Harvard student to her peers: read
Survey says sloppy
Rural education shrinking
From The Washington Post, “Rural students’ options shrink as colleges slash majors.”
Fourteen lines? tl;dr
“Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet”: from an Atlantic article by Rose Horowitch, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.”
“Is Reading Over for Gen Z Students?”
Listening to podcasts and watching YouTube videos — two suggestions offered in this podcast — don’t replace the work (and joy) of reading. Podcasts and YouTube videos might, on occasion, supplement the work (and joy) of reading in worthwhile ways. But without the reading, what’s the point? If instructors are unwilling to assign “an entire novel,” exactly what are podcasts and YouTube videos supposed to be supplementing? And what happens when the work of listening and watching becomes odious?
University library or storage room?
“A university library without academic librarians is called a storage room.”
Firing the librarians
Western Illinois University fires its librarians.
Something to say
It struck me the other night: “If you’ve got something to say, say it to my face” is utterly antithetical to discourse among academics, among whom implication and innuendo carry the day.
“AI and the Death of Student Writing”
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lisa Lieberman, a community-college instructor, writes about “AI and the Death of Student Writing.”
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Harvard, Meta, and veritas: the story of a misinformation expert and misinformation.
“AWOL from Academics”
In Harvard Magazine, Aden Barton, a Harvard undergraduate, writes about what it’s like to be “AWOL from Academics.”
Feedback in e-mail
I’m no power user, but I always find something of interest when I listen to the Mac Power Users podcast. This morning, listening to episode 740 while out on a walk, I was happy to hear a tech person confirming the wisdom of one of the bits of advice — to reply and say thanks — in my post How to e-mail a professor.
Two doctors talking
From American Fiction. There are doctors (medical) and doctors (professorial).
Struggling to read
Adam Kotsko writes about the decline in college students’ reading ability.
Grand old plays and sewing machines
The student as customer.
Plagiarism in high places
Gotta wonder sometimes who bothers to read the dissertations and theses they’re signing off on.
Claudine Gay has resigned
When the charges of plagiarism against Gay became news, I recalled my theory of plagiarism: “plagiarism seems to be governed by a sliding scale, with consequences lessening as the wrongdoer’s status rises.” I thought she’d make it through. But no.
Penn’s president is out
“Seemed to evade”? No, evaded.
Speech and conduct
It’s specious to draw a line that divides speech from conduct. As speech-act theory reminds us, there are many contexts in which to speak is to act. (Think of a former president’s pre-January 6 tweets.) And conduct need not constitute harassment to be out of bounds on a college campus.
Fish and Florida
The New York Times reports that academics — at least those who can — are fleeing Florida (gift link). But guess who’s signed up to teach at Florida’s New College: Stanley Fish.
Harvard, Meta, and veritas
From The Washington Post: “A prominent disinformation scholar has accused Harvard University of dismissing her to curry favor with Facebook and its current and former executives in violation of her right to free speech.”
Munger mega-dorm nixed?
The dream of a U Cal Santa Barbara mega-dorm, built to the specifications of a billionaire donor. with thousands of students living in single-occupancy windowless rooms, appears to have died with the donor, Charlie Munger.
PBS at WVU
“I think the level of reputational damage that the university is going to take will not be survivable. I don’t think that this will be a viable research university in five to ten years. And it essentially means that there’s no real tenure here anymore. And so nobody is going to come teach here unless they have absolutely no other choice.”
A “Day of Resistance” toolkit
Nihilism on campuses.
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Enrollment at Emporia State University drops sharply.
Dickinson State is the new WVU
Steve Easton, president of North Dakota’s Dickinson State College (and critic of tenure) is looking to cut and cut and cut.
West Virginia University cuts
E. Gordon Gee and friends, destroying a flagship school.
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Fired faculty members suing at Emporia State.
Revising again
One more addition to How to e-mail a professor, now that I can get through to ChatGPT: Don’t ask AI to write an e-mail for you. At least not if you want your e-mail to sound like the work of a human being.
Revising
I took a look at How to e-mail a professor the other night and noticed three sentences that needed revision.