Academic Freedom

There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal.
— Borges, “The Immortal”, IV, in The Aleph (1949)
All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
— Jorge Luis Borges

The shape of learning comes in all sizes, all forms. We know what not learning is — texting, emailing, You Tube videos, a world of Teletubbies, from birth to death.

He has sent so many cliques and groups into titters of anger, and the indignant have attempted to turn on him.  The university environment should be the last place where dangerous ideas, and views, are stifled and stomped upon. In actual fact, we are seeing the reverse; from students unions to middle- and upper-managerial parasites and administrators, the contrarian idea must be boxed, the controversial speaker silenced and sent beyond the pale.  Dissent and disagreement are lethal toxin to such affected notions as “diversity” and “inclusiveness”.

He has sent so many cliques and groups into titters of anger, and the indignant have attempted to turn on him. The university environment should be the last place where dangerous ideas, and views, are stifled and stomped upon. In actual fact, we are seeing the reverse; from students unions to middle- and upper-managerial parasites and administrators, the contrarian idea must be boxed, the controversial speaker silenced and sent beyond the pale. Dissent and disagreement are lethal toxin to such affected notions as “diversity” and “inclusiveness”.

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.
Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.
We only think when confronted with a problem.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them… The ability to have somebody to tell your story is so important. It says: ‘I was here’.
— Maya Angelou

Adjuncts of the world unite!
Between the worlds

The intensely controversial nature of nonprofit and for-profit charter schools in the U.S., due in no small part to endless news about the infinite problems plaguing them, is increasingly a major issue in local, state, and federal election campaigns. It is hard to find a political race today where a candidate, especially a school board candidate, is not expected to have some position, hopefully well-worked out, but usually not, on charter schools.

It has been an ordinary year for universities in Australia. While the National Tertiary Education Union pats itself on the back for supposedly advancing the rights and pay of academics, several face removal and castigation at the hands of university management.  Consumerism and pay are the sort of quotidian matters that interest the NTEU.  Less interesting is the realm of academic ideas and how they clash with the bureaucratic prisons that have been built into universities.

Universities have become bastions of sessional torment, feeding grounds for despair.  The term “sessional” is merely a euphemised way of describing an academic employee who has no ongoing employment other than what is offered, a person ever at the mercy of the subject or course coordinator of a department.  They are the toiling poor, the barrel scrapers, the trudged upon and demanded.