If you were to start over, how would you build a university from scratch? Would you keep disciplines, tenure, professors, students, and degrees? What would you keep from the current system? Taking a break from the End of the Newspaper, yesterday’s New York Times ran an End of the University op-ed from Mark Taylor, a …
Category Archives: Academe
Alep — Another Local Discovery
Across from the Jean-Talon Market (you could throw things at Hamel) stand the Syrian restaurants Alep (more formal) and Petit-Alep (less formal, same kitchen). We’ve lived in Montreal for almost 5 years now and in our current place for almost two, and just made it there for the first time Thursday night to celebrate Carrie …
Some parts of the economic crisis might still have to do with overproduction
The academic gloom-and-doom stories are moving north. Fresh off a New York Times story about new PhDs having trouble finding jobs in a year when so many searches are being cancelled, the Globe and Mail reports (a few years too late) that maybe minting all those extra PhDs wasn’t such a great idea after all. …
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A Glimpse of the Future of English-Language Higher Education
For obvious reasons, I can’t discuss many details of the admissions process to our graduate programs in Communication Studies in this space (so please don’t ask if you applied and are reading this). However, I must note a change this year which I think may foretell of something bigger to come down the road. Every …
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Two New Blogs on Books + One on Speech
This is overdue, but I am pleased to announce two new blogs on the future of books by friends who are also publishing books on books this summer, Andrew Piper and Ted Striphas. See: The Book Report and The Late Age of Print and on a not-totally-unrelated topic: Money/Speech — Okay, I’m off to California …
New Configurations of Academic Privilege?
So recently in my travels I encountered a colleague who has ascended to a high level administrative post at his school. We know each other as scholars and are academic friends. He’s the kind of person who I’m happy to see at a conference and with whom I’m happy to share a drink when the …
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Ten Words You Don’t Want to Hear From A Flight Attendant About Her Last Landing At Your Upcoming Destination
“I’d never had a flight where so many people vomited.” I finally got on a plane Friday morning and was talking with the flight attendant, who was on the Montreal-La Guardia flight that actually landed Thursday before the cancelled the rest. The above quote sums up her description of the turbulence. My flight was fine …