Anyway, apparently she's taken it upon herself to make some things up about me. I'm not the first she's done this to (see images 2-4), and I don't know what she imagines the point is, but here you are.
Also, there's plenty of space in my Irish Studies class, coming in January!
She also appears to have gifted me a whole new set of opinions on Lindsay Shepherd... totally unrelated to our last conversation on the subject
Unlike Terry (known to some of you as a Quillette and PostMillennial scribe) I don't go in for online diagnoses, but I think you can see why I wouldn't be interested in engaging
in sum, she might take some of her own favourite advice
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As far as academic employment goes, a much, much, much bigger problem than senior faculty members not retiring is universities not replacing faculty when they retire.
The problem isn't that the pipeline to secure, senior status is blocked, it's that there is no pipeline.
What, do we think state schools are cutting programs and folding departments and casualizing teaching because Old People?
Also: allow me to point out that a 65-year-old tenured professor in a program of, say, 5-7 FT faculty in a mid-ranked public university of any size does not meaningfully have “power” either in the institution or the discipline and it is a weird fantasy to imagine otherwise
This is something I wrote for my intro-level students in history, as a way to think about how to read the different kinds of text they will encounter.
1. Read actively. Write in the margin; don’t just underline, make notes. With practice you will learn to distinguish between ideas or arguments that authors emphasize, and details that you can look up again later. ...
... Rather than aiming to reproduce the contents of the reading or the lecture, focus your notes on main points and key ideas or examples.
This is one reason why pundits confusing declining *majors* with empty *classrooms* is so irritating — and why the Father’s-Day “solutions” proposed (“why not teach cool classes like MOAR WAR?”) miss the point.
My classroom is full, it’s just more and more full of non-majors.
History majors make up about a third of my scheduled intro lecture this coming year. Last year it was closer to 50%. When I started they were the majority. The subject hasn’t changed, but perceptions about future employment, a lot of them driven more by media than by data, have.
It’s not that nobody takes history courses, but that increasingly universities are seeing the arts (and, I suspect, a lot of the sciences too) as at best essentially remedial/service/“skills” supplements for vocational and pre-professional programs. A view many have internalized.
I think we’re slowly figuring out that students, parents, faculty, administrators all internalizing a vision of higher education as coercive workplace discipline rather than an opportunity to pursue intellectual interests brings out the worst in everybody and has no happy ending
Summer fun is pondering new readings for my "Knowledge and Power in Early Modern Europe" seminar @concordiahist (Fall). I've taught it a few times over 12-odd years and each time I keep a few and switch a few.
Past books that have worked well include (in no particular order)...
Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? (which also sounds like the title of a first novel when you read it all together) press.princeton.edu/books/hardcove…