Higher Education Blogs | Blog U

As regular readers know, Marc Bousquet and I are not each other’s biggest fans. That said, he has really outdone himself this time. In a remarkable tirade on InsideHigherEd – sheesh, I take a week off and the standards drop – Bousquet wrote:

I'm a big fan of LinkedIn. It's often my go-to social media site for professional networking, recommendations, and group discussions. My LinkedIn profile serves as my online professional fact sheet. It tells you just enough about me to get you interested. I've found that LinkedIn is a fantastic place to give and receive recommendations. I find that my connections on the site have a terrific willingness to engage. LinkedIn has a more professional feel to it than other social media sites.

Teaching is at the heart of what I do in the humanities, both in my self-conception as “teacher-scholar” and in my affiliation with my institution—a small regional private university that prides itself on its individualized engagement with student learning. Bringing my research into the classroom where it might supplement the pedagogical experience of my students helps me to model the life of the mind to which I am committed. It allows my students to see that the humanities are a living thing, constantly changing and demanding we confront new challenges to our habits of thought.

Do you know the story of the Potemkin Villages? Russian Minister Gregory Potyomkin allegedly ordered the building of fake villages and imported “happy serfs” to impress Catherine II as she toured recently conquered territory in the Crimea in 1787. Whether myth or fact, today the term Potemkin Village has come to mean “an impressive façade or show designed to hide an undesirable fact or condition.”