10 décembre 2015

By Bernard E. Harcourt. The invasiveness of today’s digital technology is breathtaking. We know that our network service providers, search engines, and social media monitor our every digital action to recommend products and fuel consumption. Google collects and mines our Gmails, attachments, contacts, and calendars. Twitter watches our activity on all the websites that carry its little icon. Facebook’s smartphone app collects information from all our other phone apps. More...

By Jonathan Holloway. I recently heard a joke about a fish. It’s been around for a while, but it was new to me: One day, two young fish were blissfully swimming along, enjoying their youth and the confidence that springs from the faith that one understands the world with perfect clarity. More...

In The Last Intellectuals (1987) Russell Jacoby argued that the iconic crop of midcentury public intellectuals — Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, Edmund Wilson — had given way to a younger generation of scholars devoted to highly specialized knowledge, the obscure jargon of narrow disciplines, and the bureaucratic demands of university careers. They were, in effect, a "missing generation" — and led to a diminished public discourse and a diminished culture at large. More...

By Andrew Rudalevige. In the 1980s and ’90s, the political-science subfield of presidential studies devoted itself to holding conferences decrying the state of presidential studies. I attended a late iteration, held at Columbia University in 1996. A graduate student at the time, I was an unarmed observer of the waning skirmishes in the methods wars. More...

By John Herron. American patriots aren’t what they used to be. Thomas Jefferson’s position on slavery was as complicated as it was unfortunate. George Washington, too, was tainted by slavery, but revelations about his unrepentant elitism have done little to enhance his reputation. For all of Benjamin Franklin’s contributions to the republic, he was also flawed. He loved his wife, but had you been his neighbor in Philadelphia he probably would have loved your wife as well. Only Abraham Lincoln remains. More...

By Vimal Patel. Like a sports coach, Dwight A. McBride studies his "win-loss data." As the dean of Northwestern University’s graduate school, he closely tracks his wins, when a graduate student with competing offers chooses his institution, and his losses, when that student goes somewhere else. More...

By Lee Gardner. Earning a Ph.D. in a STEM field is meant to be challenging, but data has shown it can be especially so for minority students. While universities have had some success in diversifying their STEM graduate ranks in recent years, completion rates for Ph.D. candidates who are African-American, Latino, Native American, or Alaska Native have lagged behind those of their white, Asian-American, and foreign counterparts. More...

By Audrey Williams June. Postdoctoral researchers in the United States are often overworked, poorly paid, and stuck in jobs that don’t advance their careers. And efforts to improve the system have progressed slowly, in part because academics who supervise postdocs have little incentive to push for change. More...