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    Category: Oh, FFS

    • Excellence, Schmexcellence Part IV*: an attempt to be clearer about the main problems with assessment.

      In comment #9 at this post, Susan makes a kind of canonical case I've heard from lots of assessment people. First, I should say that I agree with 95% of the intended answers to Susan's rhetorical questions. We should be much clearer about what we want our students to get out of their degrees, and…

    • Even Foucault couldn’t make this up (hat-tip Rod Dreher)

      Why do things like "professional development," "continuing education," "team-building," and (yes, this too) "assessment" always have to tend towards infantalizing the poor people subjected to them? It's one thing to bureaucratically humiliate people by making them waste huge gobs of time. But this business of making them engage in ritualistic idiotic performances (which always involve…

    • Lowlights of 2013: un-blurring the lines

      Exactly one year ago I finished off my blogging year with a post on gendered atrocities, focusing in particular on the Newtown shooting and the widely discussed gang rape in India. At that point, the hope was that these two events would at least not have been in vain, and that they would stir changes…

    • If I worked at The University of Kansas, this post might get me fired

      Why? Well, because this post is about the Kansas Regents' decision to pass a new social media policy, which states that: the chief executive officer of a state university has the authority to suspend, dismiss or terminate any faculty or staff member who makes improper use of social media. Improper use means making a communication…

    • My Dad went to LSU, and all I got was this lousy pee-cup

      A few days ago, while trying to open the interwebs thingy to allow me to start entering my grades, I was prevented from doing so by a pop-up menu that referenced LSU's Policy Statement 67. The text included unsubstantiated and highly dubious claims such as that most workplace problems are the result of drugs and alcohol…

    • How not to to engage with other humanists; Nathan Brown and the continental/continental divide

      When I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas in the late 80s there was the huge fad of philosophers making fun of professors in other departments who had appropriated philosophical thinking for their own projects.  Honestly, it's pretty easy work for people who spend their lives just studying philosophy to beat up on…

    • Orwell didn’t fully get this

      While reading this recent KCNA article about the execution of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un's uncle, I was really struck by just how transparently stupid the thing is from beginning to end. It never really tells you what the uncle did that was so bad, but just accuses him of broad classes of sin: The…

    • You know they laugh at us, don’t you?

      This is a classic in the admin bullshit arsenal, the old “here’s the strategic action document that will be implementized [oh, you think that’s an exaggeration of admin-speak? I see you haven’t gotten a “communiqué” — yes that’s the word they chose of their own free will– from the LSU admin] come hell or high…