THE THRIVING PROFESSOR is now out and available.

Wrtite me for a discount code that saves you 65%.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Preface to a book in draft, People at Work In Industrial Los Angeles or The City as a Composed Synergetic Syzygy

People at Work In Industrial Los Angeles or The City as a Composed Synergetic Syzygy Contents Preface I.   On Syzygy Street, The City in Mind             Analogy is Destiny                         Thinking and Analogy Thinking for a Living                                     Reading the Inscrutable; Writing to Go On in Life; Describing, …                         Existential Doubts                     ...
Read more

On My Mind VII

Photographing Literal description, or the illusion of literal description, is what the tools and materials of still photography do better than any other graphic medium. A still photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how a camera saw a piece of time and space.   … photographing [is] a two-way act of respect. Respect for the medium, by letting it do what it does best, describe. And respect for the subject by describing it as it is. (Garry Winogrand [i] ) Get closer, keep moving! The New York Times ’ Bill Cunningham’s philosophy, adapted for MK: I am not a photographer, I am a scholar who writes with pictures (and some words). Cunningham lets the streets talk to him.   He goes out for several days and sees the story emerge. Walker Evans: “you want [your work] to commence from life, and that’s in the street now.” [ii] Here was a whole world finely documented down to the last pocketbook and pocket square. No amount of interviewing cou...
Read more

Promotion and Tenure, some probabilities

Empirically, Marginal tenure cases lead to marginal careers, or disappointing ones. Probability is above 95%, maybe 98%. They take  much  longer than other cases to be promoted to full, if they are so promoted at all. Rarely does a tenure turndown then have a distinguished scholarly career. Surely there is a stigma to being turned down, but that seems not to be be the issue. Perhaps 1-2% of turndowns have distinguished subsequent careers.  Slow progress from associate to full is only rarely accompanied with the production of a major work when they come up for promotion. Probability is 5% at most. In general, we make many more mistaken positive decisions than mistaken negative ones, the ratio being perhaps 10:1. The basic principle is that being a faculty member of a university that is on the rise is a rare opportunity. Mistaken appointments and promotions preclude our appointing more talented scholars. And there is a agglomeration effect, more exc...
Read more