Monthly Archives: February 2011

THATCamp Texas

CSID Fellow Andrew Torget (UNT-History) is coordinating an “unconference” at Rice University. This is part of a nationwide movement to bring together folks from across the humanities & info-tech. According to Wikipedia, an unconference is “a conference where the content … Continue reading

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Mark C. Taylor on the Kantian Architectonic of the University

By ‘the University’ let us understand the Modern university, for which, as the story goes, the plan was laid out in 1798 by Immanuel Kant, put into practice by Wilhelm von Humboldt with the founding of the University of Berlin … Continue reading

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Post-Enlightenment Science Policy or:

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Unhealthy Skepticism. In the context of the federal budget debacle the Republican party is moving aggressively against the environmental regulation of commercial activities by intramurally debating how to legislatively restrict, defund, or … Continue reading

Posted in Accountability, Climate Change, Economics & STEM Research, Future of the University, Interdisciplinarity, NASA, NOAA, NSF, STEM Policy, Sustainability, Risk Management, & Long-Term Security, TechnoScience & Technoscientism, US Science Agencies | 2 Comments

Peer review = criminal libel?

Karin N. Calvo-Goller, the author of The Trial Proceedings of the International Criminal Court, is suing the author of a negative review of her book, on the grounds that it “may cause harm to my professional reputation and academic promotion.” … Continue reading

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Who will lead the academic revolution?

Mark Taylor advocates the end of tenure. He makes this radical suggestion for a few reasons. He argues that tenure enables older and less productive professors to hang on to their jobs well past their prime, which gums up the … Continue reading

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Et tu, academe?

What I find interesting about conversations I’ve had with people outside of the academy about the financial crisis is the readiness to blame the people who took out mortgages in areas hit the hardest with foreclosures. The argument goes something … Continue reading

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Financial Drivers of the Crisis on Campus

Perhaps the greatest risk inherent in the crisis on campus is to behave as if there is no crisis at all.  And this is more common than we would like to think. Plunging public investment, the overproduction of PhD degrees, … Continue reading

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Taylor’s Crisis, continued

There is a lot in Taylor’s book to think about, but I find there’s one point that I’ve been ruminating on for the last week.  He suggests that, as a counterbalance to the disciplinary-focused, research-for-its-own-sake Departments, the University create another … Continue reading

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Is Everything Peachy, Kean?

Now that I’ve suckered in all you grammar police, you might also be interested in this little tidbit from today’s Chronicle of Higher Education. Kean University is requiring faculty members to fill out time cards. Click through to the earlier … Continue reading

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Tacit Decadence

In the Annals, the Roman historian Tacitus argued that Roman policy was culturally constrained by the ever increasing demand for luxury items amongst its citizens, ensuring that Rome was entirely dependent on its provinces for its continued existence.  Of course … Continue reading

Posted in Sustainability, Risk Management, & Long-Term Security, TechnoScience & Technoscientism | 1 Comment

Pell Grant cuts

According to the budget proposed by the Obama administration, Pell education grants could see some significant cuts, in particular an end to grants for summer school, and loans for graduate school would now accrue interest throughout the loan period.  For … Continue reading

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Ethics of prison education

A recent CHE article described some colleges (Bard, in particular) as offering college-level education to prison inmates. The first part of the article described benefits to the inmates, but then said this: The idea behind the consortium isn’t just to … Continue reading

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Drowning in Data?

I haven’t looked at the 10 (!) articles in Science yet, but it is hilarious to read the CHE summary article ‘Drowning in Data‘. It is not, as denizens of CSID would expect, an account of how we have too … Continue reading

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Drowning in Data

An article in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education summarizes a series of articles in Science, all of which describe the fact — and the consequences — of   too much focus on the production of new knowledge. This is the artwork from … Continue reading

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Taylor’s Crisis on Campus

Along with most of my colleagues here at the CSID, I’m re-reading Crisis on Campus in anticipation of Prof. Taylor’s upcoming visit. In the opening pages, he presented an anecdote in which a student told him about the difficulty she … Continue reading

Posted in Future of the University, Interdisciplinarity, Multidisciplinarity, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Almost a Century into the KRISIS…

…and we are still under the desperate impression that the right diagnosis will cure the deathly ill patient. Guess what: when something or someone has been in “critical condition” from a “chronic addiction” for a very long time, disregarding the … Continue reading

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The Librarian, the Professor, and the Internet

These days, it seems as if the internet and Google are co-extensive. Much like Xerox — which back in the old days used to be how we referred to all copies, as in “I need to Xerox my syllabus” — … Continue reading

Posted in Libraries | 2 Comments

Fish on the academy

Stanley Fish, in a new NYTs piece called “What Is Academic Work?”, makes an important point: there should be precincts where the parry and thrust of thinking is done separate from the political implications of that thinking. Amen to that. … Continue reading

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Intolerable Lunacy

There is a canard making the rounds that climate science has become too politicized. Unwittingly or not, this rhetoric functions as a Trojan horse leading to political disarray and policy inaction in the face of the extremely serious risks associated … Continue reading

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Economics needs a reality check

Despite the growing gulf between econometrics – GDP, unemployment statistics, and consumer/producer price indexes, among others – and what they actually intend to measure, these numerical abstractions are increasingly the determinants of our policy decisions, with the very real danger … Continue reading

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The Perfect Storm

When you don’t have enough to eat, nothing else matters.  Therefore food security is the most fundamental raison d’être of any socioeconomic system.  So this chart is a problem: Starting in 2007, food prices entered unprecedented territory. In 2008, food insecurity led to widespread … Continue reading

Posted in Climate Change, Economics & STEM Research, Future of the University, Interdisciplinarity, STEM Policy, TechnoScience & Technoscientism | 1 Comment

“He who pays the piper calls the tune”

The former quote is from a commenter on a recent opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Dr. Laura Essig, assistant professor of sociology at Middlebury College and frequent Chronicle columnist, laments the instances of donors to academic institutions … Continue reading

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Information Overload

Data is among the most potent weapons of the 21st century. Unprecedented amounts of raw information help the military determine what targets to hit and what to avoid. And drone-based sensors have given rise to a new class of wired … Continue reading

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Climate science and its discontents

Daniel Sarewitz has recently stirred commotion with an article in Slate that discusses the political affiliations of American scientists. Responding to a Gallup poll that points out a remarkable match between political ideology and belief that climate change is occurring, … Continue reading

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