I learned today that the American Anthropological Association has the following rule regarding searches its advertises: “Solicitation of letters of recommendation should occur only after an initial screening of candidates to minimize inconvenience to applicants and referees. Names of references may be requested, however.”
Sociology doesn’t have this rule, right? Should it?
R.C.M. finished 2011 having read over 100 novels; for me the number was more like 50. Despite our often divergent tastes, we agree on what was our favorite novel we read last year: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. This was probably the most hyped debut novel of the year, and there is some backlash against it as a result, but I urge you to keep the haters at bay–and, hey, it’s good for rousing enthusiasm about what special places small colleges can be.
Other shared favorites: The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai (wins you over with its charm), The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris (wins you over by being completely unsettling), The Zero by Jess Walter (wins you over by being, well, not like any other 9/11-inspired novel you will ever read, and in a good way).
Our major disagreements for the year: The Night Circus by Erica Morgenstern (she loved it; I didn’t finish) and Busy Monsters by William Giraldi (I thought it was hilarious; she sort-of-snickered once).
As always, your suggestions for further adventures in fiction are welcome.
The new blog Mobilizing Ideas has commissioned a set of answers to this question from social movement scholars and at least one activist. The posts focus on the cultural accomplishments, the tactical innovations, and the possibility for policy change that may result from the occupy protests. It is a great set of posts–well worth your time.
I have the usual academic prejudices against diploma mills. Nevertheless, I have had a number of conversations with extremely satisfied University of Phoenix students. One was a group of employed Black adults who were working on business management degrees with an eye to career advancement. They felt they were getting a good education that fit into their needs and resented the negative talk about the school. And most recently I spoke at length at a Thanksgiving party with a new acquaintance who is working on an undergraduate degree through it. The thing that impressed me about what she said was the extremely high level of personal contact she has with the school. To stay enrolled in a class, she has to log into it at least four days in every seven, and she gets constant feedback from her instructor. Students are also required to post comments to a class forum and to respond to other students’ comments. Students who make it into the upper division have to learn how to express themselves in writing. Even more, there are three different college advisors who call her every week to chat with her and see if she is having any problems or concerns. She is very satisfied, both because the on-line format permitted her to maintain educational continuity while following her spouse’s employment and provides an avenue for upward mobility for people who are working, and because she feels like people are paying attention to her and care how she does. She feels like she is getting her money’s worth. I was impressed. This is a lot more than I can say for the experience a lot of the students have on my very large state university campus. I said to myself, “I can see why they make money.” Read More
Dear Scatterplotters, if you are not already dispersed for winter break, do you have ideas for me? I’m teaching a course where I want students to actually read the books, but I don’t want to test them on the material. If I could scan their brains and verify they had actually read the books, that would be fine. I’ve been using an ungraded book comment assignment that is often experienced as busywork by those who do it honestly, and has a non-trivial fraction of students who just work on ways to game the assignment without actually reading the books. I tell them to “read lightly, like reading a novel.” I want them to experience the books, histories of ethnic minorities in the US, so they have background for class discussions which are less focused on history. Do folks have suggestions about how to accomplish this goal while minimizing the busywork and faking it aspects?
Edit: To clarify my own problem, my lectures are too big for me to call on people to recite about the book and my educational goal is that they will learn things from the book that we don’t discuss in class.
Has anybody played around much with Google’s Correlate tool? Quite amazing, in a frightening sort of way. I found it surfing from this similarly amusing, but less thorough, post. I can come up with no adequate theory to explain the nearly .73 correlation between my scribbled line and searches for “home videos clips” on Google.
However, using a steadily decreasing line, the correlation is mostly with searches for now-obsolete web technologies (how many people now search for “web page” on google?), which indicates, I think, the fact that the meaning of google itself has changed over time.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. December is hard on academic women. We’re all just trying to keep our heads above water, but that doesn’t mean there is no joy in the Month of Fail. For our family, Kid is on a new hockey team, and I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to be that goalie he’s staring down (he’s #6). 
I admit that during the game, I was jotting down both a Christmas gift list and a grocery list, but unlike years past, this time I had a smile on my face.
I know you’ve all been just dying for another blog to read, haven’t you? Well, I’m here to satisfy!
Today marks the the public launch of Mobilizing Ideas, a new scholarly (or perhaps pseudo-scholarly!) blog concerned with activism, social movements, protests, and the like. The blog consists of two sections: a monthly set of invited essays on a particular Read More
In a heated[1] debate among me, Ezra Zuckerman, and Kieran Healey, Ezra argues that
purity in one’s constructionism… means forswearing political action, or at least any political action that is justified in terms of a critique of social valuations and the institutions that support them.
I disagree, on the grounds that political action is adequately grounded in perceived self-interest, moral valuation, etc., and depends essentially upon persuasion and power, not Truth. I use the word “agonistic” to describe this claim, borrowing from Chantal Mouffe’s approach. Read More
A reader writes:
Dear Scatterplotters,
It’s Thanksgiving time here in the US and, as graduate students, we often feel pretty thankful towards our committees, letter of recommendation-writers, and so on. Often, we want to express our gratitude somehow, but it’s not at all clear what might be an appropriate way to do so. For example, would it be appropriate to give your letter-writers chocolates or homemade candy as thank yous? In general, what are some guidelines for appropriate gift giving?
~Thankful Grad Student
My wife is working on a project that demonstrates, among other things, that lower-income adolescents report “wishes” on a survey that are more for themselves, such as housing, cars, etc., where higher-income adolescents report more wishes that are altruistic for the world, e.g., the end of global warming or poverty. She is looking for sociological references to back up this (unsurprising) finding and/or to document mechanisms for it. Any thoughts?
A few weeks ago I had a long plane ride and used it to read Benjamin Ginsberg‘s The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters. Ginsberg, a distinguished political Scientist at Johns Hopkins, made headlines with this book and excerpts appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and I was eager to read it as I expected to find myself in broad agreement.
Sadly, it is a terrible book. Its evidence consists nearly exclusively of politically-charged anecdotes strung together; its overall claim is only tangentially related to some of those anecdotes; and an inordinate proportion of the anecdotes refer to disputes that took place at the author’s own institution.
Anyone want to take a break from political news and reflect on grading policies? Specifically, what penalties are appropriate for late papers and exercises? In practice, these range from the extremely Draconian “no late work accepted at all, you just get a zero” to the extremely lax “whenever” and include a huge middle ground of grade reductions and policies about which excuses for lateness are justified or not.
My own policies are not entirely consistent but tend to the middle ground: I think students should get more credit for doing work than for not doing it, even if it is late, but that there should be penalties for lateness that are proportional to the academic harm done (or advantage gained).
The below comes from my colleague Philip Cohen. (Spanier was president of Penn State from 1995 until yesterday):
Excerpts from Graham Spanier’s article: “Higher Education Administration: One Sociologist’s View,” Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Summer, 1990), pp. 295-300, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1389050.
I truly believe that it is something like athletic accomplishment. To be really good you must want to do it, be willing to make the sacrifice, put in the hours of preparation, and stick with it against sometimes great odds. But apart from such commitment, only some will move to positions at the highest level, because some basic personal characteristics must be there to begin with and they are not easily learned. The most dedicated athlete may simply not make the cut. Similarly, some faculty just aren’t cut out for administration, despite a keen interest in it.
Continued involvement in the profession doesn’t have to focus on the collection of original data. It can entail involvement in association leadership positions, an occasional book review, an essay of the sort that an “elder statesman” might write, and teaching a course from time to time. Such involvement is also good insurance. Administrative positions have always been vulnerable, and are increasingly so. Academics must preserve the opportunity to return to a productive role as a faculty member, not just the right to return to a tenured position.
My plea is not that administrators should have thick skins. Rather, one needs perspective. One must be prepared to feel bad, be able to survive it, and then bounce back quickly-very quickly-and get everything back on track. If you can’t handle the occasional attack, don’t subject yourself to it. (On the other hand, if this happens a lot you are probably doing something wrong and shouldn’t be in the job in the first place.)
Don’t accept an administrative position unless you are prepared to make every decision in relation to what is best for the institution. You should have your own agenda, of course, but every decision must be weighed in relation to the good of the university. The easy decision is often one that is not best for the department, college, or university in the long run. If you can’t make that tough decision, don’t take the job.
Administrators who are fearful of the consequences of a controversial or difficult decision often make the choice that is not in the best interests of the institution. Realism and compromise find their way into most tough situations, but above all, be committed to integrity and principle.
My wife is a physician, and like many doctors was taught in medical schools that African Americans are susceptible to hypertension, and particularly salt-sensitive hypertension, as a result of genetic selection through conditions during the middle passage. I raised this possibility in chatting with Liana Richardson, a postdoc here at UNC, about her very interesting work on hypertension as a biomarker for stress over the life course, and in particular as a marker for high stress among African Americans. Her response was very interesting, and illustrates an example of cross-disciplinary information flows.
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