Suddenly, November is halfway over and the end of the semester is looming. In my state, South Carolina, we have had unseasonably cold weather. I know that lows in the upper-20s or low-30s are routine for many of our readers, but it’s very unusual around these parts.
In “Down with Service, Up with Leadership,” Cathy N. Davidson argues that institutions need to reframe service in favor of institutional leadership: “If from the beginning we made the three pillars of our academic-reward system scholarship, teaching, and institutional leadership, it would mean changing our idea of what responsible participation in an institution and a profession entails. If we are going to champion faculty governance, we need ways of rewarding and even cultivating the talents of those who are responsible, and giving decisive, helpful feedback to those who do not measure up.
Friend of ProfHacker Derek Bok argues, “We Must Prepare Ph.D. Students for the Complicated Art of Teaching.” Bok’s Chronicle of Higher Education post exposes a thorny difficulty of graduate training in many programs across the United States: pedagogical instruction.
Slate.com details the “Common [College] App Meltdown,” which is apparently due to a software upgrade and has exponentially increased the difficulty of applying to colleges and caused several colleges and universities to pushback their early application deadlines.
Our own Chronicle of Higher Education exposes “The Problem We’re Afraid to Name": parental interference in college education.
The Independent asks, “Are big book advances a blessing or a curse?” Salon tries to answer “Why we love loooong novels.” Both articles are a response to news that broke earlier this week by the New York Times about a debut novel titled City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg which incited a bidding war amongst publishers and landed an almost $2 million advance.
Also in book news, “Google defeats authors in U.S. book-scanning lawsuit.” A US circuit judge ruled this week that the Google Books practice of posting excerpts of books online fell under the definition of “fair use.”
Finally, in a rather unusual headline, “Victorian Dress Made Beetle A flyaway success: Victorian dress made from 1,000 beetle wings restored at a cost of £50,000.”
To send you into the weekend, something old & something new together: a cover of “Drive All Night” by Glen Hansard featuring vocals from Eddie Vedder and Jake Clemons on saxophone. This song is from Hansard’s forthcoming EP, “Drive All Night.” Stay warm!
[Creative Commons licensed image by Flickr user epSos.de]
