Have New Yorkers forgotten their manners?
What is it with academic-freedom news from the Big Apple recently, from the interruption of a speech by a Minuteman founder at Columbia to the cancellation of a speech by Tony Judt at the Polish Consulate? Is there something in the water? I can talk about this because my father was from Brooklyn (Flatbush, in fact) […]
On teaching as a perpetual activity
New Kid on the Hallway’s entry today on watching the (rebroadcast) Eyes on the Prize has me focusing on two thoughts: Wow. This really is evidence of how long the series has been unavailable to too many people. NK’s comments show how much education really is a matter of making sure that information and perspectives […]
ACTA discussions
So where would you have a serious discussion about the future of academe, where you’d talk about a thoughtful core curriculum across the country, because you think everyone has a right to the intellectual tools of a good liberal education? You know, the stuff that shouldn’t be the exclusive privilege of the elite? Harvard’s faculty […]
Statistical magic and record linkage
Highly recommended link on a way-cool statistical technique in record linkage: The Bristol Observatory, where Steven Banks and John Pandiani have developed probabilistic population estimation, using two data sets with just birthdates. It’s not really magic but relies on a classic puzzle in probability (and an elementary one to solve, apparently). Banks and Pandiani developed this technique […]
Narrators of academic and political life
By Sherman Dorn on October 9, 2006
To new scholars hired into academic jobs: Remember that your colleagues are unreliable narrators. That doesn’t mean that they are necessarily vicious, mean, backstabbing folks (and I hope you don’t run into those types, because they unfortunately exist). I mean that people to whom you look for advice on institutional morays have their own sets […]
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