University of Venus
GenX Women in Higher Ed, Writing from Across the Globe
October 17, 2010 - 9:45pm
Today I received the first royalty check for my first book, Women, Civil Society and the Geopolitics of Democratization. It was an exciting moment--payment for my work! Knowing someone actually bought my book! A little extra cash when I wasn't expecting it! It made my morning that a whopping 130 copies of my book were somewhere, out there, in the world. I am, I told myself, part of the academic conversation.
October 14, 2010 - 11:00pm
I return to one of my favorite subjects, blogging in the academia, but this time with a focus not on the students, as in my previous post, but on the scholar herself. I believe that blogging may be a useful tool for those of us involved in the process of creating (and communicating) new knowledge. How so? Because of the nature of blogging itself.Blogging = Reading + Writing + Linking + Commenting
October 12, 2010 - 7:15pm
A few days after my guest post "Community Means Us," an account of my experience in a community college, went live, I received an email directly from Andrew Hacker, co-author of Higher Education?. What he writes is quite interesting and very worth sharing:Dear Ms. Brienza:
October 11, 2010 - 8:00am
The academic calendar is symbolic of how an institution values time. It pegs the community to set dates like enrollment and graduations; exam periods and study periods; and holidays and vacations. In my university’s case, what is not contained in the calendar is more instructive than what it actually says. Like many non-modern societies, we take a more malleable approach to time and along with it, a less strict teaching regimen.
October 7, 2010 - 8:45pm
The latest critique of American higher education, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, has been getting quite a bit of buzz lately, and it's the buzz, not the thesis of the book proper, that I wish to discuss. But in case you haven't heard: The authors excoriate American higher education for no longer prioritizing the teaching of undergraduates and suggest a number of remedies.
October 5, 2010 - 9:30pm
I’ve always felt that the physical environment of educational institutions — their colours, their spaces, their architecture — is one of the least-considered elements in the constellation of educational “success factors,” though possibly the most pervasive one.
October 3, 2010 - 9:30pm
The two most misused nouns in the American academy are “Professor” and “administration.” In a recent New York Times piece, “The Case of the Vanishing Full-Time Professor,” Samantha Stainburn wrote of the disappointment parents feel upon discovering that their child’s “Professor” is an adjunct, which means in most cases the instructor is NOT a Professor at all.
September 30, 2010 - 11:15pm
Istanbul, Turkey As academics, we are expected to be doing two things on a regular basis: to read a lot and to write a lot on topics related to our profession. This expectation implies that an academic by default has to be comfortable with the idea that her time (other than teaching) will be devoted to reading and writing
September 28, 2010 - 9:30pm
New Haven, Connecticut, USA"Even if you're the whitest writer on the earth, you are writing about race, you just don't know it," - Junot Diaz
September 26, 2010 - 7:32pm
Boston, Massachusetts, USA The dean’s office. The provost’s office. The president’s office.