Last week and this week, I’m participating in the annual seminar that reviews and (occasionally) amends the curriculum of the core humanities course-sequence at my college. Some of the work that we do is tedious and bureaucratic, but a lot of it includes really interesting sessions on pedagogy, core text discussions, interdisciplinarity and more general…
Read MoreJust a couple of quick recommendations for those of you keeping up with the current scandal over the so-called “torture memos.” I’ve been doing a lot of reading on this stuff over the course of the past year as a part of my research, and I plan to include both of these texts in my…
Read MoreI can’t remember the first time I read Vladimir Nabakov’s Lolita— it must have been more than 15 years ago now– but I can remember with absolute clarity how utterly besotted I was with it. If memory serves, I think the only other books that I’ve read straight through in one sitting were Les Misérables…
Read MoreI forgot to mention that Angela Davis visited my institution a couple of weekends ago and delivered the keynote address for the Women’s and Gender Studies Conference that we hosted. (Aside: I’m not generally inclined to be star-struck, but I definitely was a little around Dr. Davis. I was charged with taking care of her…
Read MoreAhhhh, Texas. Turns out their legislature is considering allowing students over 21 to carry concealed guns on campus. Supporters say that there’s good reason for this manifestly ridiculous idea, of course, citing the tragedy at Virginia Tech almost two years ago and, I suppose, the fact that there weren’t enough armed students to make that…
Read MoreThe image to the left is a postcard that someone sent to PostSecret, an online website that asks people to write their “secrets” on one side of a postcard and mail them in anonymously. (I’ve written about PostSecret before on this blog.) It is the brainchild of Frank Warren, who now travels all over the…
Read MoreFirst, a few caveats about this post, just for clarification: (1) By “cheating,” I mean academic cheating. Plagiarism, mostly. I don’t mean relationship cheating, or sports cheating, or cheating on your taxes. I do actually care about those… well, two out of three of them, anyway.(2) The title of this post is (obviously, I hope)…
Read MoreA friend of mine forwarded me the following video, which is apparently a part of some series sponsored by the website Rate My Professors in which professors are allowed to comment upon students’ remarks about them. The retorts are called “Professors Strike Back” and this is one from Peter Fettner, Professor of Intellectual Heritage at…
Read More… then it must be a duck. Beginning today, my Philosophy of Race class will be learning about the first theorists of eugenics, an early 20th C. pseudo-science that (in the words of one of its founders and leading proponents, Sir Francis Galton) studied “all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the…
Read MoreThe picture to the left there is from my dissertation defense party, which took place at a much-beloved dive bar in Philadelphia (Oscar’s Tavern) where I have imbibed almost equal amounts of libations and philosophical conversation. As a matter of fact, this setting (and settings very much like it) is about my favorite mise-en-scène for…
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