Reading Room: Pushback on campus

It's been a busy week with the multifaceted and still dizzying responses to Debra's famous #5steps post, CHFE/NFM "Professor Staff" report, articles on MOOCs in higher education☜ a link just one of many) springing up like mushrooms in mainstream and highered media, implications for both future of higher education in general and contingent academic labor in particular, my own immersion (another post for another time, perhaps on another blog, sundry NFM projects in various stages and no others that slip my mind at the moment. Overload. Antidote: a trip through unrelated but higher ed relevant links. Welcome to the Reading Room.

Tom Medvetz (UCSD): “Scholar as Sitting Duck” : The Cronon Affair and the Buffer Zone in American Public Debate.  review Crazy U  by Andrew Ferguson and  In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic by Professor X. Welcome to College Insurrection , aimed to give conservative and libertarian student writers a larger platform and audience.     

If you didn’t know any better, you might think that the main thing conservatives learn in college English classes is how to complain about college English classes. From Radical Notes, Raju J Das on academia as a site of class struggle. 25 years later, Allan Bloom is just as misunderstood and necessary as ever. Richard Thompson on the conservative pushback on campus. A survey finds that social psychologists admit to anti-conservative bias.    

It might not be seismic, but there is a shift in academia away from the faddish and back towards the traditional. Jonathan B. Imber on misunderstanding intellectual diversity. Agnotology, the art of spreading doubt, distorts the scepticism of research to obscure the truth — areas of academic life have been tainted by the practice.

Pushback on campus is not the only reader's treat on Omnivore, the inestimable and always eagerly anticipated Book Forum blog