Archives for Academe

If you live in Washington and/or write about higher education, you swim in a sea of acronyms. Because I like making lists, I made a list of the acronyms that float through my brain on a regular basis. (This isn’t all of them, just the ones I can think of late on a Thursday night.)… Continue reading »

As I mentioned earlier, I didn’t get to the MLA this year; I was hanging out in Chicago with the historians. What’s been interesting to me, as I read reports from this year’s MLA in various venues, is to see themes re-emerge from previous years. Some of those reports inspired a sort of scholarly-conference deja… Continue reading »

This winter, for the first time since I joined the Chronicle in 2005, I won’t be at the Modern Language Association’s annual conference. I’ll be at the American Historical Association’s confab instead. (Hello, Chicago in January!) Every conference has its own style. The MLA is not the AHA is not the APA is not the… Continue reading »

Today’s New York Times has a front-page story about scholars challenging the old-school system of peer review (“Scholars Test Web Alterntive to Peer Review”). The story focuses on an experiment at Shakespeare Quarterly, the leading journal of Shakespeare studies. The journal put some submitted articles online and opened them up for public comment before deciding… Continue reading »

There’s an intriguing project under way right now called Hacking the Academy. The basic idea is to crowd-source a book in a week. The topic? How to overhaul/undo/redo/reshape the mechanisms that govern scholarship and how it is created, taught, and shared. Read the details here. It’s not my place to suggest answers but I can… Continue reading »