Among academic bloggers, yet another battle is raging in the PowerPoint wars.
Margaret Soltan, English professor and the venerable curmudgeon of University Diaries, links to a student’s blog to show how PowerPoint enables and encourages shoddy teaching.
Fellow English professor Alan Jacobs agrees, pointing to students’ sense of entitlement that results from PowerPoint.
Jonathan Rees, professor of history, [...]

Belts are a lot tighter this academic year, and faculty have widely ranging diagnoses and cures for the crisis.
Historiann (a.k.a Ann M. Little, historian at Colorada State) discusses the offer of UNC emeritus faculty to teach for free during the budget crisis, and the administration’s refusal.  There’s a lively but polite debate in the comments [...]

At the peak of summer, many faculty are in deep research mode, especially with longer projects, like books, that require the kind of travel or in-depth work they can’t schedule during the semester.  Here’s an overview of the book-writing process from the inside
Dr. Crazy, an anonymous literature professor, is beginning to ponder her topic.
Anthropologist Auto [...]

It’s been over a month, and the faculty blogosphere is still buzzing about Mark Taylor’s New York Times editorial “End the University as We Know It.”  That’s not too surprising, since Taylor called for, among other changes, abolishing both departments and tenure.  ACRLog blogger Scott Walter linked to the editorial here right after it was [...]

Over at Edge of the American West, UC Irvine English professor Scott Eric Kaufman has a bit of a rant about both the delay and format of the January issue of the journal of the Modern Language Association.
Cheer up, SEK; it could be worse.  The anonymous Lumpenprofessoriat tells a tale of woe, with an eventual [...]