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Archive for the ‘Academia’ Category

How to Get Smart

There’s some evidence that thinking makes it so—not in the obvious sense that thinking makes you smarter, but in the sense that thinking you’re getting smarter actually makes you smarter. Positive thinking really does have power.
I hesitate to endorse this, because I’ve known plenty of people who thought they were smarter than they really [...]

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Wretchard (in his new home in Pajamas Media!) writes of the political correctness of academia, with some optimism that it is now around halfway through its life-cycle. Picking up on his theme that higher education functions primarily to sort students by IQ, a commenter remarks that the growth of higher education stems from Griggs [...]

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Inside Higher Education publishes figures on expenditures in higher education, confirming what those of us on the inside have known for a long time: the far-above-inflation increases in tuition over the past twenty years have not gone to faculty or anything else involving instruction.
Median Spending Per Full-time Enrolled Student, 2005, by Sector

Sector
Direct Instructional Costs
Other Educational [...]

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when it sounds as if it should be the other way around. “Worst professor ever”—well confirmed. What on earth is going on at Dartmouth? Consider her qualifications for a position at Dartmouth Medical School:
After obtaining a BA from Dartmouth College, I have an MS in Genetics from UC Davis and a PhD [...]

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Seminar Bingo!

How can one make those dull academic colloquies fun?  Brian Hollar has a suggestion.
I just wish he had come up with this at the beginning of the semester; I’ve had to go to an average of two a week.

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Tenure, the Movie?

Good luck with that. There’s plenty of drama to tenure decisions, but it plays out slowly—though I guess the months involved an writing an article and the months it takes to hear a journal’s decision can be glossed in an 80s-style montage with bouncy music in the background.

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