By Kaitlin Mulhere. Two reports on outcomes for humanities majors could serve to reinforce two disparate beliefs about the field: one where they are seen as a viable path to a successful career, and another where they are seen as a track to a low income and few job prospects. Read more...
By Carl Straumsheim. Academic publishers on Friday notched a win in the ongoing legal debate about digital access to copyrighted works, as an appeals court rejected a broad ruling on how to determine fair use.
In a unanimous decision, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which covers Alabama, Georgia and Florida, guarantees Cambridge v. Patton has a long and litigious road ahead of it by reversing the lower court’s opinion and sending the case back for further deliberations. Read more...
By Colleen Flaherty. The liberal arts have long been subject to criticism and even ridicule from those who don’t see their immediate value; the debate over utilitarian versus broad education is ancient. But there’s something particularly pernicious about the current climate, it seems, with threats to funding models for such programs in some states, for example. Read more...
By Jeffrey Voccola. Every morning as I head to my office at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, I have to drive past two armored military vehicles aimed in my direction: an M60 tank and an M42 Duster anti-aircraft gun. The vehicles are on display in front of the National Guard Armory, which happens to sit beside my academic building, and the campus and the armory share an access road. While the armored vehicles may be an appropriate symbol for the armory, they create an unfortunate and unwelcoming entrance to campus. Read more...By David Armitage and Jo Guldi. If you’re consistently in bad meetings, it’s time to look in the mirror.No one would accept consistently terrible classes. No one would continually repeat research procedures that didn’t yield interesting data. But there’s this weird assumption that meetings are just inherently bad and unimprovable. Read more...
By Jason B. Jones. This week, Rice has hosted a fascinating conference on “Teaching in the University of Tomorrow,” which is trying to think about teaching, technology, and the changing higher ed landscape. You can find out more about the conference here or by viewing the conference’s active, boisterous hashtag, #delange9. Read more...By Jason B. Jones. I won’t spend the whole week recapitulating Rice’s De Lange conference on “Teaching in the University of Tomorrow” (see yesterday’s post on “Seeding Social Media”) but I did want to draw folks’ attention to one more thing: William Bowen’s talk on technology and changing American priorities related to higher education. Read more...By Jason B. Jones. This afternoon brings yet another set of Apple announcements–definitely new iPads, a specific release date for the new Mac operating system, and apparently retina displays for the iMac. And whenever Apple releases a product, other folks do also, with Google announcing the Nexus 9 that runs the new Android Lollipop OS. Read more...
By Lucy Ferriss. Pity the lowly adverb. Like the adenoids (I had mine removed, at age 4) or the appendix, it is regarded by rule-mongers as unnecessary, left over from a time when the body of language needed this now-useless organ to process niceties of language that we now handle by way of verbs. Or nouns. Or the effectively placed period. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. “The anti-pedant zealots,” said a recent Lingua Franca commenter, “have become tedious and repetitive, and one can’t help but feel that all the strawmen getting the stuffing beat out of them is an exercise akin to watching a terrier worry a squeaky toy.”
I’m the main anti-pedant zealot the commenter had in mind. More...
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