By Ben Yagoda. In a press conference a couple of days after the 2014 Super Bowl, the Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman, who had made rather obnoxiously boastful comments after the game, was asked if he was bothered by being repeatedly referred to as a “thug.” More...
By Anne Curzan. From The Scottish Pulpit, 1838, courtesy of Google Books:
“For should He, by whom kings reign and princes decree justice, withdraw that secret influence by which he directs the thoughts of men to the accomplishment of his own objects; … should he surrender the guidance of our concerns solely to the exercise of mere human talents, at the expense of the glory due to God, even yet, without the imposition of famine, or pestilence, or sword — those more immediate executioners of divine judgments — how fearful may be the result if we are left to our own devices!” More...
By Anne Curzan. The query took me by surprise. A few weeks ago an editor who was reviewing a piece I had submitted (for a publication other than this one) wrote:
You start one paragraph: “There’s good reason we associate. … ” It caught my eye — and I figured I better check! It’s such a subtle little twist, i.e., “There’s good logic to support this idea. … ” vs. “There is a specific reason we think this way. … ” which would require one to insert the “a.” Which one were you going for?
I thought, I was going for “There’s good reason. … ”. More...
By Teri W. Odom. The ugly side of peer review was on full display last week when a scientific paper was rejected for reasons that smacked of sexism. Two female authors had submitted a paper to a journal that is part of the open-access PLOS family. More...
By David M. Perry. It’s fun to mock academic conferences. They are quite mockable, because academics are nerds. At our best, because we all know that we are nerds, we work hard but don’t take ourselves or our rituals too seriously.
And yet I was concerned when Christy Wampole, an assistant professor of French and Italian at Princeton, asked, in a widely shared essay in The New York Times, “What is the purpose of the conference?” Her purpose was to call for better behavior, promoting a manifesto of best practices (and they are good practices, over all). But I took the question seriously. More...
By Claire Potter. My sister bloggers Historiann (who has spent part of her sabbatical creating a snazzy new design) and Madwoman with a Laptop, now a fancy executive director, could tell you this farewell has been coming for a while. I’m hangin’ up my template.
It had to come someday. After 1,115 posts (with this one, 1,116), Tenured Radical is coming to an end. Why? you may ask. More...
By Brian Mathews. I’ve been reading Applied Ontology (Munn & Smith) and really connect with this idea:
“…goal of increasing our knowledge about the world, and improving the quality of the information we already have. Knowledge, when handled properly, is to a great extent cumulative. Once we have it, we can use it to secure a wider and deeper array of further knowledge, and also to correct the errors we make as we go along. In this way, knowledge contributes to its own expansion and refinement. But this is only possible if what we know is recorded in such a way that it can quickly and easily be retrieved, and understood, by those who need it.”
Do we have a professional responsibility to not only collect, describe, evaluate, store, preserve, and share information—but to also improve it? I was thinking about this when my friend Tara was telling me about her interlibrary loan (ILL) work. More...
By Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski. During the hectic middle decades of the 20th century, from the end of the Great Depression through the Second World War and into the 1950s, a small circle of intellectuals gathered weekly in and around the University of Oxford to drink, smoke, quip, cavil, read aloud their works in progress, and endure or enjoy with as much grace as they could muster the sometimes blistering critiques that followed. This erudite club included writers and painters, philologists and physicians, historians and theologians, soldiers and actors. They called themselves, with typical self-effacing humor, the Inklings. More...
By Eric Hoover. If your vice president for enrollment looks haggard these days, maybe it’s because the percentage of accepted applicants who enroll keeps going down, complicating those all-important revenue projections. Or maybe she’s scrambling to attract more transfer students to the campus. The best strategy for recruiting foreign students? Everyone’s trying to figure that out, too. More...
By Steve Kolowich. These days, one measure of a pop-culture phenomenon is how quickly it gets its own college course.
Last summer Rutgers University offered a course on Beyoncé, while Skidmore College held one on Miley Cyrus. A few years ago Rice University listed a course devoted to "the mythology, symbolism, and history of Batman." Professors elsewhere have pegged courses to "The Simpsons," "South Park," "The Wire," "Star Trek," and many other popular TV shows. More...
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