There was an interesting article on Inside Higher Ed yesterday about the idea of “Affirmative Action for Men.” The piece was a response to an op-ed by Jennifer Delahunty Britz, an admissions officer at Kenyon College, where she talked about gender preferences in admissions, using the classic op-ed device of talking about a particular student […]
Category: Academia
Notes Toward a User’s Guide to Synthetic Chemistry Talks
Reading Dylan Stiles’s blog yesterday reminded me of a post I wrote last summer about how to approach student talks about synthetic chemistry. Since evil spammers have forced us to turn off comments to the old site, I’ll reproduce the original below the fold:
True Conference Stories
Eszter at Crooked Timber points to some public speaking tips she wrote. Some of the advice is fairly specific to the academic conference setting, but it’s all excellent. In the Crooked Timber post, she emphasizes problems with people going over their allotted time, and mentions in passing session chairs who let them. This reminds me […]
Study in Contrasts
Thursday was “Founders Day” at Union, and there were two major speaking events on campus. The official Founders Day address was given at lunchtime by Rev. Peter J. Gomes, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard Divinity School. That evening, there was a second talk, not officially associated with Founders Day, by Chuck D, […]
Email Management
Pretty much every academic on-line has already commented on the New York Times piece on student email today. As usual, Timothy Burke says most of what I’d like to say: Much of the complaint recorded in the article also seems much ado about nothing. As Margaret Soltan observes, what’s the big deal about answering the […]
Advanced Placement: Threat or Menace?
Kevin Drum reports receiving an email from a professor of physics denouncing the Advanced Placement test in Physics: It is the very apotheosis of “a mile wide and an inch deep.” They cover everything in the mighty Giancoli tome that sits unread on my bookshelf, all 1500 pages of it. They have seen not only […]