Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
Manufactured Controversy: Adam Perkins, the Psychological Imagination and the Marketing of Scholarship
The content of scholarly debates is increasingly secondary to the instrumentalization of scholarship in the promotion of one’s brand,” says our Daniel Nehring. It may not matter much that this brand is built on — academically at least — somewhat dubious welfare bashing, as long as the right markers of scholarly status are attached to it.
#WomenAlsoKnowStuff (Even About Politics)
Our goal, say the supporters of the #WomenAlsoKnowStuff database of female political scientists, is to amplify the voices of women in the discipline and in the public eye.
Statistical Association Takes on Use, Abuse of P-values
Even as it insists it’s not really saying anything new, the American Statistical Association Board of Directors has laid down a marker in the debate over what constitutes “statistical significance.”
The North-South Divide Appears in Metrics, Too
Science and technology systems are routinely monitored and assessed with indicators created to measure the natural sciences in developed countries. Ismael Ràfols and Jordi Molas-Gallart urge the creation of indicators that better reflect research activities and contributions in ‘peripheral’ spaces.
Why Do Academics Matter So Little in Britain’s Corporate Universities?
Corporate universities, argues our Daniel Nehring, have come to operate as self-enclosed power structures that are shielded from intellectually driven debate by their authoritarian structures and their anti-intellectual ethos.
The Deskilled Academic: Bureaucracy Defeats Scholarship
Intellectual labor comes to be largely external to the objectives of the bureaucratic regimes that dominate universities, argues our Daniel Nehring, and academics whose careers were built on intellectual labor turn out to be deskilled workers in organizational settings indifferent to their concerns.
One Size Does Not Fit All
Current efforts to solve wicked problems with a quick dusting of data are unlikely to result in socially useful answers. Luckily, there are innovative people and initiatives using a variety of methods to home in on real solutions.
University Amenities and University Food Banks
Is it possible, asks our Michelle Stack, to have an excellent university that is inequitable?
