Just a quick post today on teaching this and next semester. As readers of this blog probably know, I’m teaching a course in the spring for the honors program here at University of North Dakota. [As an aside, I’m not a big fan of honors programs, in general, but because of the shake up in… Read More →
There was a neat little article in the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday on academic fashion, clothes, and professionalism. I’ve posted from time to time on clothes: what to wear when’s cold outside, what I wear on survey archaeology projects, the confluence of tools that makes archaeology work, and even wrote an earlier meditation on… Read More →
I traveled a bit last week and didn’t have much time to blog, but I did read David Graeber’s Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (2015). While the book is actually a series of essays rather than a systematic unpacking of bureaucracy as a phenomenon, Graeber does offer a… Read More →
I found Dimitri Nakassis’s recent blog post in response to Mary Beard’s recent column in the TLS pretty interesting, and it seems to have generated a bit of social media buzz as well. Go read it. [For those of you who read my blog regularly, you can probably skip this post!] To summarize Dimitri and… Read More →
As readers of this blog know, I’ve been posting my occasional thoughts about the budget cuts at the University of North Dakota. Most of my posts have focused less on the budget itself (which has not yet been finalized) and more on the impact of the cuts on the quality and character of life on… Read More →
Yesterday I attended a UAS (Unmanned Aerial Systems) summit meeting on the campus of the University of North Dakota. The meeting was the first step in the establishment of the IUAR, the Institute for Unmanned and Autonomous Research. While the name of the institute sounds a bit like a dystopian fantasy where research happens without… Read More →
One good thing about traveling is (especially on “smaller regional jets”) is the opportunity to read. The seats and tray tables are really too small to do any substantial work on a laptop and my new MacBook Pro has a solid hour of battery life. So I had no excuse to do anything other than… Read More →
This week is layout week and today is layout day. These are good days when I get to immerse myself in the fussy work of book making (usually powered by an appealing soundtrack). Because I’ve been thinking a bit about publishing lately and doing more publishing than proper research, but I think that’s a fine… Read More →
For the last decade or so, I’ve had a fascination with parapsychology. Some of this stems from the work that I did on dream archaeology many years ago and some comes from puerile fascination with things like Jon Ronson’s Men who Stare at Goats. So, I couldn’t resist reading Wladimir Velminski’s Homo Sovieticus: Brain Waves, Mind… Read More →
Like many people on campus at the University of North Dakota, I’m trying not to fixate of budget issues. After all, most people on campus spend most of their time just doing their jobs. At the same, we do read the media and feel for the students and staff effected by the most recent cuts… Read More →
At a meeting a week before spring break, one of the student representatives expressed concern about the University of North Dakota budget crisis impacting teaching (and learning) on campus. He noted that low faculty morale and a lack of confidence in university leadership did little to motivate learners and had become a distraction. I think… Read More →
This past week, I got a seemingly innocent survey asking me about my research productivity. It was circulated by our Vice President of Research and asked a series of question about what it is that we do as humanities scholars in terms of our research and creative activities. I suspect that some of this has… Read More →
This is the fourth in a series of blog posts thinking about the recent round of budget cuts at the University of North Dakota. Go read part 1, part 2, and part 3 if you find this interesting. One of the little things that working on the Bakken oil boom has taught me is that history is awkwardly situated… Read More →
This is the third in a series of blog posts on the budget cuts at the University of North Dakota and part of a fragmentary treatise on the history and function of higher education. Go read part 1 and part 2 if you find this interesting. Last week, some colleagues and I had an informal… Read More →
I’ve been thinking a good bit about professionalization lately, and this is largely in response to Dimitri Nakassis’s recent efforts to come to grips with the Future of Classical Archaeology (over a series of blog posts in preparation for a paper that he’ll deliver at a conference held at Smith College next week). One of… Read More →
Over the last two years, the University of North Dakota has undergone a series of massive budget cuts. These are largely the result of cuts in state funding, limits on the university’s ability to compensate by raising tuition, and the decline in state revenues on the back of low agricultural and oil prices. When times… Read More →
Over the last few months the University of North Dakota’s campus has absorbed the sobering reality that we will need to undergo another round of budget reductions. As with anything like this, there is much flailing, wringing of hands, gnashing of teeth, and slashing away at campus institutions like a drunken pirate in a beer… Read More →
My buddy Dimitri Nakassis is giving a paper in a couple weeks at a symposium at Smith College on the Future of Classical Archaeology. He (perhaps foolishly!) asked his rather large personal and professional network to chime in on what they thought he should include in a 40 minute treatment of this rather expansive topic.… Read More →
I had some really enjoyable feedback on my blog post from yesterday. Some of it considered the arguments that I was making in the blog, but much more of it took as a point of departure my status as a mid-career faculty member. Putting aside the arrogance of assuming that my career would continue for… Read More →
