Adjuncts, MLA, and Rhetoric
There's been a little back and forth on the issue of non-tenure track faculty and Michael Berube's (MLA President) recent statements. First of all, let me say that I fully support Berube's efforts to...
View Articlerobot graders, new aesthetic, and the end of the close reading industry
This post brings together several threads I've been pondering recently: the explosion of conversation over the new aesthetic (see Ian Bogost and Bruce Sterling), conversation about the future of...
View Articlewhat’s the relationship between tenure track hiring and adjuncts?
Perhaps it’s just the MLA season, but the it’s the time of year when the dearth of tenure-track jobs and the exploitation of adjuncts often come up in the same sentence. So what’s the relationship...
View Articlegoing to graduate school in English
Probably the last in this series of posts surrounding the MLA silly season. While senior grad students, recent phds, and others prepare for their job interviews, another crop of potential graduate...
View ArticleNet Neutrality and the Public Sphere
This is not an argument for or against “net neutrality,” but rather an examination of the discourses and the beliefs that undergird our identification of this policy as integral to our sense of the...
View ArticleWhat’s worse? Coursework or dissertation?
Today, as I regularly do around this time in my Teaching Practicum, we discussed the job market. It’s not much fun as you can imagine. I think (I hope) that it is illuminating. I mostly do it because I...
View Articlechanging the ends of scholarship
A continuation of the last post on graduate education… As I think more about it, it’s fairly obvious that this is all part of a larger system with graduate curriculum as the obvious start point....
View Articleinvestigating the Yik Yak attack
The Chronicle reported today on the abuse of faculty by students in a class via Yik Yak. Steve Krause writes about the event here (it happened at his institution, Eastern Michigan). And,...
View Articlewriting epilogues on the 20th-century university
Terry Eagleton’s recent Chronicle op-ed is making the rounds. It’s a piece with some clever flourishes but with largely familiar arguments. What I think is curious is that the nostalgia for the good...
View Articledigital ethics in a jobless future
What would/will the world look like when people don’t need to work or at least need to work far less? Derek Thompson explores this question in a recent Atlantic article, “The World Without Work.” It’s...
View ArticleNeoliberal and new liberal arts
In an essay for Harper’s William Deresiewicz identifies neoliberalism as the primary foe of higher education. I certainly have no interest in defending neoliberalism, though it is a rather amorphous,...
View Articleacademic “quit pieces” and related digital flotsom
Before I get into this, I should try to make a few things clear. This post isn’t about the structural problems facing higher education right now (issues of cost and access, the changing...
View Articlealt-ac careers and the purposes of humanities doctoral programs
Marc Bousquet has a piece in Inside Higher Ed on the topic of alt-ac careers and the disciplinary-institutional motives of departments and universities in relation to them. I really don’t disagree with...
View ArticleOn the future openness of the MLA
I’m writing today about two unrelated events–unrelated that is except in that they both concern the MLA. The first is the election of Anne Ruggles Gere, a rhetorician, as second vice-president (which...
View Articlerisk, reward, and revolution in an object-oriented democracy
If you happen to go back and look at my posts from a decade ago (though why would you?), you’d find some very strongly-worded political commentary. Maybe it’s because I’m older or maybe it’s because...
View Articlepluralism and the nonmodern, nonliberal society
In a New York Times editorial, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” Mark Lilla, a Columbia history professor, makes an argument that runs against much of the discourse I hear from the academic left. I am...
View Articledistributed deliberation: beyond echo chambers and fake news
If some Americans are slowly rousing to the realization that getting information via social media resulted in a distorted (and sometimes completely false) view of past election, perhaps they might be...
View Articlerobot empathy and ethics in a jobless future
Perhaps this is a departure from concerns of distributed deliberation, fake news and such. Perhaps not. Here though I begin with the rhetoric of an emerging sub-genre regarding humanity’s slow, dismal...
View Articleidentity and pedagogy in first-year composition
Two weeks ago I wrote a post about Mark Lilla’s NY Times op-ed, “The End of Identity Liberalism.” As I noted then, I did not imagine many of my colleagues would share his views (and neither do I, as I...
View Articleliving the post-American dream
Baudrillard’s America was one of the first books of “theory” I encountered as a student. It’s a weirdly poetic, aphoristic book. I honestly can’t tell you what to make of it, but here are few bits....
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