Week in Review

From Tom

‘Angels & Demons’ May Help Physicists Explain What Matters.   Question:   Do you agree with Mr. Izen?  

“Life presents just a couple of these opportunities when the public is paying attention, really paying attention to science, and in this case it’s a movie which talks about antimatter and is set at CERN,” Mr. Izen says. The film is “a chance to tell our story.”  

A Marriage Made in History, a  review of  Eugene D. Genovese’s Miss Betsey: A Memoir of Marriage (ISI Books) for the Chronicle of Higher education, places this story of academics who find love and faith on my too read shelf.   Here’s a quote from Gene’s blind date with Elizabeth-Fox.   Beautiful.

“When I arrived at five p.m., Betsey looked terrible. At six or so, she wasn’t all that bad. At seven she had become sort of nice-looking. By eight, sitting across a table at Restaurant le Maître Jacques, she had blossomed into lovely. When I left her at one a.m., she was radiantly beautiful. Almost 40 years later, she was in immeasurably worse shape than when I first laid eyes on her. Physically broken and fighting for life, she was unable to get out of bed by herself; barely able to walk; wracked by relentless, searing pain. Still radiantly beautiful.”

Slump Revives Town-Gown Divide Across U.S.    Question:   How have the campuses with which you are connected tried to address these concerns?  

“As endowments everywhere sink with the economy, town-gown relationships, often carefully nurtured during the boom years as colleges and universities sought to expand, are fraying.”

The Two Sides of ‘Star Trek’   Question:   Is this how we approach higher education or do we address the big questions through our work in higher education?

“On the Starship Enterprise, men and women, blacks and whites, Americans, Russians and Asians —with names like Uhura, Chekov and Sulu —worked side by side, reflecting Mr. Roddenberry’s belief that ‘when human beings get over the silly little problems of racism and war, then we can tackle the big problems of exploring the universe,’ said David Gerrold, a writer for the original ‘Star Trek’ series.”  

When a Twittering College President Is Not Who He Seems. Question: How do we know what to trust in these new forms of communication? What mental and/or technological filters do you use? Note: I’m not going down the road of Terminator Salvation (2009) 😉

From Mike

From Inside Higher Ed — Did appearances on The O’Reilly Factor cost a Syracuse professor tenure?

Gay in the Academy — Career advice from a gay faculty member at Inside Higher Ed. I found it instructive to hear from this perspective from another minority group (for example, good advice on being yourself during the interview process) and to remind myself that Christians have it easy in many ways (I don’t think I’ve ever been told that Christians on campus gather clandestinely in a secluded bathroom). [Please note: any comments about homosexuality that aren’t on topic to this article will be deleted without exception.]

Blog-Based Peer Review — Noah Wardrip-Fruin allowed his book to be part of an experiment comparing traditional peer review with chapter-by-chapter review on his blog, Grand Text Auto. Here, he shares his experience and findings. For example, traditional peer review was better at following the overall argument of the book and comparing one section with another, but the blog comments were much more detailed and collaborative (e.g. commenters would affirm, correct, and nuance criticisms from others).