Janine Giordano Read part 1 of the series, "Where Did You Find Your Megaphone?" I was surprised, though maybe I shouldn't be, at the nature of responses to my last post. I expected to hear a variety of answers about where each of us of first found our voice and discovered our efficacy. Was it in your favorite class in college, or in your relationship with a younger sibling? Was it on a Church board, in a Parent-Teacher organization, or on a missions trip? Where did you first feel heard and validated, and see your … [Read more...] about On Fitting in–With the Scholarship
Completing Your PhD
End the University as We Know It
Any responses to the NY Times piece End the University as We Know It? Another piece highlighting the concerns of specialization and the slave labor by graduate students in the research universities with diminishing chance of reward after pushing through the system. The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn't conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That's one of the main reasons we … [Read more...] about End the University as We Know It
Who Gets a PhD and Why
Inside Higher Ed reports on two interesting studies about which students complete a PhD and why. … [Read more...] about Who Gets a PhD and Why
Licensing Your Dissertation
If you are completing your PhD, part of the process is completing forms to copyright your dissertation. danah boyd, a researcher who studies online social networks and recent PhD recipient herself, has written an interesting post about licensing her dissertation under Creative Commons, instead of the standard "all rights reserved" copyright. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that provides free licenses for creative works, generally to make it easier to share those works. (I use CC's search tool frequently to … [Read more...] about Licensing Your Dissertation
Are PhDs a Waste Product?
This week, I began reading Marc Bousquet's How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. Bousquet is an academic labor activist, and blogs at both the Chronicle's Brainstorm and at his own site. (A side note: Bousquet is now a prof at Santa Clara, but he first received tenure at the University of Louisville, my alma mater, at the same time I was a student there. He and I did not cross paths, as far as I can remember, but I witnessed firsthand many of the same things he saw, including UofL's deal … [Read more...] about Are PhDs a Waste Product?