" All of those nuggets are familiar to the thousands of contract employees in academe who can share horror stories of doing their work with dignity and efficacy and yet losing their employment. You get told by esteemed colleagues to take this as a "kick in the pants," pack up your publication-laden CV and your sterling evaluation "numbers," and move forward. "

" Many people are drawn to academic life because they expect it will provide a refuge from the social demands of other careers: They believe one can be valued as a studious introvert, as many undergraduates are. But academe is a profession of opposites. Long periods of social isolation—research and writing—are punctuated by brief periods of intense social engagement: job interviews, teaching, conferences, and meetings. One reason that completion rates for graduate programs are so low—and unhappiness levels so high—is, I suspect, because students are not selected for the full range of aptitudes they will need to be successful in graduate school. And there are few if any supports in place for those students who struggle with the extremes of introversion and extroversion that academe demands. "

...

" There are countless social events and networking opportunities that introverts find exhausting. Many of those events are characterized by elaborate social rules governing behavior and the appropriate topics of conversation. Everywhere extroverts are working the room, making small talk, and laughing in clusters while the introverts are smiling weakly and struggling just to find one person with whom they can speak about their research. Usually, the introverts leave early, if they find the energy to come at all. Over time, introverted students face a huge relative disadvantage in the reach of their professional networks. "

...

" Then comes the struggle to secure an academic position. Publication is important, of course, but so is the ability to connect with strangers—sometimes in large numbers—under extreme stress (for example, the awareness during an interview that it may be the only one you ever get).

When there are so many job candidates with excellent written credentials, "fit" and personality take on a magnified importance. One could hardly devise a more brutal process for disadvantaging introverts than the two-day, on-campus interview—involving multiple high-stakes meetings with important strangers, a public lecture, and a teaching demonstration, all in an unfamiliar location with little or no time to recharge between events. "

" I’ve heard many stories of faculty colleagues who routinely spend 90+ hours a week doing work, and seeing spouses and family only for an hour or so a day at the dinner table before disappearing to grade or work in the lab until 2 AM. And these stories are not from people in R1 universities — quite often they’re working in small liberal arts colleges and regional universities. It seems not to depend on the size or type of the institution.

" Small liberal arts colleges can actually be some of the worst offenders in this. In some places, faculty quality gets implicitly tied to the degree to which one sacrifices freedom and time — faculty who volunteer to teach 16+ credits a semester and stay on campus doing review sessions until 11pm are seen as “more caring” than those faculty who don’t. And as I discovered last year during my job search, there’s a shocking mission creep among SLAC’s toward a more research-intensive focus among new faculty, with some positions advertising for people with strong research backgrounds in specialized technical areas with the expectation of conducting large-scale undergraduate research on top of a 4/4 teaching load. A colleague recently said to me that small liberal arts colleges can eat productive people alive, and I’m beginning to believe it. "

" It is extremely hard to get into journalism. Even before the recession and the jerky transition to online publishing made new staff reporter jobs harder to get than an NYPD press pass, J-schools were consistently churning out several times as many talented, energetic, hopelessly indebted young people than there were salaried positions at even the smallest papers. So many people want to make a living writing that we are encouraged to accept tiny salaries and terrible working conditions, and breaking into the industry often involves years of underpaid or unpaid interning – closing off the most prestigious jobs to all but a wealthy few. We are expected to be grateful for any opportunities we are thrown, and encouraged to see ourselves as future members of a social elite rather than workers with a living to make and a job to do. "

" But here is what they were whispering to me: "I am unhappy," "This is not what I want to do," "This is not where I want to live," "I wake up depressed," "I hate teaching," "My spouse lives 1,500 miles away," or "I have no health insurance." They often asked, "Am I trapped?" "

" Part of this personal reflection takes me to the consulting I’ve done with international organizations. There I’m involved in discussions of “governance” (better: “good governance”) or “appropriate management,” or “leadership.” These terms steer discussion away from “power” and “politics.” Understandably, international agencies are not meant to meddle in such internal matters, though of course, most observers recognize that agency projects and advice have political implications and affect the distribution of power.

" By the same token, terms used more frequently include “sound decision-making” or knowledge-based decisions, or of course “policy.” But don’t say “power” or “politics” much (unless perhaps, referring to those who oppose rational reforms you or the agency promotes). True, terms like “stakeholders” have entered the lexicon (ad nauseam). But don’t say “interest groups” (again unless meaning to deprecate opposition). Do say “the public interest.” The notion that higher education policy is fundamentally an arena—like other policy arenas-- in which power usually determines policy through political conflicts among governmental and private interest groups is often rather marginalized. Especially pernicious in effect is the frequent near equation of government with the public interest, or with the citizenry. "

" the MLA has devised a standard format that you should keep in mind. "

" Two academics who wrote a paper suggesting that it should logically be permissible to kill babies at birth who would have fitted the criteria for abortion during pregnancy have been subjected to death threats, according to the journal editor.

" Julian Savulescu, editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, published by the British Medical Journal group, said the online intimidation of two philosophers endangered free speech. "

Humanities "methods"? Also some courses on how to write coherent paragraphs, because, ironically, …

" Had the commission understood what human subjects research is under present definitions, it would know that the bulk of human subjects research conducted in the U.S. is not regulated. Nor should it be, if it only involves asking questions of adults. "

" I have noticed a growing trend that disturbs me and others devoted to rigorous research: Too many academics—veterans and neophytes alike—are producing scholarship that appears to have traded careful, methodical, fully developed intellectual work for quick and dirty publication. "

Supposed log of Anonymous IRC chat from #reporter. Note that biella (Gabriella Coleman) chats as a member of Anonymous, referring to herself and them as "us", and denigrates another Anon who asks pointed questions about Anonymous leadership.

Whether a professional association should take political stances is never simple. Beware of pundits who depict it so.

" other academics came forward to complain that Churchill had plagiarized some of his other work, and the university fired him for academic misconduct. "

Social scientists: not necessarily above exploiting the holy living fuck out of people.

Welcome to academia. ("Ha! Is funny cause it's true!")

The customer is always right! Wait, isn't that the very problem?

" The researchers, along with 26 others hired into new positions in the past five years, are the fruits of the university's continuing campaign to bring aboard grant-winning and commercially minded professors in fields selected because they align with the state's existing economic strengths, such as medical devices and computer gaming. "

" Over the course of informational interviewing, I finely honed a simple story about myself, which introduced my training, my knowledge base (avoiding terms that had been flagged by interviewees as “jargony”), and my research skills. "

" Brooks went on to say that being part of the secondary market is, paradoxically, seen as a disqualification to those seeking to advance to the tenure track. “Put bluntly, adjuncts and other 'precarious' faculty are 'tainted' by their involvement in the secondary labor market,” he said. “As time goes by, they (we) are considered to be 'damaged goods,' less and less worthy of consideration for the primary academic market.” "

" A defense of the humanities on the grounds that they enrich education is not sufficient to justify parity between the sciences and humanities. More than enrichment is involved when education is oriented around promoting a critical attitude toward the circumstances of our common life. We need to remember that the humanities provide crucial knowledge about our social nature, knowledge that would be eliminated in an extreme version of a STEM-dominated core curriculum. "

On adjunct teaching writing & literature to the indifferent & poorly-prepared

" The timing of Mr. Thompson’s request surely means that it is a response to my blog posting about the American Legislative Exchange Council, since I have never before been the subject of an Open Records request, and nothing in my prior professional life has ever attracted this kind of attention from the Republican Party. It doesn’t take a great leap of logic to infer that Mr. Thompson and his colleagues aren’t particularly eager to have a state university professor asking awkward questions about the dealings of state Republicans with the American Legislative Exchange Council. This open records request apparently seemed to Mr. Thompson to be a good way to discourage me from sticking my nose in places he doesn’t think it belongs. "

" The Wisconsin Republican Party apparently found Cronon's writing on the links between Walker's initiatives and ALEC unacceptable. In response they demanded--under Wisconsin's Open Records Law--copies of any of Cronon's University emails relating to a series of names and topics. "

“My student’s [sic] papers are making me dumber, so very stupid; by the minute. Please, make them, [sic] stop. They are infecting me with there [sic] huge and apparent stupidity, and I fear they will start to effect [sic] in my opinion [sic] the way I myself right [sic] papers.”

Relying on theory to understand reality can lead to a strange deliberate autism. The comment from homespon exquisitely sums up both the article and the linked academic paper:

" I'm puzzled as to why this is worthy of research. If you go where people are playing and ignore what the group wants, you're going to get asked to go away. It's what we all learned in kindergarten, isn't it?

" Online communities are usually self-selecting. If someone wants to kill a bunch of opponents, they are encouraged to find communities where people like to kill each other online. Here, the purposefully selected a group of players who wanted to chill and hang out together and acted like a jerk. And -- wow, people didn't like it.

" This is about as significant as finding out that if you join in a game of touch football and then keep tackling people, they might get mad! "

The list of social science academics who took Libya PR money gets better and better as you read.

"Stories exert a powerful influence on human thoughts and behavior. They consolidate memory, shape emotions, cue heuristics and biases in judgment, influence in-group/out-group distinctions, and may affect the fundamental contents of personal identity. It comes as no surprise that these influences make stories highly relevant to vexing security challenges such as radicalization, violent social mobilization, insurgency and terrorism, and conflict prevention and resolution. Therefore, understanding the role stories play in a security context is a matter of great import and some urgency,"

" Why did the AAA run amok, when all other involved scholarly institutions instead worked to document the phenomenal extent of Tierney’s falsehoods? ... But it also looks to me like the AAA went overboard because of problematic bias of the sort where political liberalism is mistaken for intellectualism. Once the Yanomamö were positioned as an oppressed minority (which they are) while Chagnon and Neel were positioned as evil right-wing Nazis (which they were not), it seemed clear who would count as a hero and who as a villain. "

" Despite those hardships, said Mr. Wilson in his talk, success stories are unfolding in several states, led by Texas, Arizona, Oregon and, most recently, New York. All, he said, have chosen to orient their university research operations to the needs of the semiconductor industry, winning their states thousands of jobs in the process. "

" Anyway, the $12/B figure is in print again. This time in a journal published by the American Economic Association. Never mind the only place the figure has ever appeared as original data is in the ever reliable AVN, and AVN’s source is (when asked by an enterprising Forbes reporter) “a pie chart.” "

" “If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” "

" I just wish she wouldn't sell it to the general public as though it were some radical new test that the "mammography mafia" don't want you to know about."

" Those enormous budget gaps, and the likely battles over where to slice spending without tax increases, put public colleges in those states at the greatest risk of steep cuts in financial support during the legislative sessions that will begin this month in many states. "

" There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things. The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes. "

"Bob, the professor business is even sleazier than the jewelry business. At least in the jewelry business we were honest about being fake. Plus, when I go to conferences, I've never seen such pretentiousness. These are the most precious people I've ever met."

" Academic labor has lost a lot of ground, and fast, in the last few decades. In 1970 roughly three-quarters of professors were on the tenure-track; now only 27 percent are, according to the American Federation of Teachers. "

RT @chronicle: "Contingent employment in academe is already twice what it is in any other industry, even retail."

An inevitable implication of Moore's Law. And of writing a PhD during the Great Recession.

" Through a literary agent, he approached The Chronicle wanting to tell the story of how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and to describe the extent of student cheating he has observed. "

Why academics make lousy activists, and vice versa.

Academics studying Tea Party activism make their colleagues look like hacks when they take sides.

" The letters that the four faculty members received telling them that they had been suspended immediately did not say why. But the letters referenced (by number) a section of California's penal code that bars people from "willfully disrupting the orderly operation of the campus." "

35 universities found Futurity: a press release distributor

"Elsevier, the world's largest publisher of primary scientific literature, created an entirely new, seemingly peer-reviewed journal after receiving payments from Merck. According to The Scientist, Merck paid an undisclosed amount of cash to Elsevier to launch the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, which largely contained content favorable to Merck's products - particularly Vioxx - but did not disclose the sponsorship."

"But there is a fundamental problem here that needs to be addressed. Look at this issue from the other side. A significant number of articles, including many published in small circulation periodicals, are never cited by anyone. Think, too, of the conferences papers that fail to attract meaningful audiences, the journals that have tiny circulations and very small readerships, and the fact that most academic books are published in press runs of under 1,000 copies, despite the growth in the number of academics and university and college libraries. Put bluntly, we are researching without having an impact, speaking without being heard and writing without being read."

" Mr. Churchill faced withering cross examination on Tuesday by the university’s lawyer, Patrick O’Rourke. Mr. O’Rourke said Mr. Churchill’s practice of ghostwriting essays for other scholars and then citing them to support his own theories on the persecution of American Indians was severely problematic. “The only evidence we’ve heard from anyone other than you about this scholarly practice, is from 20 people tenured at C.U., all of whom say this is wrong,” Mr. O’Rourke said." "

"It's hard to explain why the article isn't simply deleted; or, better, loudly labeled as a fake so that we can learn even from fakes."

"Unless you are independently wealthy or really well connected, don’t apply, he advised."

"The little things are just practice for when it really counts, arguing for two hours for $5 means that when they screw you for hundreds of dollars you are well prepared for the shit storm that lies ahead. Being a crafty consumer isn't something you can just flip on or off"

" I don’t care whether you want to sell something, including yourself: It’s your goddamned responsibility to pay attention to the people you’re talking with, interacting with, having conversations with. And adapt to them. Not “adapt your message”. Adapt your self. And I don’t mean “that’s a good strategy for your success!” I mean it’s your responsibility as a human being. Otherwise? You’re not listening. And if you’re not listening, not participating? You’re of no use."

"For every Galileo, Ignaz Semmelweis, Nicolaus Copernicus, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, etc., whose scientific ideas were either ignored, rejected, or vigorously attacked by the scientific community of his time and then later accepted, there are untold numbers of others whose ideas were either ignored or rejected initially and then were never accepted--and never will be accepted. Why? Because they were wrong! The reason the ideas of Galileo, Semmelweis, Copernicus, Darwin, Pasteur, et al, were ultimately accepted as correct by the scientific community is because they turned out to be correct!"

"What they found, in short, is that the worst team member is the best predictor of how any team performs. It doesn't seem to matter how great the best member is, or what the average member of the group is like. It all comes down to what your worst team member is like. The teams with the worst person performed the poorest. "

"The authors seem to have an unrealistic view about the role and prominence of competition in college. ... Increasing numbers of students are going to graduate school, and it is not uncommon for top programs to admit fewer than 10% of their applicants. Competition for plumb jobs is equally fierce, and the current economic downturn is only making matters worse."

" If it's acceptable to frame science in such a way that will convince granting agencies to fund that science, why is it not acceptable to frame science for a different audience, the public? Or are both not OK? And if both are not OK, then how does a scientist convince his fellow scientists and lay people controlling the purse strings at private foundations that his work is worthy of funding otherwise? "

" How is this any different from "framing" an argument for a mass audience or for the lay public? It's not, really, other than in degree and in how many constraints are placed on us by the media as opposed to scientific venues. "

"Of the 112 scientists who responded to the survey and interviews, 51 percent said they have since self-censored their grant proposals to remove "red flag" words, such as gay, lesbian, AIDS, needle-exchange or anal sex from their titles or abstracts. Nearly a quarter of respondents said they either modified their studies to seem less controversial or abandoned controversial grant proposals. Joanna Kempner, an assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers, said the study attempts to quantify the "chilling effect" of political or ideological controversy on scientists. "

"On Thursday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California proposed a midyear budget cut of $65.5 million for the University of California system — on top of the $48 million reduction already in the budget."

"In a recent commentary in the journal Nature, two Cambridge University researchers reported that about a dozen of their colleagues had admitted to regular use of prescription drugs like Adderall, a stimulant, and Provigil, which promotes wakefulness, to improve their academic performance."

"So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. "

Giles:"The companies started by bankrolling academics opposed to smoking restrictions,including economists who questioned the financial benefits of the restrictions & anthropologists who argued that smoking brings people together & so has social benefits"

"PRISP students study chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology, anthropology and foreign languages without their fellow classmates, professors, advisors, department chairs or presumably even research subjects knowing that they are working for the CIA"

"The executive board of the American Anthropology Association (AAA) has officially expressed "its disapproval of the [Human Terrain System] HTS program," a military effort that embeds social scientists in the military."