This post is a collection of some favorite cartoons about the nature of academic research. All of them are from the website PhD, which stands for Piled Higher and Deeper. The author is Jorge Cham, who got his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford and then taught at Cal Tech. Enjoy!
This post is a collection of some of my favorite cartoons about academic life, most of which come from the Jorge Chan website PHDComics.com. Enjoy.
This post is an overview of the book I published last spring. It’s available on Amazon both as an e-book and a paperback. The title is Being a Scholar: Reflections on Doctoral Study, Scholarly Writing, and Academic Life. Below is the book’s introduction, which provides the rationale for the book and summarizes the eleven pieces that you will … Continue reading Being a Scholar
This post is a piece I published in 2020 in the Chronicle Review. Here’s a link to the original. It’s about an issue that has been gnawing at me for years. How can you justify the existence of institutions of the sort I taught at for the last two decades — rich private research universities? These institutions … Continue reading How Not to Defend the Research University
This post is an analysis of the engine for scholarly production in American higher education. The issue is that the university is a unique work setting in which the usual organizational incentives don’t apply. Administrators can’t offer much in the way of power and money as rewards for productive faculty and they also can’t do … Continue reading Lust for Academic Fame
This post is a preview of my new book, which I recently published with Kindle. It's available on Amazon both as an e-book and a paperback. The title is Being a Scholar: Reflections on Doctoral Study, Scholarly Writing, and Academic Life. Below is the book's introduction, which provides the rationale for the book and summarizes … Continue reading My New Book: Being a Scholar
This post is a piece I published in 2020 in the Chronicle Review. Here's a link to the original. It’s about an issue that has been gnawing at me for years. How can you justify the existence of institutions of the sort I taught at for the last two decades — rich private research universities? … Continue reading How Not to Defend the Private Research University
This post is a collection of some favorite cartoons about life as a professor. Most of them are from the website PhD, which stands for Piled Higher and Deeper. The author is Jorge Cham, who got his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford and then taught at Cal Tech. Enjoy! ARTOONS ABOUT THE LIFE OF … Continue reading Cartoons about Faculty Life
This post is an analysis of the engine for scholarly production in American higher education. The issue is that the university is a unique work setting in which the usual organizational incentives don’t apply. Administrators can’t offer much in the way of power and money as rewards for productive faculty and they also can’t do … Continue reading The Lust for Academic Fame
This is a short piece about the problems that professionalism poses for the academic historian. History is a different kind of subject, and too often academic rigor gets in the way of telling the kinds of historical accounts that we need. An earlier version was published in 2017 in the International Journal of the Historiography of Education. Perils … Continue reading Perils of the Professionalized Historian
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 