By Erin E. Templeton. Suddenly, November is halfway over and the end of the semester is looming. In my state, South Carolina, we have had unseasonably cold weather. I know that lows in the upper-20s or low-30s are routine for many of our readers, but it’s very unusual around these parts. In “Down with Service, Up with Leadership,” Cathy N. Davidson argues that institutions need to reframe service in favor of institutional leadership: “If from the beginning we made the three pillars of our academic-reward system scholarship, teaching, and institutional leadership, it would mean changing our idea of what responsible participation in an institution and a profession entails. More...

By Adeline Koh. More and more institutions are beginning to incorporate digital tools and assignments into their curricula. If this includes you and your students, and you work in the arts and the humanities, consider asking your students to submit applications to present at Re:Humanities, the first national digital humanities conference for and by undergraduates. Stemming from the TriCollege Digital Humanities Initiative (run out of Haverford, Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr), Re:Humanities offers a peer-reviewed space for undergraduate students to exchange ideas and discuss digital humanities projects. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. Like many Lingua Franca readers, I spend some of my life in airports, which has undoubtedly given me a skewed view of language. Be that as it may, I’ve been particularly struck this autumn by what seems to be the rise of the reckless diacritical.
I’m not a linguist, as readers of this blog will know. I won’t delve into the historical arcana of diacritical marks, except to say that they seem to have been necessities of writing since antiquity, as if alphabetic language itself were born in need of a little help. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. A long time ago in a university far, far away (which I will not name), the English Literature department added to its undergraduate handbook a page of grammar and usage advice. That page, still reprinted every year, contains a well-known list of “common errors” stated as self-violating maxims (with droll intent). I will not repeat all of these tongue-in-cheek ukases, but here are a dozen samples. More...