publishedmedium:the chronicle of higher education

  • Academic Conference Panels Are Boring - The Chronicle of Higher Education

    Merci Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary d’avoir signalé cet opus, on s’identifie assez bien :)

    https://www.chronicle.com/article/Academic-Conference-Panels-Are/241970

    By Randy Laist December 05, 2017

    It’s conference season, and that means we will soon be suffering together in some drab meeting room. The minutes will tick by as an earnest scholar reads — word for excruciating word — a jargon-filled essay advancing an indecipherable thesis about an esoteric subject that no one in the audience knows anything about.

    We’ve all been there. Maybe you’ve even been that earnest speaker. I know I have.

    For more than a dozen years, I’ve participated in conference panels all over the world, and I’ve had stimulating, thought-provoking, and engaging experiences — just far, far too few of them. Rather than inspiration, what I remember most from those sessions is trying to calculate — based on the number of pages the speaker was holding at the lectern — how much longer the droning would continue.

    #communication

  • Contingent No More

    Academia is in the midst of an acute, unsustainable crisis. For those working in the higher-education industry, and increasingly for those outside of it, it has become impossible to ignore.

    New generations of faculty and students crushed by unprecedented levels of debt; the increased precariousness of the academic labor force; the systematic devaluation of academic labor itself; the corporate-style structuring of higher education—something, somehow is going to give.

    In spite of the cold facts—that “contingent faculty” make up more than 70 percent of the academic labor force, that the gap between doctorates awarded and jobs available is wider than ever, that the overwhelming majority of academic workers live in a state of economic insecurity—we remain individually hypnotized by the poisonous conviction that hard work is all we need, that the “best” people in the best programs produce the best work, etc.

    The neoliberalization of higher education is every academic’s problem. This is the reality in which we are all participating, even those of us at “top” programs, even those of us who have reached the promised land of tenure. Not surprisingly, many at the top are mostly fine with it. But their eager complicity makes it all the more incumbent on the rest of us to recognize how deeply the current system skews all relevant outcomes—from the accrual of professional prestige to basic salary-and-benefit protections—in the favor of the already privileged.

    https://thebaffler.com/the-poverty-of-theory/contingent-no-more

    #université #crise #académie #néolibéralisme #néo-libéralisme #précarité #précarisation #travail #mythe #méritocratie #hiérarchie

    Avec une belle et longue #bibliographie :

    Resources for Resistance (an introductory bibliography) :

    Craig Lambert, Harvard Magazine, “The ‘Wild West’ of Academic Publishing”

    The Conversation, Articles on Academic Journal Debate

    Hugh Gusterson, The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Want to Change Academic Publishing? Just Say No“

    Michael White, Pacific Standard, “How to Change the Centuries-Old Model of Academic Publishing”

    Jonathan Gray, The Guardian, “It’s Time to Stand Up to Greedy Academic Publishers”

    Jane C. Hu, The Atlantic, “Academics Want You to Read Their Work for Free”

    Modern Languages Association, “The Future of Scholarly Publishing” (2002 Report)

    American Council of Learned Societies, “Crises and Opportunities: The Futures of Scholarly Publishing” (2003 Report)

    Christover J. Broadhurst and Georgianna L. Martin (Eds.), “Radical Academia”? Understanding the Climate for Campus Activists

    The Sociological Imagination, Radical Education Projects

    Robin D.G. Kelley, Boston Review, “Black Study, Black Struggle”

    Simon Batterbury, The Winnower, “Who Are the Radical Academics Today?“

    Gwendolyn Beetham, Feministing, “The Academic Feminist: Summer at the Archives with Chicana Por Mi Raza (An Interview with Maria Cotera)”

    The SIGJ2 Writing Collective, Antipode, “What Can We Do? The Challenge of Being New Academics in Neoliberal Universities”

    Culum Canally, Antipode, “Timidity and the ‘Radical’ Academic Mind: A Response to the SIGJ2 Writing Collective”

    Yasmin Nair, Current Affairs, “The Dangerous Academic Is an Extinct Species“

    Cary Nelson, American Association of University Professors, “A Faculty Agenda for Hard Times”

    Jennifer Ruth, Remaking the University, “When Tenure-Track Faculty Take On the Problem of Adjunctification“

    Thomas Duke, The Undercurrent, “The Cause of the Adjunct Crisis: How a Research Focus is Destroying Higher Education”

    Debra Leigh Scott, Adjunct Nation, “How American Universities Have Destroyed Scholarship in the U.S.“

    Mary Elizabeth Luka, Alison Harvey, Mél Hogan, Tamara Shepherd, Andrea Zeffiro, Studies in Social Justice, “Scholarship as Cultural Production in the Neoliberal University: Working Within and Against ‘Deliverables’”

    Alison Mountz, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu, Risa Whitson, Roberta Hawkins, Trina Hamilton, Winifred Curran, ACME, “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University”

    Sarah Banet-Weiser, Alexandra Juhasz, International Journal of Communications, “Feminist Labor in Media Studies/Communication”

    Heather Fraser and Nik Taylor, Neoliberalization, Universities, and the Public Intellectual

    Kevin Birmingham, The Chronicle of Higher Education, “‘The Great Shame of Our Profession’”

    Mac Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation

    Shannon Ikebe and Alexandra Holmstrom-Smith, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, “Union Democracy, Student Labor, and the Fight for Public Education”

    Anonymous, Inside Higher Ed, “Treadmill to Oblivion”

    Lucia Lorenzi, thoughts on mediocrity

    Miya Tokumitsu, Jacobin, “In the Name of Love”

    Sarah Kendzior, Vitae, “The Adjunct Crisis Is Everyone’s Problem”

    Hamilton Nolan, Gawker, “The Horrifying Reality of the Academic Job Market”

    Denise Cummins, PBS, “Why the Backlash against Adjuncts Is an Indictment of the Tenure System”

    Christopher Newfield, American Association of University Professors, “Avoiding the Coming Higher Ed Wars”

    Henry A. Giroux, Truthout, “Angela Davis, Freedom and the Politics of Higher Education”

    Charles R. Hale (Ed.), Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship

    Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Social Text, “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses”

    Ji-Young Um, #alt-academy, “On Being a Failed Professor: Lessons from the Margins and the Undercommons”

    Undercommoning Collective, ROAR, “Undercommoning within, against, and beyond the University-as-Such”

    Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, Is This What Democracy Looks Like?, “Not Your Academy: Occupation and the Future of Student Struggles“

    Trish Kahle and Michael Billeaux, Jacobin, “Resisting the Corporate University”

    Levi Gahman, ROAR, “Dismantling Neoliberal Education: A Lesson from the Zapatistas“

    #résistance

  • Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0 | Scholz | First Monday
    http://firstmonday.org/article/view/2138/1945

    This essay debunks the myths of the Web 2.0 brand and argues that the popularized phrase limits public media discourse and the imagination of a future World Wide Web.
    Contents

    Introduction
    The Shifting Definitions of Web 2.0
    The New Newness of Technologies
    Wikis and User–submitted Content
    Collective Intelligence, Voice, and Conversation
    Social Networking Sites, RSS, CSS, and Blogging
    Podcasting and Folksonomies
    The Web 2.0 Ideology, the Power of Naming, and the Imagination of the Future of the Web

    Trebor Scholz
    https://re-publica.com/en/member/6610
    Associate Professor of Culture and Media
    The New School

    Trebor Scholz is a scholar-activist and Associate Professor for Culture & Media at The New School in New York City.

    His book Uber-Worked and Underpaid. How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy (Polity, 2016) develops an analysis of the challenges posed by digital labor and introduces the concept of platform cooperativism as a way of joining the peer-to-peer and co-op movements with online labor markets while insisting on communal ownership and democratic governance.

    His edited volumes include Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory (Routledge, 2013), and Ours to Hack and to Own: Platform Cooperativism. A New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet (with Nathan Schneider, O/R, 2016).

    In 2009, Scholz started to convene the influential digital labor conferences at The New School. Today, he frequently presents on the future of work, solidarity, and the Internet to media scholars, lawyers, activists, designers, developers, union leaders, and policymakers worldwide. His articles and ideas have appeared in The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Le Monde, and The Washington Post.

    Birds of a Feather
    Conclusion❞

    #internet #web2.0 #travail #activisme

  • The Believers - The Chronicle of Higher Education
    http://chronicle.com/article/The-Believers/190147

    “Do you have an Android phone?” Hinton replies.
    “Yes.”
    "The speech recognition is pretty good, isn’t it?"

    gros papier sur la #recherche #informatique en #intelligence_artificielle et précisément sur le champ du #deep_learning (#machine_learning #réseaux_de_neurones) qu’on voit partout en ce moment.

    Ca parle aussi de #silicon_army :)

  • Why Technology Will Never Fix Education - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education
    http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Technology-Will-Never-Fix/230185

    Over time, I came to think of this as technology’s Law of Amplification: While technology helps education where it’s already doing well, technology does little for mediocre educational systems; and in dysfunctional schools, it can cause outright harm.

  • The Slow Death of the University - The Chronicle of Higher Education
    http://m.chronicle.com/article/The-Slow-Death-of-the/228991/?key=Smt2IgNgb3oWZHlqZDdCNDhROiY8MU4hMHAeYnonblxSEw%3D%3D%3D%3D

    A few years ago, I was being shown around a large, very technologically advanced university in Asia by its proud president. As befitted so eminent a personage, he was flanked by two burly young minders in black suits and shades, who for all I knew were carrying Kalashnikovs under their jackets. Having waxed lyrical about his gleaming new business school and state-of-the-art institute for management studies, the president paused to permit me a few words of fulsome praise. I remarked instead that there seemed to be no critical studies of any kind on his campus. He looked at me bemusedly, as though I had asked him how many Ph.D.’s in pole dancing they awarded each year, and replied rather stiffly “Your comment will be noted.” He then took a small piece of cutting-edge technology out of his pocket, flicked it open and spoke a few curt words of Korean into it, probably “Kill him.” A limousine the length of a cricket pitch then arrived, into which the president was bundled by his minders and swept away. I watched his car disappear from view, wondering when his order for my execution was to be implemented.

  • In Their Silence, Israeli Academics Collude With #Occupation - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
    http://chronicle.com/article/In-Their-Silence-Israeli/146815

    Most academics around the world know very little about the fact that since the early 2000s, the Israeli government has prohibited Palestinian residents of Gaza from studying in the occupied West Bank—despite the fact that many programs, including preparation for vital medical and paramedical professions, are simply unavailable in the Gaza Strip. They are unaware how the Israeli military continues to obstruct academic studies in the occupied territories. In late January, for example, soldiers entered the Al-Quds University campus in Arab Jerusalem, breaking doors and terrifying students and professors.

    #Israël #Palestine

  • Women as Academic Authors, 1665-2010 - Special Reports - The Chronicle of Higher Education
    http://chronicle.com/article/Woman-as-Academic-Authors/135192

    Women’s presence in higher education has increased, but as authors of scholarly papers—keys to career success—their publishing patterns differ from those of men. Explore nearly 1,800 fields and subfields, across four centuries, to see which areas have the most female authors and which have the fewest,

    #science #recherche #femmes #inégalités #genre #données #visualisation via @karenbastien

  • [Neurosciences et immortalité] Pour Kenneth Hayworth, dans 100 ans on pourra transférer un cerveau sur un support informatique (et le gars entend se suicider le temps venu pour qu’on stocke son cerveau et ses neurones) :

    The Strange Neuroscience of Immortality (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
    http://chronicle.com/article/The-Strange-Neuroscience-of/132819

    « Kenneth Hayworth wants to plastinate his brain and have it uploaded to a computer to achieve an immortal consciousness. Is he brilliant? Is he crazy? Is he both? »

    #Neurosciences #Technologie #Immortalité

  • Lecturer’s Arrest in the Emirates Stirs Debate Over Academic Freedom in the Middle East - Global - The Chronicle of Higher Education
    http://chronicle.com/article/Lecturers-Arrest-in-the/127190

    The recent detention of a Sorbonne lecturer in the United Arab Emirates has rekindled the debate over the nature of academic freedom at Western institutions in the Persian Gulf region and the political impact those institutions, especially the high-profile new campus of New York University in Abu Dhabi, will have.

    The arrest of Nasser bin Ghaith, a lecturer at the Abu Dhabi branch of the University of Paris IV (Paris-Sorbonne) who has participated in the Doha Debates, a respected regional political forum, leaves observers asking what freedoms the academics working at new Western branch campuses in the emirates will enjoy. “Are professors only protected in the 90 minutes when they are giving seminars, and after that they are fair game?” asks Samer Muscati, a researcher on the United Arab Emirates for Human Rights Watch.

    [...]

    The Sorbonne’s Web sites are silent about the arrest, and e-mail messages from The Chronicle to communication offices at the Paris and the Abu Dhabi campuses of the Sorbonne were not answered.

  • Le récit assez édifiant d’un écrivain dont les clients sont des étudiants lui demandant de rédiger divers mémoires, rapports ou recherches dans différentes disciplines. Avec en creux une critique assez radicale du système d’évaluation et de notation aux États-Unis, mais c’est sans doute à peu près la même chose en France.

    The Shadow Scholar - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
    http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329

    I’ve written toward a master’s degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I’ve worked on bachelor’s degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I’ve written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I’ve attended three dozen online universities. I’ve completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.

    You’ve never heard of me, but there’s a good chance that you’ve read some of my work. I’m a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists.

    I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I’ve worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic year, I am working on upward of 20 assignments.

    #éducation #université #triche #ghostwriter