… alas and alack: many punchlines, but not a joke.

Some recent items and one classic à propos; a digest of recent reading and, rearranged as a collage, of postings on Ye Booke of Fayce; and I do hope this sort of thing is not going to become a regular feature:

• Institute for Critical Education Studies, “Manifesto for universities that live up to their missions” (2012-04-22)
  Publicly subsidized universities ought to fulfil three missions – teaching, research, and service to the community – as defined by their objectives and their mutual implication.For signatories of the present manifesto these missions have the following objectives:
  • preserving knowledge as accumulated through history, producing new knowledge and passing on both old and new knowledge to as many students as possible along with the questions they have prompted;
  • training students in research methodologies, in critical analysis of the social consequences of scientific issues, practices and findings, in the development of free thinking, avoiding any form of dogma, with the common good as an objective as well as the acquisition of competence for a responsible professional activity;
  • contributing to the reflection of social systems on themselves, particularly on the kind of model they use for their own development.

  Nowadays current modes of governance in universities run against the above definition of what a university ought to be. Their mantras are efficiency, profitability, competitiveness. Universities are invited to become the agents of maximum production in as little time as possible, to turn out scientists and professionals that are competitive, flexible and adapted to market demands – the improvement of humanity is then measured in terms of economic growth and technical breakthroughs, and the progress of universities in terms of ‘critical mass.’ […]

• Also c/o the Workplace Blog – Issues, events, & breaking news from ICES & Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor:
  • “Academic job market decimated, crashing” #highered #edstudies #criticaled #caut #aaup #bced #bcpoli (2014-02-10)
  • “Administrative bloat @ 28% boom in #highered #criticaled #edstudies #ubc #bced” (2014-02-10)
  • “Podcast CBC: The income gap between tenure faculty & adjunct contract professors in Canadian universities” #ubc #ubced#bced #criticaled #edstudies” (2014-01-27)
• Stephen Ward, “Academic assessment gone mad” (Times Higher Education Supplement, 2014-02-06)
• Perhaps related? [or, the importance of translating prepositions accurately…]
  Call for Papers: 16th Congress of Danses Macabres d’Europe