paulbailey.us

Bookmarks from August 16th through August 22nd 2010

“And then it’s time for the Cosmic Flip concept that my long lost friend Heriberto was fond of discussing : maybe the lack of importance makes it super important. I won’t delve into this serious filosophizing, but it was something to that effect. In any case, I think I’ve done my small part in describing my city. But in the end, the bastards with the money still own the bullhorn: they get to blurt out their inanities all over the place. I’ve been keeping watch. So finally, the point of this post. I’m going to show you a sampling of travel books/guide books to LA to see how they deal with our lil’ historic community known as the Eastside. How do you think we will fare?”

link: LA Eastside » Eastside 101: Off The Map!

Then head on over to read Anastasia, who writes about how crassly her administrators tell her how much they like exploiting her to save money. (I’ve commented over there on some of my own experiences with the tactlessness of t-track faculty who discuss money with adjuncts.) As a former adjunct, the lack of advance notice about courseloads, the fluctuating income, and the lack of benefits were hardships, but what made those financial hardships almost unbearable was the absolutely shitty way that administrators, HR, and t-track faculty members treated adjuncts as second-class citizens. One of my adjunct colleagues used to refer to such degrading and tactless treatment as “death by a thousand paper cuts.”

link: Terminal Degree: Adjuncting around the blogosphere

“I prefer the term “art.” I know, I know, all the pretentiousness alarm-bells are going off, but for me, to call something “art” is merely to request that your prospective audience pay careful attention to what you’ve made. Here’s another way of putting it: I’m not interested in competing with commercial culture for your attention. I’m going to assume that I’ve already got your attention, and so my goal is to hold on to it and to reward you for paying attention.”

link: Alt Classical + links « Endless Possibilities

“If we improvise with an instrument, tool, or idea that we know well, we have the solid technique for expressing ourselves. But the technique can get too solid — we can become so used to knowing how it should be done that we become distanced from the freshness of today’s situation. This is the danger that inheres in the very competence that we acquire in practice. Competence that loses a sense of its roots in the playful spirit becomes ensconced in rigid forms of professionalism.”–Stephen Nachmanovitch

link: Jazz: The Music of Unemployment: Death by competence

“Here’s what happens. Academics typically don’t get tenured until the age of 40. This means that from their years as graduate students and then assistant professors, from age 25 through 38 or 39, they have to toe the line. They have to do things in the accepted way that their elders and superiors require. They can’t be controversial and all the rest. So tenure is, in fact, the enemy of spontaneity, the enemy of intellectual freedom. We’ve seen this again and again. And even people who get tenure really don’t change. They keep on following the disciplinary mode they’ve been trained to follow. What bothers us, too, is that over 300,000 professors have it. That’s a tremendous number. What that means is these people never leave. There’s hardly any turnover in the senior ranks—not just at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford but at small colleges in Kentucky, everywhere. You go to a campus and over two thirds of the faculty have been there at least 25 years. They begin to stagnate. In many ways, they become infantilized, embroiled in ideological issues like faculty parking.”

link: What’s Wrong With the American University System – Culture – The Atlantic

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Related posts:

1. Bookmarks for August 17th through August 22nd [del.icio.us]
2. Bookmarks from August 2nd through August 8th 2010
3. Bookmarks for October 16th through October 22nd [del.icio.us]
4. Bookmarks for August 23rd through August 29th [del.icio.us]
5. Bookmarks for August 9th through August 17th [del.icio.us]

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 22nd, 2010 at 4:53 pm. It is filed under bookmarks and tagged with Adjunct, alt-classical, higher ed, los angeles, Travel Guides. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.