Dissertation-writing as apprenticeship

In his Goals of a Liberal Education (PDF), William Cronon argues that a liberal education seeks to teach a certain worldview—a preference for curiosity, for empathy, for clarity of language, and so on. An illiberal education, by implication, teaches professional skills but leaves students’ worldviews untouched.
Cronon also has a thorough study of the purpose of [...]

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Should critics be willing to offend?

I was astonished, reading Imaginary Homelands, at the tone of some of Rushdie’s book reviews:

Umberto Eco (Foucault’s Pendulum): “Unfortunately, the journey to this truth is so turgid that it’s impossible to care about reaching the goal. This is Spielbergery without the action or bullwhips, and if, as Anthony Burgess threatens on the jacket, ‘this is [...]

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More corporate shilling: Who needs EndNote?

I procrastinated for hours at the beginning of April looking for useful reference management software—I considered learning LaTeX so I could use BibDesk. UW–Madison has a license for RefWorks and EndNote Web, and I spent half a day trying to wrangle them into serviceability; EndNote came closest, though it had an ugly habit of making [...]

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A public service announcement and/or corporate shilling

One of my best friends had her computer stolen last month, and, with it, her dissertation. My reaction to this was visceral, but, though I vowed to back up my writing, I didn’t do anything about it.
Then, last week, my iBook choked; but for its miraculous resurrection at hands of Josh down at the local [...]

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Success and failure in academia, and a plea for book suggestions

Female Science Professor’s autopsy of grad student failure has been haunting me for a month, but after reading Dr. Crazy’s 12-Step Program for Academic Success yesterday I finally saw just how much more systematically I could have used my post-prelims years.
I have encountered two disconnects between pre-dissertating and post-dissertating grad school, and these are the [...]

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The theorizing class

Scott Eric Kaufman, one of our lit blogging luminaries, wrote recently that he’d “uncritically embraced post-modern/post-structuralist theory as an undergraduate.”
The other day, Sisyphus paraphrased a professor’s surprise that students were not coming to college with “a grounding in political theory.”
When the guiding minds of n+1 got together “to give college students a directed guide… to [...]

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An ethic of slow dissertations

Last July, Inside Higher Ed looked at how long it takes students from different disciplines to get that Ph.D.: after 10 years of grad school fewer than half of humanities students reach their degree. This is partly because of attrition, but there are hundreds of other reasons it might take a decade to finish a [...]

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Are the humanities “overly focused on critique”?

When I teach lit, I begin the semester by asking students why the University of Wisconsin pays tens of millions of dollars requiring every student to pass a class in English literature. Over the years my students have offered career-affirming answers:

literature teaches us how to understand what happens in someone else’s mind
literature gives us a [...]

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Can a dissertation be a story?

This week I read Barak Kushner’s The Thought War to fill in some of the historical gaps in my chapter, and I’ve found myself surprised by his writing. Though an Amazon reviewer calls it “dry, dull, and… like a jumped-up version of someone’s dissertation,” as someone who hopes to jump up his own dissertation [...]

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