academe on the brink

…a stroll through academic culture & how it looks outside the Ivory Silo™ as well as from the inside…Sunday reading, time enough another day for the difficult, weighty and unpleasantly tangled plus more agreeable relevant professional announcements ~ more on 

• IRS weighing in on ACA and PTF workload (cadres of the unhappy no matter how it goes), 
• Green River CC intra-union conflict (oh noes, not again, but yes: uglier, more divisive, increasingly less conducive to civil discourse + gratuitous sideswipes at NFM), 
• @FutureofHE working papers on funding higher ed, 
• rounding off with calls for papers and upcoming conferences with contingent faculty sessions, even whole conferences just for us. 

So read on and enjoy. I'll do the same...

A new issue of Academe is out. Amy Laitinen on the curious birth and harmful legacy of the credit hour (and a defense). The secret lives of faculty: A biker, a baker, a photograph maker? Professors can look very different when they’re outside the classroom. 

What are low-ranked graduate programs good for? Too many Ph.D. programs are too focused on what's going on above them. The internet is placing the academe on the brink of a dramatic disruption that is liberating yet potentially devastating. 

Sex in the meritocracy: Helen Rittelmeyer on how performance anxiety, not hedonism, motivates Yale’s sexual culture. Hamilton Nolan on the ludicrous mythology that Christian colleges teach as fact. Joseph Martin reviews Punkademics: The Basement Show in the Ivory Tower. A tragic past and a loaded gun: Patrick Radden Keefe on mass shooter Amy Bishop, a neurobiologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

"academe on the brink" at the book forum's blog, omnivore