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Posts Tagged ‘higher education’

Almost, But Not Quite, Entirely Unlike Tea

Posted in Musings, tagged , , on April 6, 2023| 4 Comments »

One of the (relatively few) things I hate about marking student work is the sinking feeling when a suspicion of plagiarism starts to form; the moment when something like an abrupt switch of style or changes in spelling or the wording of a phase makes you look over the pages you’ve already read and start spotting more such possible indications. Turnitin, as we all know, is moderately useless – it generates lots of false positives (well-formatted bibliography entries and properly referenced quotes) while missing stuff that can be found with a quick google – so this suspicion implies the need to invest a load of time in identifying and checking likely sources and marking up the exercise, while experiencing a general feeling of annoyance and disappointment.

Well, I’ve now found something worse: (more…)

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Rule The World

Posted in Musings, tagged , , on March 14, 2023| 8 Comments »

According to my wife, my falling over and breaking my foot was my body, or perhaps the universe, telling me that I need to slow down and look after myself. I’m not sure how far this is a genuine philosophical position and how far she is grasping at any available argument to try to get me to slow down – she said similar things about the Long COVID that’s drained my energy and intellectual capacity over the last few years – but that could likewise be interpreted either way… (more…)

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2022 on The Sphinx

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 31, 2022| Leave a Comment »

It’s that time of year again, when I look back over the previous twelve months of blogging and wonder why I bother. Levels of interest and engagement, on every single measure, continue their inexorable decline – the fact that it’s only a 20-25% fall from the already-feeble figures of 2021 is due almost entirely to December, with the combination of my regular Blogs of the Year post piggy-backing on other people’s talent and popularity and a bit of gratuitous snark about #Receptiogate (now removed after a take-down notice from the alpaca whose image I used without permission). Maybe the blog post as a genre will make a come-back as a result of the immolation of Twitter; more plausibly, I should be thinking about how to re-tool my prolix ramblings for the world of TikTok… (more…)

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Dog Eat Dog

Posted in Musings, tagged , on July 27, 2022| 2 Comments »

What should an academic career in the humanities look like today – beyond “not like this”? The question is prompted in the short term by the fact that Mary Beard, to mark her retirement, has taken the opportunity to promote discussion of the academic precariat and the extent to which things have changed over the course of her own career; but if, like me, you use Twitter partly as a means of networking with younger colleagues and early career researchers, this is a topic which has long been pretty well impossible to avoid. One way of trying to think about it, from a not-as-old-as-Mary-but-still-moderately-decrepit-and-comfortably-established perspective, is to wonder about the ideal against which the present situation is being compared; what is it so much worse than, and when did it all change? (more…)

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Broken English

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , on June 23, 2022| Leave a Comment »

It’s always nice to learn that someone has found something you did a while ago useful – yes, I know there are giants in the field who get thoroughly sick of being told how they’ve transformed the understanding and indeed life philosophy of another dozen junior scholars this month, but us provincial types have more modest horizons. This month, I’ve actually had it twice. Someone liked an obscure thing I wrote on ‘historiography as trauma’ in Thucydides and has done the hard yards of a proper analysis of the theme in relation to the Sicilian Expedition rather than just tossing out a few random ideas on the topic – so, watch out for the new piece by Bernd Steinbock. And then I heard about what may prove to be my greatest, if rather unsung, contribution to the world of learning… (more…)

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Hit Me Baby One More Time

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , on January 3, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Folks, the tone for 2022 has already been set, and I think it’s a pretty clear indication that we should simply go back to bed for the next 362 days: two British newspapers, which still to the best of my knowledge claim a degree of seriousness of purpose, have published articles claiming that the University of Reading has cancelled Semonides. You can imagine the furore: an author whose work has defined and shaped Western Civilization for millennia, beloved by every British schoolchild who first encountered his enchanting imaginative world in primary school, essential for a true understanding of philosophy, politics and cosmology – and they DARE not to assess students on every single line? They’ll be coming for Anacreon next, mark my words. (more…)

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Everything Changes

Posted in Musings, tagged on December 10, 2021| Leave a Comment »

If I had the artistic talent, I would actually have a go at drawing the H.M. Bateman-style cartoon: a gathering of sleek, well-fed people in sharp business suits, enjoying lavish corporate hospitality in a shiny modern building, variously shocked, horrified, apoplectic and overcome with laughter at one of their number who is blushing awkwardly in the centre. The title? ‘The Vice Chancellor Who Admitted He Was Not Currently Planning A Gratuitous Institutional Restructuring Strategy In Pursuance aof A Transformative Ten-Year Strategy’.

(Obviously this thought is prompted solely by the University of Sydney’s proposal to abolish arts and social sciences departments, and the various UK universities seizing the opportunities presented by the plague to invest in redundancy payments and consultancy fees, and not at all by any vague rumours about what my own institution may be planning). (more…)

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Head Hunters

Posted in Musings, tagged on November 9, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I have been head-hunted! Not, alas, for a lucratively-endowed chair in Thucydides Studies at the new University of Austin, despite all my best efforts to promote this icon of neocon power politics and the innate cultural superiority of paunchy middle-aged white men. No, it’s for an academic leadership position – which would involve dealing with a lovely group of colleagues (just in case whoever put my name forward reads this and makes the deductive leap), but would also involve trying to manage modern historians and archaeologists as well. You know that simile about herding cats? Okay, you know what simile cats use for the same phenomenon..? (more…)

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The Horror, The Horror

Posted in Musings, tagged , , on November 4, 2021| 2 Comments »

I’ve been having flashbacks to that time in my previous outfit when I was sent to have a word (with extreme prejudice) with a Faculty Education Director who’d stopped answering emails. Professor Kurtz was a fine academic manager, combining military efficiency with a broad background in the Humanities, the Arts and Sciences. He viewed his career as the dedication of his talents to bringing our values and way of life to those darker, less fortunate people – students. He’d been sent out to survey student ideas about feedback and assessment, after rumours of NSS discontent had reached senior management. (more…)

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Gone Fishing

Posted in Musings, tagged , on October 18, 2021| 1 Comment »

Sometimes, however much you need to take the weekend to rest and recuperate, just do a bit of reading or music and spend time with loved ones, there is a task that simply can’t wait. Actually it should have been done last weekend but you were then too tired to do more than a bit of preparatory work, and of course there was no time during the week with all the regular demands of teaching and meetings and seeing students; so, regardless of the consequences for Monday, it’s bye-bye Saturday and much of Sunday…

I’m referring, of course, to the pressing need to press this year’s apple harvest into juice, for cider-making and pasteurising, before it all rots. (more…)

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