Rigor mortician on dissertation committees
The Panda’s Thumb evolution blog reports an object lesson in dissertation duplicity with an aborted thesis defense of Bryan Leonard’s “intelligent design” curriculum dissertation because, well, there was no evolutionary biologist or science education faculty on the committee! The money quote comes from the comment of Andrea Bottaro who wrote, A graduate student has the […]
Chairs and speech
Kudos to David French of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) for acknowledging today the gray areas involved in the speech of department chairs, who act both as faculty and as administrators. The immediate occasion is the controversy over Timothy Shortell, recently elected as chair of Brooklyn College’s sociology department…. In reality, the removal of departmental chairs based on their speech is a cover-your-rear maneuver to stem public embarrassment…. In essence, David French and Stanley Fish here are on the same side (which has got to be a first), arguing that one can lose an administrative job from one’s speech.
Educational Reform in Florida
Educational Reform in Florida: Diversity and Equity in Public Policy, a collection of essays edited by Kathy Borman and me, has been accepted for publication by SUNY Press. The collaborative work was supported for several years by the Spencer Foundation, and with sociologists and historians as the authors, it covers a broad range of perspectives […]
Accepting manuscripts
Now that I’ve been the editor at Education Policy Analysis Archives for six months, I’m starting to settle into the job. Some things are quick but don’t give too much joy. Easily and without guilt, I can reject manuscripts that are clearly inappropriate (stuff that might belong in a popular magazine or course papers that […]
What’s fair in love and academe
Noted by Erin O’Connor today is the first article in a Rocky Mountain News series this week on Ward Churchill. The reporters have been looking into the allegations that are now part of the internal research-misconduct investigation at Boulder. The allegations that are most troubling to an historian are the charges that Churchill plagiarized several […]