College guide: what parents should ask on the college tour

I am often asked for advice from people I know whose children are thinking about going to college or are “interviewing” for colleges, probably since I work part time in higher education and I guess I keep on top on what is going on “in that world.”  What kinds of questions should we ask that are beyond the obvious?  What kinds of questions will really make the student tour guide squirm?  Here’s some I came up with.  Obviously, college tour guides aren’t going to know the answer to all of these–especially the second–but with some research one can discover this information.

At the risk of opening up for a whole lot of snark, what questions would you add to this list?

So what was the point?

My post on the ontology of academia seems to have been widely misunderstood. Indeed, this was so much the case that it pushed me to the brink of despair about blogging as a pursuit — a dynamic that people’s insistence on reading my descriptive account of the U.S. as a party state as a list of recommendations for reform only exacerbated. While there are external reasons (mainly faculty meetings) that the latter, written over two weeks ago, was my last substantive post for the blog, the sense that anything I wrote was going to be met with incomprehension did not encourage me to make time.

That being said, any misunderstanding is obviously at least partly the author’s own fault, and so I will try to get at what I was doing in the post. My goal was to try to isolate what it is that academics do that no one else does. What is their “product”? It can’t be learning, because everyone is learning all the time and in many ways. In the last analysis, what they produce is grades, which are then agglomerated into degrees. Their activity is fundamentally one of certification. Yes, it’s meant to be certification of knowledge, but we all know that the certification does not always correspond closely with knowledge.

I wanted to suggest that the certification aspect is ineradicable — no employer, no publisher, no one can know in detail all that another person knows and can do.

The Credential-less Society

Via @traxus4420, I find a piece that is basically the opposite of my ontological analysis of academia: a call for the abolition of credentials. One of the most fascinating things about it is that it comes from the late 70s, but feels very timely.

What do you think, readers? If you do decide to comment, be sure to scan over it, skip to the end, and pass hasty judgment based on the general category of writing you believe it to belong to — life’s too short to read attentively.

Adventures in Trying to Do Research During the Semester

My research project on the devil has been long deferred. It was immediately clear to me after finishing my dissertation that the devil theme was the most interesting aspect and worthy of its own study, and that remained my “official” position on the matter despite the fact that I was doing relatively little in the way of actual work toward that goal. I explain this partly by the vagaries of the job market — in my years as a VAP, I wasn’t sure where I was going to wind up, in the sense that I didn’t know if I’d find a job at all and I also wasn’t sure what department I’d be in. Hence I focused more on my little pop culture project, along with more occasional writings that were mostly dictated by invitations rather than any kind of systematic program. I gave myself time off from thinking about such things while finding my feet at Shimer, and then once I was through my first year, I had already committed my summer (and much of the fall, as it turns out) to my Agamben translations.

But now, dear reader — now I have actually done something.

What is called grading? On the ontological structure of academia

The academy is in crisis. Adjunctification, outcome assessment, online learning, for-profit universities — all of these things have been decried as challenging the very foundations of the academic enterprise. Yet no one stops to ask what that foundation is. We have forgotten about the question of the being of academia. We must put ourselves in a position to ask it afresh, so that we can begin to sketch out the ontological structure of academia. (Here I limit myself to institutions of higher education — lower levels present different, though not unrelated, problems.)

Let us start from the assumption that the academic enterprise is a type of professional practice. Academics never achieved the clearly “professional” status of doctors and lawyers — and our ontological investigation may disclose the inner necessity of that failure — but that status remains an indispensable point of reference. Part of being a professional in the modern world is obviously being certified by the state to undertake some kind of activity in an authoritative way. Anyone can give medical or legal advice, but that does not make them a doctor or lawyer. Further, there are some aspects of being a doctor or lawyer that only “work” if the state certification is present. Not just anyone can write a prescription or rightly demand attorney-client privilege.

Broadly speaking, the aspects of professionality that require state certification to be effective are performative speech acts that the state has empowered the professional to undertake. This puts us into a position to ask: What are academics empowered to do?

IHE piece on assessment and other announcements

I have a piece in Inside Higher Ed today entitled “How to Make the Best of Assessment” (link). Some of the points made therein may be familiar to readers of this post, but there has been substantial editing.

Though I’ve announced it on Twitter, I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here: my translation of Agamben’s Highest Poverty is now available (Amazon; publisher site) in both print and electronic editions.

In addition, I have updated my CV page with links to the submitted versions of two of my recent articles — and more thoroughly updated it in general, because it’s not as though it’s the end of the semester and I have a lot of work to do….

Finally, on a totally different note, I was recently interviewed for a short piece in the men’s magazine Details, which focused on a recent trend of books taking psychopaths as models for self-help. The piece does not appear to be online, but you can read it on pg. 36 of the print edition.

An irresolvable paradox

“Man, we keep drilling into kids from a very young age that college is the only path to the American dream, we tell them that the wage premium outweighs almost any amount of up-front cost, and we provide government-backed loans limited only by what a college is willing to charge. And yet somehow tuition keeps rising at an alarming rate! I guess that means we haven’t been aggressive enough in cutting labor costs.”

It’s simple economics, really.

“Don’t go, you pathetic loser!”

Karen Gregory has a great post up responding to the ubiquitous advice columns discouraging people from going to grad school.

There are many reasons why these screeds of “Don’t go! Graduate School will ruin your life” leave me wanting to kick the wall. Yes, things suck. I make no bones about that, but these screeds overlook the work that students are doing to organize, agitate, and resist the restructuring of higher education. And this oversight raises the question: if you realized the Pannapacker “Truth,” then did you then get involved in your union, in an activist group, in an education alternative (like the Free University), or in a conversation with your students? When did you start realizing that a career in academics also means addressing the very conditions of our labor? What have you done besides comparing the kind of tenacity it takes to be a graduate student today to being a willful smoker who smokes “four packs a day” and hopes to not get cancer?

As one used to say in the heroic era of blogging: read the whole thing.

A Lecture, a Review, and a Book Cover

If there are any readers in the New Jersey area I will be giving a lecture at Rowan University this Wednesday (April 3rd) entitled “Honesty is a hindrance if you want to be what is true: On Islamic Taqiyya and Contemporary Philosophy”. It begins at 4:45pm in Robinson Hall, Room 101.

I also saw today that the edited volume Spinoza Beyond Philosophy was reviewed very favorably by Moria Gatens. Beth Lord did a wonderful job putting together this volume and I was very honored to be a part of it. I am glad that it has been well received by the community of Spinoza scholars. If you are able to please request that your library buy a copy (it would be nice to see a paperback, but I’m not sure if that’s planned).

Finally, I am also really happy to show you the cover for my forthcoming book A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature: Ecologies of Thought. The book will be out this July as a hardback and cheaper eBook. I have been told a paperback will follow.

A mystery of the CV

One often sees CVs with “areas of specialization” and “areas of competence.” One also sees them without. How does one decide whether to list them? Further, how does one determine what to list in each area?

I was pondering the latter question while walking the dog, and I came up with a theory — an area of competence is where you’d feel comfortable teaching an intro class or writing a conference paper or article; an area of specialization is where you’d feel comfortable teaching an advanced seminar or grad class or writing a book. As for the former, it struck me that if one’s CV is not immediately legible (like someone who’s written a book on Zizek, one on atonement theory, and two on pop culture), one might want to include them as “quilting points,” so to speak.

What do you think, dear readers?