By Ben Yagoda. For some time, I have been planning to write a Lingua Franca post on Somebody Said Something Stupid Syndrome. SSSSS (as I abbreviate it) begins when an individual writes or is recorded as saying something strikingly venal, inhumane, and/or dumb. The quote is then taken up and derided—in social media or blogs—by thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of other individuals. And then it spreads from there. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. A significant body of press coverage suggests that the Conservative-led government of Britain recently recommended wearing jumpers (sweaters) as a response to increases in heating costs, and later did a U-turn. None of this is true; yet somehow the British press managed to create a mini-scandal dubbed Jumpergate out of it. Jumpergate was spawned mostly by quotational inaccuracy verging on mendacity. But it was helped along by certain facts about pragmatic strengthening of specificity of negation. Let me explain. With verbs and adjectives having certain weakly modal meanings (mainly relating to desire, perception, likelihood, opinion, and advice; see The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Pages 838-843), negation is subject to pragmatic strengthening: It is liable to be understood more specifically than the grammar dictates. More...

By David Yaffe. We’ve been hearing these stories for years. Humanities majors are declining. Tenure-track jobs are dwindling. No one cares about books by English professors anymore, at least not this year. The Chronicle has run many articles on this, and Thursday’s New York Times offers a reprise. More...

By Nick DeSantis. A report released on Friday by the American Educational Research Association offers recommendations for reassessing faculty evaluations at a time when colleges have faced serious financial pressures and increased scrutiny about the quality of teaching and learning. The report, “Rethinking Faculty Evaluation,” lays out recommendations in the assessment of three areas: teaching, research, and how faculty members communicate the results of their scholarship with policy makers and the public. More...

By Nick DeSantis. The U.S. Department of Education has posted online a series of proposals submitted by negotiators who are seeking to shape its revised “gainful employment” rule, ahead of a negotiating panel’s second formal gathering, set to take place this month. A federal judge last year struck down the department’s previous version of the controversial rule after the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, the main trade group representing for-profit colleges, challenged the regulation in court. In August the department released draft language for a new version of the rule, which would penalize career-oriented programs whose graduates struggle to repay their student loans, as defined by two benchmarks—a debt-to-income ratio and a debt-to-discretionary-income ratio. More...