Friend of the blog and brilliant neurofeminist researcher Rebecca Jordan-Young asks people to visit this petition site in support of her distinguished colleagues Carol Vance and Kim Hopper. That bell tolling you hear, where if you don't bring in 80% of your salary in grants, you're fired even after 25+ years of superb work? It's for you too, soon enough.
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A terrible loss felt by many, many people. Notice is here, from Fordham University Press, where she was Editorial Director.
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The journal's webpage for submissions is here. The editorial board is just about as distinguished as it could get. Editors don't write a journal, but the prestige of this board ought to make this a good venue to have on one's cv.
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Discussion on FB of this post at Leiter Reports about rejection led me to remark:
I hesitate to say this, since I made it through the wars by dint of being married to the right person, but here goes. My wife likes to say "you can't take rejection personally; there are too many factors involved that have nothing to do with your qualifications. [Wait two beats.] In fact, you can't even take acceptance personally, for exactly the same reason."
Further reflections below the fold, taken from a talk on inclusivity in conference organizing (points which hold, mutatis mutandis, for hiring decisions) at the APA Eastern, 2013. (See also this post, on why we should change our frame away from "job market".)
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In a few months, my son will get the MMR vaccine. I count myself very fortunate to live in a place and time when this amazing protection against is made available for free, and I will of course have him vaccinated. When I had my oldest child vaccinated, nearly 10 years ago, there was (at least where I lived, Belgium) no vaccine debate. I was dimly aware there were some very religious people who refused vaccines, but they were so clearly an outgroup that people did not seriously consider them and their arguments. Not vaccinating didn't even seem like a live option to me. Now, fast-forward post-Wakefield UK…
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There's a worrying piece over at Inside Higher Ed quoting the president of "a mildly selective private nonprofit institution that is tuition-dependent" saying that the institution has begun to reject some applicants that it would previously have admitted because of worries about meeting outcomes targets in the ratings system proposed by President Obama in his Higher Education Plan last year. Not surprisingly, the effect of this shift has disproportionately affected applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds — and while this is only one case,* it seems to neatly exemplify what many have feared will be the effect of the proposals.
I've written before — and I plan to write more — about the effects of prestige races on the state of higher education in the U.S. Until now, these races have been fostered primarily by the proliferation of ranking systems (US News and World Report, etc.) as structuring elements of the enviornment in which institutions are operating. It is not difficult to link competition for prestige to the sorts of spending and other institutional policy decisions that have led to rising costs of attendence and increased institutional debt loads** — all of which has also created pressure on institutions that traditionally serve less advantaged populations to abandon or de-emphasize those missions. The Obama proposals, as the article shows, seem to have already added to that pressure without even having been put into effect.
*There are definitely reasons to think carefully about what type of institution is being disucssed here, which may not be typical of those doing the most to serve students from disadvantaged populations.
**See, for instance, this New York Times piece from 2012
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With all the stories in the news lately about bitcoins, and with our recent discussions of the role of central banks in creating money, I thought I would post two recent articles/blog posts that I think provide a good analysis of the present situation as well as some good proposals for what the future of electronic currency really ought to look like.
The first argues that bitcoins are mostly designed to solve problems that only exist in the minds of right-wing conspiracy theorists. And the second one outlines the real problems that a genuine electronic currency ought to solve–and how one could do it.
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From time to time, this blog has discussed the benefits (and the challenges) of open access journals; see, e.g., here, here, and here. New APPS has also discussed the temporary moratorium that Hypatia had to institute (now over) because of a large backlog of submissions. So, I am very pleased to see an announcement for a new open access feminist philosophy journal. (Keep your eye on Feminist Philosophers for future announcements).
Below the fold, the announcement from the editors:
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Interesting story in Time (of all places) about how the Obama campaign tech team rescued the broken healthcare website.
New APPS 