Grad students who weren’t schooled at elite universities face real challenges in a squeezed academic job market. But many talented grad students do reach tenure when they receive the same support and guidance offered in elite universities.
Both because of the unexpected direction yesterday took, and because I haven't worked through my thoughts about any number of pressing current events, I thought I'd write about an experiment that...
The last two years saw some major stories in my corner of the blogsphere concerning sexual harassment. Colin McGinn's resignation from the University of Miami saw widespread discussion across the...
Another day, another piece chronicling problems with the metrics scholars use to assess quality. Colin Wight sends George Lozano's "The Demise of the Impact Factor": Using a huge dataset of over 29...
Being new to the blogging world, I have been thinking a lot about the utility and influence of blogs. Blogs seem appealing in so many ways. They appear to be an effective means of disseminating facts and views quickly to a wide audience, facilitating timely responses to emerging policy issues (and other fun pop politics). At the same time, blogging is a way of discussing real intellectual ideas free of many of the pitfalls of peer review and academic publishing (see last week's Duck entry by Brian Rathbun). More importantly, blogging is concise, pithy and entertaining and can potentially...
[Updated]No sooner do I pen an intemperate, semi-coherent rant about the culture of pretending-to-know-things among graduate students, then Nawal Mustafa makes a probing comment:From the student side of things Dan, it strikes me as a deeper problem that transcends the academy. Certainly, I concur students should take responsibility to ensure they are actually learning, and not view their seminars as merely an exercise in impressing others, or securing great letters of recommendation by purporting to "know" the material. That said, there is a deeper problem where success and achievement, even...
At his own blog, PM writes:So why were my undergrad classes so much more educational for me? The simplest explanation is just that this was the second time I'd gone through the material, and so the review made clearer connections that had been obscure. The more profound difference, though, is that undergrads are more incentivized to ask questions. Graduate students are vastly more risk-averse about asking dumb-sounding questions, not least because their professors will also be their colleagues and one simply doesn't want to make a bad impression. (The reverse calculation--that failing to...
To me, the high point of academic blogging is putting out a request for insight to readers on a specific problem and crowd-sourcing a wealth of useful feedback that helps me be better at what I do than I would have been had I gone with my gut. Sometimes these blegs are about research and sometimes about teaching, and sometimes about how to wade through the backwash of scholarly life without getting too dirty. I want to thank everyone who weighed in on my "famous, dumb student" how-to-deal-with-a-suspected-cheating-student-not-from-my-own-institution-who-happens-to-be-public-figure thread....
So this email arrived my mailbox yesterday:Hi Mr. Carpenter, I am a fourth year college student and I have the honor of reading one of your books and I just had a few questions... I am very fascinated by your work and I am just trying to understand everything. Can you please address some of my questions? I would greatly appreciate it. It certainly help me understand your wonderful article better. Thank you very much! :) Sincerely, [NAME REDACTED]The "questions":1. What is the fundamental purpose of your article? 2. What is your fundamental thesis? 3. What evidence do you use to support your...
Via Drew Conway, a great quote this morning from Stephen Curry, a professor at Imperial College London:Students should think more broadly about what a PhD could prepare them for. We should start selling a PhD as higher level education but not one that necessarily points you down a tunnel...We should not see moving out of academia as a failure. We need to see it as a stepping stone, a way of moving forward to something else.Curry was commenting here on changing the mindset of the students, but I would argue in many disciplines the problem isn't the students, but the professors.  There are...
What does a citizen need to know? What skills and knowledge should we assume in our interactions with others? What makes a person a well-rounded person? The issues go back for centuries, and every so often some suggests modifications to the list of "liberal arts." I teach at a university with a "liberal arts" requirement, and I know from experience the battles to have a class listed as required (or optional) include issues of academic politics and teaching philosophy. The outcomes of those battles can make or break particular classes, or entire programs.A group of scholars has published a...
Yesterday, Michael Calderone ignited a media brouhaha with his Politico piece, "JournoList: Inside the echo chamber."For the past two years, several hundred left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks and academics have talked stories and compared notes in an off-the-record online meeting space called JournoList. Lou Dobbs and Keith Olbermann talked about the email listserv on their TV programs yesterday. On the right, bloggers had a field day talking about conspiracy theories and speculating about high profile members of JournoList. Red State's Erick Erickson:...