Bousquet v. Taylor on higher education

If you've read Mark C. Taylor's New York Times opinion piece on American higher education, End the University as We Know It, follow up with Marc Bousquet's persuasive reply, More Drivel From the New York Times.

Says Taylor:

Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist).

Says Bousquet:

In fact, there are plenty of teaching positions to absorb all of the "excess doctorates" out there. At least 70 percent of the faculty are nontenurable. In many fields, most of the faculty don’t hold a Ph.D. and aren’t studying for one. By changing their hiring patterns over the course of a few years New York or California — either one — alone could absorb most of the "excess" doctorates in many fields.

The problem isn’t an oversupply of qualified labor. It’s a restructuring of "demand" so that work that used to be done by people with doctorates is being done by persons with a master's or a B.A., or even by undergraduates.

70% of U.S. college faculty are indeed nontenurable. In 2007, tenured and tenure-track professors composed 31.2% of college teaching personnel.

I recommend Bousquet's How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York University Press, 2008) to anyone interested in American higher education.

A related post
NYT and higher ed

Trouble in Ithaca

In the news this morning:

Hollywood's Warner Bros. studio has hired Jonathan Liebesman to direct a movie inspired by Homer's epic Greek poem The Odyssey. . . .

Odysseus is about what happens when the king of Ithaca returns home after years of fighting the Trojan Wars and discovers his kingdom is occupied by an invading force, the entertainment industry trade newspaper [Variety] noted.

Wars? No, war. His kingdom? No, his oikos. An invading force? No, young aristocrats seeking to marry Penelope.

The article notes that Liebesman is the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006).

O, ye gods.

Gmail and Firefox

If you're having trouble getting Gmail to open in Firefox, try typing

https://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0

I found this solution in a post at the Gmail Labs Google Group. Thanks, dojibear.

Buy Indie Day

Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?

Friday, May 1 is Buy Indie Day, a day for buying a book or two or more from an independent bookstore. In the United States, you can search for such bookstores with the Indie Store Finder.

If you'd like to share news of what you've scored and where, stop by and leave a comment on Friday (I'll add a post for that). It will be fun to see the bookbuying activity of readers hither and yon, especially yon.

[Question courtesy of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi."]

Strunk and White and wit

Commenting on a previous post, a reader suggested that a sentence in The Elements of Style that some read as an obvious joke is in fact "a dunder-headed Strunken mistake." "You can't just declare that it's a joke," wrote this reader.

The Elements of Style has many touches of wit. Here, for example, is the passage that follows the precept "Do not overstate":

When you overstate, readers will be instantly on guard, and everything that has preceded your overstatement as well as everything that follows it will be suspect in their minds because they have lost confidence in your judgment or your poise. Overstatement is one of the common faults. A single overstatement, wherever or however it occurs, diminishes the whole, and a single carefree superlative has the power to destroy, for readers, the object of your enthusiasm.

Look at the language: instantly, everything, everything, single, wherever or however, single, destroy. Note too the conspiciously missing superlative: "one of the [most] common faults." I hereby declare that E.B. White (the passage is his) is joking.

And here is the passage that follows "Avoid the use of qualifiers":

Rather, very, little, pretty — these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words. The constant use of the adjective little (except to indicate size) is particularly debilitating; we should all try to do a little better, we should all be very watchful of this rule, for it is a rather important one, and we are pretty sure to violate it now and then.

One could take such passages as evidence of supreme cluelessness or as evidence of wit. Wit is the better choice, one that respects the intelligence of Strunk and White and their readers.

Related posts
Pullum on Strunk and White
Hardly (adverb) convincing (adjective)
More on Pullum, Strunk, White
The Elements of Style, one more time

Word of the day

From Anu Garg's A.Word.A.Day: maritorious, "Excessively fond of one's husband." The word is derived from the Latin maritus (married, husband).

Those who are excessively fond of their wives are uxorious. As A.Word.A.Day observes,

The word maritorious is rare, while uxorious is fairly well known. What does that say about the relative fondness of husbands and wives to each other?

A blue ribbon for free speech

I'm joining my blogging friend T. in placing a blue ribbon on my blog in support of journalist Roxana Saberi, now being held in Tehran's Evin Prison, and in support of all writers and students imprisoned for expressing their ideas. Today is Roxana Saberi's thirty-second birthday.

If you have an online presence, please join this rally in support of free expression by displaying a blue ribbon.

John Ashbery at 81

From a brief interview with John Ashbery:

Q. You are still writing poetry and last fall you had an exhibit of your collages at a Manhattan gallery. Could you please share some lessons of a long life?

A. I go back to Harvard and see all the same buildings and streets and rivers. It seems as though this was only a few months ago that I was there. I don't know that I have really accumulated any wisdom in my fourscore years. I feel as unprepared now as I was when I was a student. I guess I'm just an 80-year-old adolescent. Or 81.

John Ashbery's words to live by (Boston Globe)

Ashbery returns to Harvard later this week to receive the university's Arts Medal. He graduated from Harvard College in 1949.

A related post
John Ashbery's collages

Happy Anniversary

As my dad said on the phone, "Some people don't stay married fifty-five weeks."

Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad.

(Yes, fifty-five years.)

T for texting, T for Tennessee

At the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga:

Apparently, private text messages — not university-sponsored alerts — invited students to a party at the library, which turned into a riot, according to local news sources. About 1000 students congregated and tried to force their way into the building and jump off of it. Police arrived, and members of the crowd began throwing objects at the officers. Police responded by spraying mace in the air above the crowd, and several people were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. . . .

A university official said that some of the students believed this was “harmless fun” but forcing entry to a building or disturbing the peace, particularly when students inside were trying to study, was far from harmless.

Read all about it:

Text Messaging Gone Wild at U. of Tennessee at Chattanooga (Chronicle of Higher Education)

[Post title with apologies to the Singing Brakeman.]