Was this academic study a waste of university dollars or beneficial in some way?

I have two professions. One of them -- a research academic specializing in language, discrimination and ideology -- has been stagnant for the last years. My PhD is in linguistics, and I taught for ten years at the University of Michigan. For the last eight years I have been writing fiction full time.   Which I still do, but just recently I agreed to revise a non-fiction book I wrote for Routledge ten years ago. It's called English with an Accent: Lanugage, Ideology and Discrimination in the U.S.

It's a well known book in academic circles and still the standard text in undergraduate courses on related topics. It is the pinnacle of my academic career. It has been called a landmark book. And it's very out of date.

I'm writing about critical language studies here because in my experience, even open-minded socially liberal people are under-informed about the less visible role language plays in maintaining the dominant ideology.

I'm also writing because revising English with an Accent, I have to solicit a lot of opinions from a lot of people. This was much more difficult when I was first writing the book eleven years ago. Now I can set things up on the internet and get a wider range of opinions and discussion.

And that's where the challenge lies.

I'd say this notion of a "Knowledge Economy" is a subversive elitist campaign translated to mean, "The American Dream now comes with an IQ Test, administered by us. Do you have your application fee?"

My field is academia and I have been involved in various groups and committees focused on the status of women in colleges and universities.  From these and my own experiences, I have developed a hypothesis of sorts that may explain the continued under-representation of women in my field:  a pipeline that selects for the very very best.  This phenomenon is in no way restricted to academia, however, or only to women. Rather I suspect this may well be true in a variety of organizational structures including government.  Follow me below for a fuller explanation...

With How the University Works, Marc Bousquet has written quite a book (book blog here) that deserves to be widely distributed not only in academia but to any organization involved in labor issues.

The University (capitalized as generic) may be the main topic but the background and consequences apply to general labor-management relations. It's a very dense book that weaves social theory, labor relations history and contemporary academic labor analysis. It should command one's attention and will give academic readers quite a few "wow, that's what's going on where I work" moments.

I cannot hope to do justice to such a substantial and important book but I want nevertheless to try to extract what I think are the central insights of Marc's analysis.

Dear Kossackistan,

The latest issue of Public Resistance is up and online for FREE!!

Kossacks who so desire are encouraged to submit articles in compliance with the Guidelines posted on the site.  Send your articles to publicresistance@mac.com

We hope to have a new issue up in May. Try to have your articles submitted to us by march 1 to allow for review.

For you academics out there, we are instituting a peer review process. So publication with us will count as a refereed "pub." Anyone who'd like to volunteer to serve as a reviewer, contact me at publicresistance@mac.com

Cheers!!

The CMU Professor is Gary Peters - and he is running for Congress.

Redstate.com, as a part of the right's continuing effort to intimdate and stifle academic voices that refuse to goosestep along with Dear Leader, sent out an alert this morning directing people to harass the Board of Trustees at CMU (with the aim of trying to harm Peters or his candidacy).  

Here's the Redstate alert:

Dear RedState Reader,

This is the first time we have an action item at the state level.  Whether or not you live in Michigan you should be concerned about it.

My friend Dennis Lennox is a student at Central Michigan University ("CMU").  He is a model for student conservative activists on campus.  

CMU Professor Gary Peters is running for Congress.  Dennis wants to make sure Professor Peters is not using taxpayer money to subsidize his political campaign.  He's filed open records requests, he's videotaped Professor Peters, and Dennis has put out the word to conservatives about what's going on.

I'm an Anthropology/Media Studies student at S.U.N.Y. Purchase working on a long term project involving the Daily Kos community.  I'm hoping to engage as many niches (genres?) of the site's readers/participants as possible.  I've been attending local meetings for progressive causes (Daily Kos and otherwise) to meet and interact with everyone here on a more face-to-face level, but I know there's a huge audience here who might not write diary entires, and probably even more whom refrain from even commenting.  I'm asking for your help.

As an optimistic political science undergrad whose idealistic dreams were shattered by the complacency of an ignorant student body, one thought stayed in my head: just wait until graduate school.

Graduate school, I was told, was a place where scholars sat around and debated serious, real-world issues.  There were no needs for polemics in graduate school, the conventional wisdom told me, for the better argument would win - and humanity would be better off as a result.  After all, with so many intelligent people seriously discussing the issues, as opposed to shouting talking points one sees on television, how could this place not be beneficial?

When I was in college a professor told us we really should invest in the classics. Regardless of which field of social science we ended up in, we would return again and again to the foundation texts.

So I got a big fat double volume of Max Weber's Economy and Society and a too-fat single volume of Karl Marx's Das Kapital. I bought them, but I never read them.

A note about the boycott-Israel movement's latest setback, this one in the UK.

Nothing too earth-shattering, unless you like I/P stuff.

The wait is over and the inevitable has happened: the University of Colorado yesterday formally dismissed Professor Ward Churchill. Interim President Hank Brown explained, in an open letter to the school's donors:

To help ensure that accountability, we cannot abide academic misconduct. More than 20 faculty members (from CU and other universities) on three separate panels conducted a thorough review of Professor Churchill's work and unanimously agreed that the evidence showed he engaged in research misconduct, which required serious sanction. The record of the case his faculty peers developed shows a pattern of serious, repeated and deliberate research misconduct that fell below the minimum standard of professional integrity, including fabrication, falsification, improper citation and plagiarism.

As a doctoral graduate of CU, I care deeply about issues of academic integrity at the institution because they reflect, for good or ill, on my own reputation. For this reason, if Churchill is guilty of academic dishonesty (and there seems little doubt at this point that he is), then he needed to go.

A little-noted resolution in the House of Representatives was passed July 11, remarkably, by a vote of 414-0, with a few members, including Dennis Kucinich, not voting, and two Republican members voting only "present."
Now placed on the record is 414 Congress members' condemnation of  the University and College Union of the United Kingdom's (UCU's) support for an international boycott of Israel academics until it halts its systematic oppression of the Palestinian people.
The targets of the condemnation are two resolutions adopted by the UCU in May.

We talk about class pretty regularly in the world of Democratic politics:  we argue over whose policies are best for the middle class, complain about how Republicans don’t care about the working class, explain how John Edwards’ upper class position doesn’t undermine his genuine commitment to the poor, or how his working class background allows him to really understand the plight of the working poor.  

But what do all these terms mean?  Do you and I picture the same people, or mean the same kinds of jobs, when we talk about the "middle class"?  Do the people we’re talking about identify with the classes we imagine them in, or any class at all?  

These are questions the field of sociology has been asking, and trying to answer, for the better part of the last 60 years.  I’d like to use this diary to take you through some of the answers as well as some of the unresolved issues, and then talk about what you think "class" means, and how you think we ought to use the term.

This is a political engagement with the writings of Richard Rorty, to add to LithiumCola’s wonderful obituary here.  Here I wish to contrast Rorty’s attitude toward academic discourse with that of "academic writing as real estate," which renounces democratic impulses because it has "an insensitivity to the dialogue requirements of public speech and prose," (Agger 123).  Against the concept of academic writing as real estate, Rorty sought to debunk the absolutist claims of academic conversationalists of all stripes.

In concluding, I wish to address Rorty’s later political stance, especially as regards his assertion on p. 15 of Achieving Our Country that "The academic Left has no projects to propose to America, no vision of a country to be achieved, by building a consensus on the need for specific reforms."  This should be read, I argue, as a provocation to act, and in this context I would like to propose an academic Left with a political project: a global, ecologically-sustainable society.

The Brits have done it again. In an outrageous , totally bogus decision , they have decided to motion a boycott against Israeli universities.
(http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=2555)

A last minute announcement from Brigham Young University disclosed that not only is Dick Cheney the commencement keynote speaker, he is also scheduled to receive an honorary doctorate for "Public Service."  If this weren't so revolting it would be laughable.  It's also unconscionable for a school like BYU, based on the religious tenets and good works of the Church of Latter Day Saints, to give this honor to a lying, war-mongering, venal individual such as Cheney.

Tell the school's president, Cecil O. Samuelson what you think of this.  BYU has an interesting Mission Statement and Institutional Objective statement.  Read them before you complete the form.  Be considerate, be polite, and please keep in mind that this is an accomplished, religious man who has earned respect.  If you know appropriate Mormon scripture or teachings, please include it (but make sure it's Mormon).  But we don't have to respect this act, or the way it was hidden from the public, the students, and the faculty.

[EDIT]
Sorry - here's a link.

In their ever-continuing quest to turn California's public higher education into a de facto private institution, the University of California, not content with jacking up graduate student tuition yet another 10% (and nearly doubling fees since 2002), is now trying to stiff TAs, readers, and research assistants in the latest series of contract negotiations by freezing fee remissions and health insurance premiums: