Our department is due for our once-a-decade external review, which requires preparing a “self-study” report as a preliminary to the visit by the review committee. As Chair, I’m in charge of putting together the various pieces of this, which has turned out to involve a good deal more writing and rewriting than I expected.
Thus, while I didn’t write anything new on Substack this week, I did write stuff. Sooo much stuff, none of it fun. Also, Spring term classes started, whee!
Between that and travel to and from the March Meeting, there were two full weeks of March with no posts here. But the others were pretty busy, and we’re overdue for a recap post anyway, so:
Me on Substack:
— Top 40 Radio and the Punditsphere: A lot of what’s tedious and repetetive in the commentariat is just people who feel obliged to play the hits.
— March Meeting 2023 Wrap-Up: Scattered thoughts on returning from Vegas.
— A Proposal for Social Physics: The collective dynamics of lunch breaks at big conferences.
— A Tepid Defense of Elite Education: The hard-to-quantify value of collecting really good students and faculty together in a smallish number of places.
— Active Learning, and Learning to Adjust: Some thoughts on how we teach and what we teach.
— In Praise of 1948: The first part of my March Meeting talk commemorating the 75th anniversary of QED.
— The Lessons of 1948: The conclusion of my March Meeting talk on the 75th anniversary of QED.
Links Dump:
— The EduSkeptic’s Guidebook 1.0 by Freddie deBoer: He’s done a few good posts about education matters since the last links dump here, which are linked from this high-level compendium of a lot of his stuff.
— Why So Many Elites Feel Like Losers by Freddie deBoer: At a different publication, writing about a twist on the idea of “elite overproduction.”
— Hating Everyone Everywhere All At Once At Stanford by Ken White: A good summary of the latest free speech kerfuffle. Should also note his follow-up after the Dean weighed in with a surprisingly good response.
— Long COVID Comes Into the Light by Jeff Wise: What seems like a pretty good summary of research, but I’m sure it makes no-one happy.
— Of Course You Know What "Woke" Means by Freddie deBoer: A cathartic rant about a silly definitional gotcha game. (My attempt at a one-sentence definition, not that anybody wants one, would be “A pejorative term for the sillier excesses arising from analyzing all interactions through power relationships between identity groups.”)
— How Geniuses Used to Be Raised by Erik Hoel: I don’t think I really agree with the thesis here, but it’s more interesting than a lot of stuff that people write about modern education.
— Men’s College Basketball Is in Its Upset Era by Rodger Sherman: Reflections on a pretty entertaining NCAA tournament.
— Academia: Quality Control by Timothy Burke: I share some of the concerns that Burke raises here, though in keeping with the general difference in our approaches, I’d put a bit more of the blame on the faculty side of things. I’ll try to come back to this when I have some free writing time.
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:
We’re now firmly into spring, which means a wild whipsawing between daytime highs in the 60s and in the 30s, and also the end of cross-country ski season. I closed it out with a big day up at Lapland Lake— about 11 miles of skiing— which included these snow whirlwinds on the frozen lake.
Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:
New Hold Steady album just dropped. Hoist a beer in the air and yell along with the “Woo-oo-ooh” in the chorus.
And that’s a bunch of stuff. If you like any of the above, here’s a button to get more:
And if you want to argue with any of it, the comments will be open: