Category — General

Tomorrow’s Professor Blog: 772. Academic Freedom:
This function of tenure has been challenged as “absolutizing” academic freedom: “[T]enure can never protect of guarantee academic freedom,” John Silber opined. “Academic freedom is protected and guaranteed by the courage of individual professors, and by individual administrators who protect individual members of the faculty, and by students. If they express their freedom responsibly, they will not expect immunity from criticism or public disapproval; they will recognize these risks as one of the essential conditions of responsibility.”

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a nice brief review of the history and purpose of academic freedom

YouTube – March of the Librarians:

Can you trust your mind? at hvattum.net:
How good are you when it comes to concentration and perception?
Here is a cool experiment where you can test you ability to focus attention on a certain object in a short video.

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no, one can’t trust one’s mind, but eh..

Radical Society – Review of Culture & Politics:
THE SKEPTIC IS GENERALLY PORTRAYED AS standing, on purpose, outside the normal flow of life. The skeptic refuses to assent to things that most people take for granted, perceiving the world through a protective lens of doubt and incredulity. The skeptic is the one who pauses just as everyone else jumps in.

The funny thing about this picture is that it characterizes an attitude almost exactly opposite to what some of the earliest skeptics actually proposed. For them, the most important thing to be skeptical about was the very tendency for human beings to worry about knowledge. Once you start worrying about whether you really know things or not, it sets off a whole chain of intellectual moves that, to the skeptic, get you nowhere. Skepticism is not about nay-saying and arch looks; it is about getting us back into the normal flow of life, with, perhaps, a renewed and deeper sense of how flowing that flow really is.
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ahh pyrrho.. an old favorite.

In You More Than Yourself — In These Times:
And the same goes for my partners who I communicate with in cyberspace: I can never be sure who they are. Are they “really” the way they describe themselves? Is there a “real” person at all behind a screen-persona or is the screen-persona a mask for several different people? Does the same “real” person possess and manipulate more screen-personas? Or perhaps I am simply dealing with a digitalized entity that does not stand for any “real” person? In short, interface means precisely that my relationship to the Other is never face-to-face, that it is always mediated by the interposed digital machinery whose structure is that of a labyrinth. I “browse,” I err around in this infinite space where messages circulate freely without fixed destination, while the Whole of it—this immense circuitry of “murmurs”—remains forever beyond the scope of my comprehension. The obverse of cyberspace’s direct democracy is this chaotic and impenetrable magnitude of messages and their circuits that even the greatest effort of my imagination cannot comprehend. Immanuel Kant would have called it a cyberspace Sublime.

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zizek on cyberspace

$21,280 starting salary in a Virginia public library system:
There is really no need for a study. The study will, however, provide quantitative evidence to support the self-evident–that $21,280 is a paltry starting salary for a professional with a master’s degree (who may be carrying sizeable student debt incurred while earning that degree). A study of salaries in other libraries in the region won’t, however, tell the whole story.
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this makes me wonder…. I mean the willingness to take on debt to me is a private matter and has much to do with personal choices. But… the low salary, that speaks to the merit the local people assign to the role of librarians… it is problematic.

i broke one of my favorite mugs this morning…. one my sister got me i think in undergrad… suxxors. those are the little things in life that can change a day from weeee, to bleh.

33 reasons librarians are still extremely important:
A no-nonsense list, good for any sort of situation. My favorites are 24) The internet is subject to manipulation, and 32) Libraries are a stopgap to anti-intellectualism. [thanks forrest]
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i know several anti-intellectual and more sinister anti-academic oriented librarians in training. they seem to have a strong negative feeling for anything they see as not immediately applicable, and or ‘academic’, ‘theoretic’. This is a tragedy of the ‘professional’ school certification and training, i think.

YouTube – Being an Unperson:

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this is… perhaps one of the most profound statements of institutionalization of our time.

the dreamlife of letters, Brian Kim Stefans: