Cover letter advice
How do you write a cover letter in applying for a full-time faculty job? This blog entry is a complement to my advice on crafting the curriculum vitae, and was originally a twitter thread in May 2021, responding to two colleagues from the University of North Carolina. Like a vitae, a cover letter is purpose-built, […]
Marginalized college radio: past, present, and future?
Not once but twice in the last century, major movements in radio policy marginalized a range of radio stations licensed to colleges and universities. In the 1920s, that marginalization was part of the disappearance of dozens of college radio stations. In the 1970s, college radio stations became divided into two broad segments: those who had […]
I look for new colleagues who will keep the job
This entry is a bit slice-of-academic-life and a bit perspective for doctoral students who want to be faculty at research universities. As a division director (and department chair at my last university), I have never directly hired tenure-track faculty but have always had significant advice for the deans I’ve reported to, and my experience leads […]
How to think clearly about that clever econometrics policy paper
A late August NBER working paper by Joshua Goodman, Oded Gurantz, and Jonathan Smith argues that if every high school student took common college admissions tests twice, that would shrink the income-relevant college enrollment gap by 20%. New York Times reporter Sahil Chinoy wrote up the story, and the headline repeated the eyebrow-raising import of the paper’s […]
Christina Sommers is not the typical target of attempts to suppress speech on campuses
This morning, New York Magazine columnist Jonathan Chait tried to address the question of political norms on the left in response to several academics and a few journalists who have pushed back against the idea that there is a free speech crisis on college campuses. The headlines of some of the pieces Chait is reponding to: People […]