Month: June 2024

Grading War Letters to Home, Winter 2014 (Day Four)

These are the letters from the second day of the 2014 Grading War.  If you landed here by accident and don’t know what you’re reading, click here for the backstory. Day Four, 11:22am Dear Charles,  I post this report on my station during a brief tho welcome respite. Forgive my wretched penmanship. I write quickly &…

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Grading War Letters to Home, Winter 2014 (Day Two)

These are the letters from the second day of the 2014 Grading War.  If you landed here by accident and don’t know what you’re reading, click here for the backstory. Day Two, 3:05am My Dearest Leigh, You cannot imagine my joy upon receiving your letter! I worked ceaselessly to fend off any and all of…

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Grading War Letters to Home, Winter 2014 (Day Three)

These are the letters from the second day of the 2014 Grading War.  If you landed here by accident and don’t know what you’re reading, click here for the backstory. Day Three, 9:33am My Dear Friend Charles,  Your letter from yesterday was rec’d in due time, and would have been answered ere now, but for the…

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Grading War Letters To Home, Winter 2014 (The Unabridged Collection)

My good friend and colleague Charles McKinney and I are continuing our #GradingWarLetterstoHome correspondence this term.  If you’re unfamiliar with the backstory of how this hilariously ridiculous endeavor got started, I refer you to the archive of last year’s correspondences here, which also explains the origin and style of these letters. To save you a click…

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Grading War Letters to Home, Winter 2014 (Day One)

These are the letters from the first day of the 2014 Grading War.  If you landed here by accident and don’t know what you’re reading, click here for the backstory. Day One, 12:40am My Dear Leigh, It has been far too long since I’ve written to you. For this transgression, I can only hope you can…

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Waiting for Ferguson

We continue awaiting the decision of a grand jury on whether or not to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer, who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, exactly 15 weeks ago today on a suburban street in Ferguson, Missouri. News reporters from across the globe have been camped out in Ferguson for…

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What Public Philosophy LOOKS Like

A pen (or keyboard) has, for millennia, been both the preferred and most essential tool of a philosopher, but I consider my camera to be a very close second as a 21stC philosopher.  Since completing the American Values Project in 2012, I’ve come to understand my camera as another weapon in the struggle against ignorance and,…

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Witch-Hunting in the Digital Age

Much to my own embarrassment, I’ve neglected to post here on the Steven Salaita controversy thus far, an affair with far-reaching implications not only for how we determine what constitutes both the civic and academic limits to the “right to free speech,” but also for a number of hiring-and-firing practices that are customary within the Academy but…

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Normalizing Civility, Policing Critique, Enforcing Silence and Misunderstanding Collegiality

How we ought to understand the terms “civility” and “collegiality” and to what extent they can be enforced as professional norms are dominating discussions in academic journalism and the academic blogosphere right now.  (So much so, in fact, that it’s practically impossible for me to select among the literally hundreds of recent articles/posts and provide…

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Archive of The Meltdown [Now Closed]

If the current results of Brian Leiter’s poll (which asks whether or not he should continue producing the Philosophical Gourmet Report) are any indication– it’s 1709 to 1118 in favor of “No” votes as I write this– and if Leiter intends to take those poll results as some sort of mandate, then Philosophy may very well…

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