Category: Academia

According to Inside Higher Ed, a new report about the Virginia Tech shooter puts the blame on college lawyers: “Throughout our meetings and in every breakout session, we heard differing interpretations and confusion about legal restrictions on the ability to share information about a person who may be a threat to self or to others,”… Continue reading Lawyers Kill

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m a college basketball junkie. As far as I’m concerned, the NBA is just a giant methadone program to easy me into the summer, when there aren’t any sports worth watching on tv. I’m a big fan of NCAA basketball, but I’m starting to think about how I… Continue reading The NCAA vs. Free Speech

Inside Higher Ed reports on a new study of RateMyProfessors showing that the ratings correlate well with “official” evaluations: What if RateMyProfessors.com — the site that professors love to hate — is more accurate than they think? Or what if officially sanctioned student evaluations of faculty members — which many professors like to contrast with… Continue reading The Wisdom of Crowds of Frat Boys, Redux

Steinn links to a post by the “Incoherent Ponderer” that was pretty much guaranteed to raise my blood pressure. It’s an analysis of “Ph.D. Pedigree”, spinning off earlier arguments at Cosmic Variance and elsewhere in which the Ponderer argued that there’s a hiring bias in favor of “big name” Ph.D. programs. The analysis in this… Continue reading There Is Life After Fifty

Over at evolgen, RPM is indignant about being rated by students, citing some pig-ignorant comments from RateMyProfessors. Interestingly, someone brought this up to the Dean Dad a little while ago, and he had an interesting response: A reader wrote to ask a dean’s-eye perspective on ratemyprofessors.com. The short version: I consider it electronic gossip. The… Continue reading The Wisdom of Crowds of Frat Boys

There’s a nice article in Inside Higher Ed today by a faculty member suddenly working in admissions: Whole sections of the admissions and recruitment process might not even be part of the division of academic affairs, but part of an enrollment services division, staffed by people who are experts in marketing, admissions, financial aid and… Continue reading You Gotta Admit

Something old, something new, on the topic near and dear to every academic. The old is a post by Doug Natelson from a couple of weeks ago, giving advice on how to get tenure, as a response to the recent flurry of tenure discussions on science blogs. The new is an article by Lesboprof at… Continue reading How to Survive the Tenure Process

Matthew Yglesias has a couple of posts on opposition to the US News college rankings, the first noting the phenomenon, and the second pointing to Kevin Carey’s work on better ranking methods. The problem with this is, I think he sort of misses the point of the objections. Matt writes: All that said, the very… Continue reading The Problem of Rankings

I’m mired in lab grading at the moment, which is sufficiently irritating that I usually have to decamp to someplace with no Internet access, or else I spend the day blogrolling instead. Or, really, just hitting “Refresh” over and over on Bloglines, hoping that somebody in my RSS subscriptions has posted something new. A big… Continue reading Myths of Science Writing