Tweet Just a quick follow-up to last week’s post on changes in higher education. The New York Times published an article on Friday, highlighting two new books on the future of the American academy and picking up some of the points I discussed last time: The labor system, for one thing, is clearly unjust. Tenured [...]
Archive for the ‘Jobs’ Category
August 25, 2010
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Courting controversy
By james in Jobs, Opinion, TeachingTweet There’s nothing like an overtly contentious statement to bring in the traffic. And as they go, this is a pretty good one: “Why higher education is like a Ponzi scheme“. The linked post is actually for a radio program, the content of which was based on this original article by a professor of psychology [...]
September 15, 2009
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Portrait of the scientist as a bureaucrat
By dario in Evaluation, Funding, Jobs, WritingTweet Cambridge zoologist Peter A. Lawrence has published a thoughtful piece on the frustration of scientists (whether young or not so young) facing the ruthlessness of the research granting system (Real Lives and White Lies in the Funding of Scientific Research). He suggests how a “drastic simplification of this grant-writing process would help scientists return [...]
August 18, 2009
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Study Hacks on Rethinking What Impresses Employers and being a hyperspecialist
By jose in Evaluation, Jobs, OpinionTweet Cal Newport says people think that the more hard things they do, the more impressive they’ll be to potential employers. He calls this the diligence hypothesis. This is a leitmotiv in his blogging. However, this trend of getting (and looking!) as busy as possible is not exclusive to undergrads (his audience). I don’t know [...]
April 17, 2009
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“Do it for love” and other fallacies to motivate grad students and junior faculty
By jose in Blog, JobsTweet In a supremely honest piece, (part II) T. H. Benton says that basically, it makes no sense to get a PhD in the humanities right now. His predictions are gloomy (and I think this applies to other disciplines): We are entering a period in which large numbers of tenured faculty members will be released [...]