First, everything is on fire; as bad as things have been looking, and continue to look, for English-language universities in Quebec (a long story I won't bother with at the moment), the Trump administration's war on academia has ramped up so dramatically in the US, and on so many fronts -- from arresting and deporting … Continue reading A quick, mid-apocalyptic update
academia
The Illusion of a Future
Say the line! "Faculty need to tell the truth about the academic job market." Unobjectionable in itself, this is a constant refrain in online and print performances of academic self-criticism. Why? One implication is that faculty members have been cornering unwary bystanders to share the Good News about tenure-track jobs. Another implication is that the … Continue reading The Illusion of a Future
Better CVs will not save us
In lieu of a full-length post here, here is a link to a full-length post I wrote for the North American Conference on British Studies blog, Broadsides. It's one of a series looking at the state of British studies -- considered rather more as a profession than as a discipline, if you take my meaning. … Continue reading Better CVs will not save us
Faculty[,] Don’t Run It Like a Business
The subtext of nearly every practical discussion about hiring, promotion, or retention in academia -- on the faculty side, that is -- is that everyone is replaceable. One might say this is the subtext of any discussion where there is a labour market to speak of, but in academia it is sharpened by the massive … Continue reading Faculty[,] Don’t Run It Like a Business
Knowing when to quit
When I was still working on my dissertation, but near enough the end of it to begin looking for jobs, the question loomed: how long to keep at it? Asking this of some senior faculty members over a post-seminar dinner, I received the canonical answer: three years. "If you're on the market for three years … Continue reading Knowing when to quit
And now for something completely different
Now that the second book is safely out of my hands, I've been working for the last little while on some new things: perpetual motion machines (see this earlier post for a very preliminary version), Spanish ghosts in English-conquered Jamaica, scientific projectors in Restoration England, and so on. One of these, as previous posts might … Continue reading And now for something completely different
The Best Compliment I’ve Received on My Teaching
It was not the evaluation that said I was a snappy dresser. It was the time fifteen years ago when a student in an introduction to modern history who had identified himself as conservative said that, thanks to our class's discussions of The Communist Manifesto, he wanted to read more Marx. Today, when the notion … Continue reading The Best Compliment I’ve Received on My Teaching
Writing the Second Book
Yesterday I submitted the first full manuscript of my second book to what I very much hope will be its publisher. (Note to editors: I love you. Please love me back!) As with the doctoral dissertation and the first book, submission felt impossibly distant at every moment up until the moment it happened. I'd say … Continue reading Writing the Second Book
Can ‘Progress Studies’ Contribute to Knowledge? History Suggests Caution
By Shannon Dea, University of Waterloo and Ted McCormick, Concordia University (republished from ; original here) According to tech entrepreneur Patrick Collison and economist Tyler Cowen, academia needs a new discipline called “progress studies.” But their proposal overlooks two crucial facts: human progress has been an object of study for centuries, and innovators ignorant of that scholarship … Continue reading Can ‘Progress Studies’ Contribute to Knowledge? History Suggests Caution
Matters of Faith
Tuesday brought news of the latest self-indulgent hoaxing of academic journals by a trio of "academic exiles" intent on establishing that the academy is a at once a hothouse of left-wing ideological orthodoxy and, at the same time, a credulous fantasy-land where anything couched in the language of "theory", however nonsensical, can get published. (How … Continue reading Matters of Faith
memorious 