They forgot to teach and advise
Survey: Many MIT Faculty Fear Speaking Freely While Students Support Barring Speakers with Opposing Views: The MIT survey shows that we are raising the most speech-intolerant generation in our history […]
Tenure and the intellectual monoculture
How Tenure Fosters Conformity: This is a tough one to answer technically. We have nothing to compare directly with the academia we have today, no alternative system of higher education. […]
Truth, even if we fail
There is an internet/social media controversy about the new book, The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe. The book itself is fine. I have a copy though I […]
Higher education is going to become a partisan issue
Over the past few years, I have been telling my friends in academia that the Republicans are going to turn on the whole institution. Because my friends don’t know any Republicans personally (well, except for me) it has all seemed abstract and kind of vague. Pew now is reporting that over the past few years […]
The 100 Million Killed Under Communist Regimes Matter
Growing up as a child I didn’t know much about Communism except that it was bad. I knew that it was atheistic from what I had heard at the mosque……View Post
Why many academic departments should be replaced with “think tanks”
Glenn Loury has an important essay up on his website, Self-Censorship in Public Discourse: A Theory of “Political Correctness” and Related Phenomena”. A classic “read the whole thing.” But I want to highlight one section: Sociologist James Coleman, perhaps the world’s leading scholar of educational policy, recalls that in 1976 the president and a number […]
America, these are (some) your graduate students
If you haven’t, you should check out The Shadow Scholar, The man who writes your students’ papers tells his story. This is the conclusion:
“Thanx u so much for the chapter is going very good the porfesser likes it but wants the folloi…
Do consumatory scholars need tenure?
John Hawks pointed me to this really strange article, Just Because We’re Not Publishing Doesn’t Mean We’re Not Working:
We have no concise term to describe what we spend much of our time doing. Our colleges are focused on scholarly pr…
Boycott Elsevier
While I have the blog open, let me throw in a quick two cents to support the Boycott Elsevier movement. As most working scientists know, Elsevier is a publishing company that controls many important journals, and uses their position to charge amazingly exorbitant prices to university libraries — and then makes the published papers very […]
Who argues the most from authority?
Google results for +”nobel laureate” +X, where X is one of the following:Chemistry: 317,000Physics: 415,000Medicine: 467,000Economics: 484,000Of course, there are more winners to refer to in Physics than in Economics, so we should control for that. Div…