Last December, Julie lamented the decline of Sociology as a discipline in an essay provocatively titled “RIP Sociology.” As Julie noted in her post, it seems that the discipline no longer had the vim and verve she remembers from her undergraduate and graduate days of only 10 or 20 years ago. She laments with Les Back the dominance of “the audit culture” in sociology which avoids big questions in favor of some arbitrary metric, and in particular refuses to ask students to wrestle with big problems, or engage the broader society with a sociological imagination.…
Category: Education
The Tattooed Professor Takes on the Big U and Wins
Kevin, The Tattooed Professor from the Harvard University of East Des Moines posted a quick rebuttal to Professor Mark Bauerlein’s New York Times op-ed complaining about the skills of students. Bauerlein teaches at elite Emory University in Atlanta, and Kevin’s rebuttal is worth reading. Bauerlein’s article, which is written without much broader context beyond the hallowed halls of Emory is not nearly as original as what hte tattooed professor wrote—Bauerlien’s article is mainly a “whatever happened to today’s youth” diatribe.…
The Three Gifts of Tenure
I will say it up front. Tenure is cool, and the opposite, “contingent” employment, really sucks. I was an adjunct for about two years in the 1990s, and I know from first hand experience that it sucked. Why?
Well there were a couple of reasons. First, was that I was constantly on the job market, since I did not know where my income was coming from the following semester. This is a condition that college teachers share with many workers in the modern economy, on the funny assumption that the more scared you are of catastrophe, the harder you will work.…