The Sorkin-is-a-Terrible-Journalist Affair
As universities are under attack by activist boards and unfriendly legislatures, as they face increasing political pressures to align their teaching and research with the agendas of conservative politicians, and as even Presidents of flagship systems in ostensibly liberal states call for “viewpoint neutrality”, Andrew Ross Sorkin and his colleagues at the New York Times […]
The Problem of (Management) Knowledge in Higher Education
The problem of (management) knowledge in higher education is distressingly complicated but, like most complicated things, is one that requires urgent attention. How should we run universities? How should we plan their academic programs? Reward efforts of their staff and faculty? Work with organized labor? Anticipate catastrophes? Plan the design and deployment of information systems? […]
Science, Interrupted*
If there is a lesson to learn from the whirlwind of our times, it must be that the world we’ve built, the one we assume provides sturdy grounds to our steps and thoughts, is but a sandcastle surrounded by waves. Fragility envelops us, sand disguised as concrete, our heartfelt certainty of a better future rapidly […]
Austere Thoughts
Apologies for the quick post. Types in between meetings… A key strategy in the discursive array known as neoliberalism is individualizing complex, collective social problems to forestall actual solutions. “If you are poor, it must be because you don’t work hard enough”. “If you are stressed, it must be because you lack mindfulness”. “If you […]
For a General Strike
As we go into the fourth week of a systemwide strike of academic workers at the University of California, a solution to this crisis seems increasingly unlikely. While postdoctoral workers have reached a tentative agreement on a revised contract which provides for more stability and higher levels of compensation, students, the union, and the University […]
Una ética neoliberal
Me llegó hoy un hilo interesante. En él, Violeta Vázquez-Rojas, conocida columnista y profesora de El Colegio de México, y Nicolás Medina Mora, editor de Nexos, discutieron una reconfiguración importante del discurso obradorista contemporáneo. Ante críticas de que López Obrador ha controlado la narrativa sin ofrecer nada sustantivo, Vázquez-Rojas nos presenta otra interpretación. Más allá […]
On the strike
On November 14, 2022, the United Automobile Workers union, representing more than 48,000 graduate teaching and research assistants, graders, readers, and postdoctoral workers at the University of California, started what Dissent Magazine calls the “largest strike in the history of American higher education”. Supported by an overwhelming vote for a strike authorization—voted for by over […]
Downward Academia, or Why We All Deserve to be Economists
In my last post, I tried to make sense of what might account for a recent discussion in social media about payment for work in contemporary academia. There, I focused on the way some forms of payment for work are coupled to specific politics of visibility that, because of their inherent focus on individuals and […]
Honor to Those Who Labor: on Honoraria and the Politics of Prestige in Academia
The politics of remuneration are always fundamentally messy. Jake Rosenfeld reminds us as much in his You’re Paid What You’re Worth. The payment for our labor reflects not some objective evaluation of our individual performance (though many seem to think so), but structures of power, inertia, and mimesis that shape employment and society. Discussions about […]
Bad science, computational imperialism, and the economy of attention
Here we are, yet again, discussing a paper that, through computational means, resurrects painful ghosts from the past. Here we are, yet again, discussing the myriad problems of design, inference, and logic behind Michal Kosinski’s work. Here we are, yet again, trying to painstakingly explain why physiognomy is an intellectual dead end, even when powered […]
Fuck the bees
For almost 300 years, a meticulously tended grass lawn stood imperviously, sloping gently from the gothic spires of King’s College Chapel toward the normally peaceful waters of the Cam. Older than even the oldest modern republic, older than industrial capitalism itself, this particular institution has finally come to an end. The lawn disappeared not because […]
Advice for the year of the plague
Sorry. I am truly very, very sorry. You are hitting the job market or beginning your academic career during one of the most uncertain times for higher education. Around you, talks of freezes, furloughs, closures, and cuts mount, magnifying the anxieties of what would ‘normally’ be a grueling process. You rightfully feel precarious, along with […]