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Category: Academia

Microcosmographia Academica

Many years ago – I think it was when I first got elected to student council – my grandfather gave me a copy of a 1908 satirical book on academic politics called the Microcosmographia Academica (available online here) by F. M. Cornford. Addressed to “the aspiring academic politician”, it is still very much worth a read today, especially if you’ve just been elected to Senate or have taken on some significant administrative duties. Not all of it ages well (bits

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October 7, 2016 No Comments

Authentic Academic Eyes

It’s a reasonably common occurrence for academics to diss non-academic professional staff.  “They’re taking over”.  “They’re not like us”.  “They’re ruining the university”.  Book-length whinges (not very good ones, mind) have been written about this. These whinges usually combine two distinct arguments.  The first has to do with the mere existence of some non-academic positions, who often act as the interface between the academic institution and the market (think research services, alumni/advancement, recruitment, marketing and – God forbid – branding). 

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October 4, 2016 3 Comments

Counting Sessionals

Much rejoicing last Thursday when Science Minister Kirsty Duncan announced that the federal government was re-instating the funding for the Universities and Colleges Academic Staff System (UCASS), which was last run in 2011.     But what caught most people’s attention was the coda to the announcement, which said that Statistics Canada was going to “test the feasibility” of expanding the survey to include “part-time and public college staff” (the “C” in UCASS stands for colleges in the Trinity College sense, not the

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September 19, 2016 No Comments

Unpleasantness at Brock

So, everybody is talking about the kerfuffle at Brock: yet another presidential hire gone wrong, though this time the slamming-on-the-brakes happened before the hire actually started working, which I suppose is progress. What actually happened?  At the moment, here’s what we know for sure:  Wendy Cukier, a former VP at Ryerson was offered the President’s job at Brock in December 2015 with a start date of September 1.  She was undergoing what seemed to be a normal transition, starting to

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September 7, 2016 2 Comments

PhDs in the Humanities

I had the good fortune earlier this week of speaking to the Future of the Humanities PhD conference at Carleton University. It was an interesting event, full of both faculty and students who are thinking about ways to reform a system takes students far too long to navigate. They asked me for my thoughts, so I gave them. Here’s a precis. One of the most intractable problems with the PhD (and not just in the humanities) is that it serves

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May 19, 2016 3 Comments
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