On an Academic Note

I got a paper proposal accepted!!

The paper is called "Carrying the Fire": Political Liberalism and Realism in Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It will be presented at the Western Literature Association Conference in Spearfish, South Dakota this fall.

You might be asking yourself, "Western Lit? I thought you taught political science?" Well, yes, yes I do teach poli sci, but I'm doing a political look at a piece of modern literature and this is a conference that welcomes and encourages scholars from other disciplines to present at their conference. Plus, my husband is presenting a paper there as well, so I was going anyway, so why not see if I could present too, right?

Deadly shooting a Virginia Tech

Via the BBC - Deadly shooting at US university

At least 20 people have been killed and more injured after a gunman went on the rampage at the campus of Virginia Tech university in Virginia, US.

Police say there were two separate shooting incidents - one at West Ambler Johnston Hall, a student dormitory, and Norris Hall, an engineering building.

The incidents were about two hours apart. Police say that the gunman at Norris Hall is dead.

The state university in the town of Blacksburg is home to 26,000 students.

That is the whole article at the moment, but I'm sure the linked article will continue to update as more info becomes available.

The Wikipedia Debate Continues

NYT - A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source

When half a dozen students in Neil Waters’s Japanese history class at Middlebury College asserted on exams that the Jesuits supported the Shimabara Rebellion in 17th-century Japan, he knew something was wrong. The Jesuits were in “no position to aid a revolution,” he said; the few of them in Japan were in hiding.

He figured out the problem soon enough. The obscure, though incorrect, information was from Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia, and the students had picked it up cramming for his exam.

Dr. Waters and other professors in the history department had begun noticing about a year ago that students were citing Wikipedia as a source in their papers. When confronted, many would say that their high school teachers had allowed the practice.

But the errors on the Japanese history test last semester were the last straw. At Dr. Waters’s urging, the Middlebury history department notified its students this month that Wikipedia could not be cited in papers or exams, and that students could not “point to Wikipedia or any similar source that may appear in the future to escape the consequences of errors.”

Considering the fact that anybody can edit Wikipedia and Wikipedia itself includes the disclaimer that all the information it provides cannot be guaranteed to be correct, I can't see why any educated individual, especially a professor, would ever argue in favor of using Wikipedia as a valid research source. But apparently some do:

Jason Mittell, an assistant professor of American studies and film and media culture at Middlebury, said he planned to take the pro-Wikipedia side in the campus debate. “The message that is being sent is that ultimately they see it as a threat to traditional knowledge,” he said. “I see it as an opportunity. What does that mean for traditional scholarship? Does traditional scholarship lose value?”

It seems to me that it means that if student consult Wikipedia without looking any farther to actually varify the information, they are likely to end up misinformed. Isn't that one of the roles of a university, to teach students to tell the difference between accurate information and misinformation? If it isn't, it should be. If you are going to cite Wikipedia, why not just cite some guy off the street?

Intellectual honesty?

NYT - Believing Scripture but Playing by Science’s Rules

There is nothing much unusual about the 197-page dissertation Marcus R. Ross submitted in December to complete his doctoral degree in geosciences here at the University of Rhode Island.

His subject was the abundance and spread of mosasaurs, marine reptiles that, as he wrote, vanished at the end of the Cretaceous era about 65 million years ago. The work is “impeccable,” said David E. Fastovsky, a paleontologist and professor of geosciences at the university who was Dr. Ross’s dissertation adviser. “He was working within a strictly scientific framework, a conventional scientific framework.”

But Dr. Ross is hardly a conventional paleontologist. He is a “young earth creationist” — he believes that the Bible is a literally true account of the creation of the universe, and that the earth is at most 10,000 years old.

For him, Dr. Ross said, the methods and theories of paleontology are one “paradigm” for studying the past, and Scripture is another. In the paleontological paradigm, he said, the dates in his dissertation are entirely appropriate. The fact that as a young earth creationist he has a different view just means, he said, “that I am separating the different paradigms.”

The article continues on to discuss the use of scientific degrees by creationists to somehow validate their positions as scientific, and the ability (or lack thereof) of universities to use the religious beliefs of degree candidates as criteria for awarding or withholding degrees.

It just seems to me that student here is being intellectually dishonest. He is unwilling to be honest with himself. Either he believes what his dissertation says or he doesn't. All of this "one paradigm or another" business doesn't cut it for me in this circumstance. Now I can say "if one follows a realist paradigm" even if I'm not a realist, but I'm not going to write a dissertation arguing in favor of that paradigm.

I suppose that the universities shouldn't be able to deny people degrees based on their religious beliefs on the one hand, but if the candidates have truly steeled themselves against believing what they are being taught, it seems that they don't really deserve the degree in the first place. Ultimately, it just seems like a really odd thing to do.

Ya think?

NYT - Troubles Grow for a University Built on Profits

The University of Phoenix became the nation’s largest private university by delivering high profits to investors and a solid, albeit low-overhead, education to midcareer workers seeking college degrees.

But its reputation is fraying as prominent educators, students and some of its own former administrators say the relentless pressure for higher profits, at a university that gets more federal student financial aid than any other, has eroded academic quality.

Imagine that, when a university focuses too much on profit academic quality decreases. Who would have guessed?