R is for Responsibility

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …