Welcome to te penultimate day of this week-long excursion into the summer work schedule of academics – or, really, one academic. Â Me. Â If you’ve come this far, I’ll presume you’ve read the earlier entries (links at end of this piece). Â If you haven’t, the whole thing starts back on Saturday. Â You might begin there. Â Or…
Starting on Saturday, I began blogging a summer-work-week in the life of an academic – specifically, me.  We are now up to day 5.  The goal is simply to show – in as much detail as I can – precisely what I do in the summer. Indeed, if all academics who have a blogs did this,…
It’s hard to imagine that this is even slightly interesting to read, but it does (at least) make visible the work that academics do in the summer. Â Or this academic, at least. Â If you’re just tuning in today, I should say that this week — and this week only — I’m keeping track of what…
The week’s ongoing experiment in trying my readers’ (or “reader’s,” singular?) patience continues. Â In a (possibly misguided) attempt to make academic labor visible, I’m documenting how I spend my days during this first week of summer, when academics are allegedly “on vacation.” Â Here is day 3. Monday, 14 May 2012. 12:00 – 1:55 am. Â Caught…
Continuing what I started yesterday, I’m continuing this week’s chronicle of what a professor does in the summer. As noted, it’s an attempt to make visible the work that academics do when most people think we’re on holiday. So. If you found yesterday’s post dull and yet slogged through it anyway, then you’re in luck:…
For a week in February of 2011, I blogged exactly what I did each day – the goal being to show precisely how academics spend their time. Starting today, I’m beginning the summer edition of the same experiment. From today through Friday the 18th, I will publicly keep track of how I use my time…
The main problem with Chronicle of Higher Education blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley is not racism.  The main problem is her intellectually lazy, sloppy “journalism” that cherry-picks examples in order to “support” uninformed opinions.  In her recent piece, “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations,” she reads the descriptions of dissertations by five recent…
One of the many pleasures of Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (2010) is its evocation of the thrill of research. As he traces the history of his family’s netsuke (small Japanese ivory and wood carvings), de Waal describes great-great-great grandfather Charles Ephrussi’s art-collecting in nineteenth-century Paris as “‘vagabonding’ … done with…
I don’t enjoy flying, but I do like traveling. There is pleasure in being somewhere else, in experiencing a different city or country. All that is taken for granted in daily life cannot be taken for granted – and this is especially true when in another country, when the food, language, and culture differs in…
One wonders if David C. Levy came by his ignorance naturally, or whether it’s a state of mind that he has cultivated carefully over the years. Â His piece in the Washington Post is so poorly informed that I suspect ignorance may simply be something with which nature has endowed him. Â He claims that “Happily, senior…
