Yesterday’s Gazette featured an article entitled “Professor Shortage Looming, Feds Told: Schools Urged to Boost Post-Grad Ranks by 35%” The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada made its annual pitch for more federal money by saying that we try to lure in more than 150,000 postgraduate students because nearly have the country’s 40,000 professors …
Category Archives: Academe
Flashback — the Bad Kind
My first year teaching — ever — was in the Department of Speech Communication at the University of Illinois. The course was SpCom 111-112, a year long speaking and writing course. One of those “skills” courses with no official content, though students had to read a minimal amount of stuff. I still remember the first …
Forgetting
As I may have mentioned somewhere below, writing has been my most daunting task since becoming chair (to be fair, this was complicated in the summer by virtue of moving). Mostly it’s a time issue, but though it is also something of a concentration issue. To write well and creatively, one must forget (if momentarily) …
Why have graduate students?
I often say that I went to graduate school to become a grad student, and not a professor. And that my goal as tenured prof is to approach the state of graduate-studentness as much as possible (minus, of course, the poverty and angst). It is fair to say that during my stint as department chair …
Hypothesis on the Histories of Communication Studies in the U.S. and Canada
File this under “probably not news to lots of people up here.” This past week in proseminar we discussed competing historical accounts of the field of Communication Studies (recognizing that even what counts as “in” and “out” of that field is debatable). Naturally, one of the questions that arose concerned the differences between the field …
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The Crisis of the Humanities; also, I’m entering “annoying Canadian” territory
Most of the time when I return to the U.S. and attend a conference, a thread emerges some point about “the crisis of the humanities.” Sometimes it’s about Republicans defunding higher education, sometimes it’s about changing attitudes among undergraduates or university administrators, sometimes it’s about the publishing industry, sometimes it’s about curriculum, and sometimes it’s …
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Pass it on. . .
I don’t often post ads in this space, but this one is special: — The Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University invites applications for a tenure track position to begin on August 1, 2008, in the area of Media and Public Policy. Although the appointment is expected to be made at …