The poll questions are very poorly designed. This is one way to get Frankfurtian bullshit with data, i.e. polling designed without truth as its objective. Touting this poll is straightforwardly irresponsible.
'Inherently' introduces an unnecessary confound: One could agree there's structural white privilege (much closer to the claim of mainstream CRT) and disagree that such privilege is 'inherent.' Those are substantial conceptual differences not registered in the data. Total failure.
Similarly, dealing in absolutes (as below) introduces a catastrophic error into the question: One could view race as a very important component of identity to study in school *without* believing it's 'the most important thing about [a person].' Fail.
Similarly, 'racism is the cause of all differences and outcomes in achievement' deals in an unnecessary absolute. And its alternative *need not be* imagining some 'genetic' component to the issue. Could be race & class, for example. So, another confound, another failure.
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1) Some thoughts about faculty governance in higher ed. and being in the position to change things for the better. ...
2) Actually governing and running a college is complicated and a ton of work, much of it the kind of work that too many faculty look down on. I say this based on ...
3) my first year as a dept. chair, hiring, writing staffing requests, managing the curriculum, &c &c and having now served on committees for reevaluating the college core curriculum, for developing free expression policies, for developing first-year orientation and ...
@conor64 I think what would have the greatest impact is reversing the adjunctification trend. Particularly if we take seriously the conjectures about faculty self-censorship. About 75% of the professoriate works off the tenure track, not protected by academic freedom.
@conor64 Another, further afield idea would be to incentivize more collaboration between departments and divisions, such that the viewpoint diversity already present isn't concentrated in disciplinary enclaves. At present I think this has some negative externalities, including ...
@conor64 ...a distorted media image of what academia is like, which focuses on a few lefty depts. while giving e.g. biz schools a (relative) pass and a tendency to form disciplinary 'teams' with distorted impressions of people in other disciplines. No point in viewpoint diversity if...
1) Dreaded thread on why I think the response to postcritique is so vitriolic. Short version: Because literary studies is a discipline in search of an application.
2) Before I go on, I'll say from the outset that many in lit studies explicitly reject the idea that the field *should* have an application. My opinion is that's fine if you want to do book clubs, but if you want an institution you can't ignore that difficult issue. But anyway...
3) The evidence by this point is overwhelming that when lit scholars talk about 'method' we're actually just talking about ourselves: 'ways of reading,' 'how we argue,' 'phenomenology of reading,' etc. etc.
1) I defend post-critique (not with any particular investment in it). But here’s a thread of some of my national media publications also defending left and PoC students and faculty against bullshit ‘free speech’ concern trolling. ...
2) Here’s where I take on ‘The Coddling of the American Mind,’ the ur-text of of this recent iteration of using appeals to free speech to criticize marginalized students who are just urging us to do better: newrepublic.com/article/122543…
1) Let us pause to appreciate the sheer comedic majesty of the fact that French politicians are worried about the threat of US academic theories of race, gender, and post-colonialism.
2) On the one hand, in the US, you have a capacious grifting industry that pins the downfall of 'American values' and 'Western Civilization' on a handful of passé French philosophers ...
3) And on the other hand, you have the French president and education minister parroting nearly verbatim the same US-based grift, but reversing causality and blaming it on US intellectuals.
1) NFL thread from a guy who didn't watch the Super Bowl. Up until about 5 years ago I wouldn't miss an NFL game. Even when I lived in the UK--before the NFL conquered the UK--I'd find creative ways to watch NFL football. What happened? I have to admit: part of it is Tom Brady.
2) There are more substantive reasons why I turned off the NFL, of course. On the principled end of things--by no means my only reasons, I have to admit--I'm uneasy about CTE and the unconscionable League response to its players. ...
3) And on the less principled end of things, the in-your-face marketing that makes the NFL what it is just became so tedious. It's just hard to watch a game with so many stoppages in play, so many of them primarily commercial. It just got really, really boring. ...