Clips Archives - Page 21 of 26

One More Set of Recommendations

Published at Chronicle Vitae on March 8, 2016. In short, I would be both the recommender and the recommended. That turn of events left me unsettled. For a moment, I felt simultaneously ancient and young. After all, my student was at the beginning of a potential career, and I am still trying to figure out what I […]

On Academic Pandering

Published at Chronicle Vitae on December 9, 2015. Academics trade in pander, too. We pander to professors, advisers, dissertation committees, search committees, department chairs, deans, provosts, university and college presidents, and chancellors. We indulge them and make choices to gratify them. We try to do what they want us to do: to graduate, be recommended, get […]

Should Academic Conferences Have Codes of Conduct?

Published at Chronicle Vitae on November 2, 2015. Sadly, those experiences were not entirely new to me (or to my fellow attendees). I’m a woman scholar in a field that still skews toward men. I’ve encountered comments about my appearance (from benign to hostile to overtly sexual); dismissals of the merit of my work because of […]

Zombies and Guns

Published at Killing the Buddha on October 27, 2015. Indeed, high-power and high-caliber weapons for zombie killing employ fantasy to justify guns that might otherwise violate gun laws. Do products made for killing zombies allow fantasy to trump reality? It seems so. I can’t help but wonder about the consequences of marketing real weapons for fantasy targets. […]

Welcome to the Dark Side

Published October 8, 2015 at Sacred Matters. the demonic returned to me…but Harry Potter wasn’t my only encounter. A member of my mother’s former church feared that my study of religions would lead me to participate in “satanic religions” like Hinduism or Buddhism; my mom, thankfully, ignored her. In high school, a fellow trumpet player spoke of […]

Is Academe A Cult?

Published at The Chronicle Review on October 5, 2015. Training for the doctorate changes your goals because “part of you drinks the Kool-Aid while earning a Ph.D.” Yes, yet another reference to the poison that members of the Peoples Temple drank to commit suicide at Jonestown. I flinch any time I hear someone use the distasteful, […]