Friday Off to ICFA Links!

* Ayn Rand Comes to UNC.

* So you want to loot a public institution: CUNY edition.

The higher tuition rates have not provided students with greater access to full-time faculty. In 1975, the last year that CUNY offered a free education, there were 11,500 full-time faculty members teaching 250,000 students. Today enrollment is at an all-time high of about 274,000 students. Meanwhile, there are only 7,500 full-time faculty employed at CUNY, according to testimony given by CUNY Chancellor James Milliken to the state Assembly earlier this year. CUNY relies on poorly paid, part-time adjunct faculty to teach the majority of its classes.

* …UC edition. What a stunning, sickening photo.

* Here’s the Internal Memo from Starbucks’ Disastrous Race-Relations Push.

* Ferguson and the Criminalization of American Life.

* Freddie deBoer vs. soft censorship on the academic job market and soft research in rhet-comp programs.

For while social constructivism, cultural studies, critical pedagogy, theory, and abstract notions of the digital dominate our scholarly journals, the truth is that in most places the study of writing is the study of the research paper, the argumentative essay, the resume. This isn’t a contradiction with what I’ve said before; my argument is that writing scholars mostly research subjects that have little to do with the actual day-to-day reality of teaching students to express themselves in prose. But the teaching of writing is undertaken not by tenure-track academics who have a research responsibility but, dominantly, by adjuncts, graduate students, visiting professors, and permanent non-tenure track faculty. It’s these people that I most fear we fail, because they frequently are at permanent risk, risk that amplifies greatly if they don’t do the kind of traditional pedagogy they are expected to by their institutions. When they need guidance for how to better teach library research, or how to help students in basic writing courses use paragraphs, or what research shows about whether peer review is helpful or not, where can they turn? To a degree, not to rhetoric and composition journals, or at the very least, not to our flagship journals, which I will again say simply do not publish that sort of thing regularly anymore.

* Towards teaching-oriented tenure.

* The latest scenes from the Scott Walker Miracle.

* Three-hundred-twenty-five staff members — including those with tenure — are being offered “go away” packages by University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Chancellor James Schmidt. That’s a third of the people who work there.

* Why Are Campus Administrators Making So Much Money?

* Survey: The State of Adjunct Professors.

* Great moments in not understanding what satire is. The kicker:

Asked whether he posted any of the photos, the frat member said “No, no, absolutely not. I’m a good guy.”

* Paul F. Tompkins announces a new podcast.

* 8,000 Years Ago, 17 Women Reproduced for Every One Man.

* Australian man’s dream was to go to UNC, but he went to wrong school for four years. I love that the closer of this thing is the man singling out the English department for praise. Go Spartans!

* Now offering my services as a consultant to prevent this sort of thing from happening. $1000/hour.

* The Science of Near-Death Experiences.

* Woman abandoned as baby in Macon in 1915 dies at age 100. Bringing new meaning to the phrase “never live it down.”

* The preferential option for the poor: Catholic Cathedral Installed Water System That Drenches Homeless People To Keep Them Away.

* Another tremendous issue of Demon from Jason Shiga.

* What Happens When A 38-Year-Old Man Takes An AP History Test?

* The past isn’t even past: Britons still live in Anglo-Saxon tribal kingdoms, Oxford University finds.

* The end of MSNBC, again.

* And this just seems like a background joke from the set designers that we somehow accidentally noticed: Obamas may be buying ‘Magnum, P.I.’ home in Hawaii.