academe

A new blogger friend of mine, J.K. Gayle, recently posted this awesome quiz. He’s also got a great meme going around on “favorite teachers,” reminding us of the value of giving personal and public credit to one’s best teachers. (I’m going to post mine soon!)

For those of you unfamiliar with J.K.’s blog, Speakeristic, I urge you to check it out. J.K. is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at Texas Christian University, working on “translating Aristotle’s Rhetoric, rhetorically, feministically.” As he writes, “The whole project works against the nature Aristotle appears to suppose: ‘rhetoric is subservient to logic; women are subservient to men; translation is subservient to the original authored text.'”

Amen.

Drat–I missed it! But if you did too, you can still catch my fave career journalist/guru Marci Alboher on The Today Show. To see the clip, click here. And for those of you who aren’t sure what a slash career is, a slash implies multiple professions in a single career.

(Addendum 11/28: Check out what Marci learned from the appearance–and about publicity in general–on her Shifting Careers blog at the NYTimes, here.)

Cheers to Elizabeth Curtis on her retort to recent (yet to my mind, and Elizabeth’s, tired) attacks on the discipline of Women’s Studies. You tell ’em, E 🙂

Girl with Pen in New York Times blog today! In response to questions I’ve been getting, there ARE a few slots left in my “Making It Pop: Translating Your Ideas for Trade” webinar this fall. Please see this post and this one for more.

From the academic forefront come some very cool resources, of course, these days. In case you missed it(!), the Summer 2007 issue of the journal Feminist Studies focuses on Feminism and Mass Media. It includes an essay on the feminist cultural work of The Sopranos by my gal Lisa Johnson (“Gangster Feminism”). And on a very different subject–so different that I can’t even think of a way to link other than the fact that I admire all the authors–the University of Michigan Press is coming out this month with a book on everything you need to know about advancing academic women in science and engineering, Transforming Science and Engineering: Advancing Academic Women, wouldn’t you know. Take that, Larry Summers ole pal.

(So Marco and I were trying to figure out what a gasket was last night, so I looked it up and had to use it somehow in a post. A gasket, for the record, is a mechanical seal that fills the space between two objects, generally to prevent leakage between the two objects while under compression. You don’t want to “blow a gasket,” if you know what I mean.)

First of all, I’m here to report that there is such a thing as a chocolate hangover.

Second, check out the news about this course that Pitzer College media studies professor and documentary filmmaker Alexandra Juhasz is teaching on YouTube. Literally. The course’s subject? The popular role of YouTube!

Class members control most of the class content and YouTube watchers from around the world are encouraged to comment. Mainstream media coverage is all “you’re kidding–college credit for watching YouTube?” But if you ask me, it’s an incredibly innovative venture. I’m eager to see where this leads.

To check out the course and join the conversation, click here. Juhasz is blogging about it all at Media Praxis, a project she’s developing for Mediacommons, where interesting commentary on the project is also underway.

I just learned about MediaCommons, an online community exploring the changing nature of what it means to “publish,” and new forms of digital scholarship and pedagogy. Interesting convo going on over there now about the issue of what blogging and other forms of online publishing “count” for in the academic system of reward. For those of you tenure bound, might want to check it out!

(Thanks to Elizabeth Curtis for the heads up.)

Turns out the New Yorker’s Shouts and Murmurs isn’t the only place women aren’t being published. Just came upon this uplifting little tidbit, via Inside Higher Ed, about a paper by MIT philosophy professor Sally Haslanger on the limits of progress for women in philosophy. The paper won’t appear until next year, in the journal Hypatia, but Haslanger posted a version of it online and it’s attracting considerable attention. (Total non sequitor: I will always have a soft spot for Hypatia. They published my first academic article, as part of their special “third wave feminism” issue back in 1997.)

Here’s the scoop:

Haslanger studied the gender breakdowns in the top 20 departments (based on The Philosophical Gourmet Report) and found that the percentage of women in tenure track positions was 18.7 percent, with two departments under 10 percent. She also looked at who published in top philosophy journals for the last five years and found that only 12.36 percent of articles were by women.

As Inside Higher Ed goes on to note, “While Haslanger hasn’t made formal proposals for reform, in her essay and in the interview, she spoke of the importance of ensuring that women receive equal treatment through blind review of journal submissions and that ‘efforts ought to be made to make sure women aren’t solo in graduate programs.’”

Interesting discussion going on about it all over at Crooked Timber, an academic group blog I just discovered.

Does the idea of self-marketing make you nauseous? Try to get over it! Harsh words, I know, but I have to say, for authors in our DIY culture, I tend to agree.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has an interesting piece out on entrepreneurship and academe. Writes Philip L. Leopold, an associate professor of genetic medicine at the Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University:

The entrepreneurial topic that academics are least likely to embrace might be the most important concept in their career: marketing.

To a professor, the term might carry connotations of profit motives and deceptive practices. Insomuch as marketing represents the dissemination of the product, professors should realize that marketing is an essential responsibility of their profession.

So true, especially when it comes to book promotion; publishing houses can only do so much, then they move on. The article puts it all in a larger, and interesting, context for those on an academic track. Read more here.