no scientist shortage,” declares Harvard economics professor Richard Freeman, a pre-eminent authority on the scientific work force. Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a leading demographer who is also a national authority on science training, cites the “profound irony” of crying shortage — as have many business leaders, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates — while scores of thousands of young Ph.D.s labor in the nation’s university labs as low-paid, temporary workers, ostensibly training for permanent faculty positions that will never exist.
posted by ennui.bz
on Jun 14, 2010 -
80 comments
Mendeley is a cross-platform research management tool which features article databasing, PDF annotation, online backup, private, shared and public collections, metadata lookup on Google Scholar, direct exporting of multiple citation styles to Word, OpenOffice and BibTex, the ability to add documents directly from a web browser, and social networking with other members in your field of study. Like
Zotero (
previously), but out of the browser and with note-taking abilities. For Windows, Mac and Linux.
posted by l33tpolicywonk
on Jun 11, 2010 -
27 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
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
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
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
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
"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
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 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
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
