The world is divided into standers and sitters. Some stand behind podiums while others sit at desks. Some wander up and down the aisles while others never so much as shift from their position.

Which are you?

I used to be a desk-edge sitter, but that was when I first started teaching as an adjunct at Queens College back in 1982. I wore Laura Ashley dresses because I wanted to disguise my figure and look older—I was 25, and those were my goals. 

The dresses themselves were pretty enough, but their peasant motif didn’t really suit me because they made me look, well, like a peasant. I looked like the lady on the Contadina can. All I was missing was a basket of plum tomatoes and a bandana. Also, I wore flat shoes because I was taking the F train home at 11 p.m. and needed to know I could move quickly.  Plus, I carried huge bags of books and papers because I had no permanent place to leave ...

I missed the Emmy Awards earlier this week. I barely knew they were happening, and I didn't really care, even though I'm a big TV watcher and this year's broadcast actually attracted many more viewers than the show has in recent years.

I rarely make a big ritual out of watching any of the annual award ceremonies. I'm a filmmaker and a film fanatic, but there are many years when I even have to build up the energy to watch the Oscars. But I was particularly disinterested in the Emmy broadcast this year, and glancing at the nominees and the winners, I realize why: I don't watch those shows. I watch "bad TV."

That wasn't always the case. There used to be a time when "my shows" were the critically-acclaimed ones: The Wire, The Sopranos, 24, The West Wing, The X-Files, Sex and the City. They had relatively large audiences, and they won all the awards. But even after any of those shows lost...

My first thought on reading yesterday’s opening line to the Chronicle story on Texas A&M rating professors based on their individual “bottom-line value” was, “Oh look, how clever! The Chronicle is running an Onion story.” Not so. They ran a real story about Texas A&M’s plan to evaluate how much professors are worth based on their salaries, the research money they bring in, and the amount of money they “generate from teaching” (presumably tuition dollars brought by each individual student in a class) and then (can this really be true? Shouldn't it be the other way around?) "add the money generated by each professor and subtract that amount from his or her salary to get a bottom-line value for each." Any way you look at it, they're searching for profit and loss accounts for each individual professor. (All you non-profit-making Latin and fine arts professors, get ready to get lost.)

This...

Contributing to The Chronicle's series of special reports on the higher education quality problem, Alexander McCormick says, "There’s lots of blame to go around, but I’ll single out faculty norms and the news media." I'm with him on the first part. But the media part, not so much. He says:

The news media usually focus on the wrong things. If the big story every year is which Ivy tops the rankings, or which campus is the biggest party school, we won’t ever focus on the real problems. And when the media do look at quality, they too often settle for simple answers to complex questions—flawed approaches that either reinforce the conventional wisdom (reputation and average SAT scores, for example) or ignore content and process (graduation rates). The media rarely ask tough questions about teaching and learning: What are we asking of our students? How do we know if we’re getting it? What are...

Hey Brainstorm readers! This blog site made itself into another blog and newspaper—well sort of newspaper.

A blogger for The Washington Examiner (a give-away paper at the D.C. Metro and in freebie boxes around town) attacks my Brainstorm blog about falling wages for American workers. 

Did he dispute the fact that employers are using unemployment as an opportunity to cut wages for their existing workers even when profits are up?

No.

He defended the practice.

He writes that the price of labor is "dynamic and free of moral content." Wow. That comment would be breathtaking if it weren't a mainstream view among some neo-classical economists. They will invoke “supply and demand” as a kind of natural law that determines wages. 

Most other economists reject the view that the supply and demand of human beings’ time, effort, skill, and loyality determines (or should determine) compensation. ...

Whenever I give a lecture on evolution, even though I am a historian and philosopher of science rather than a practicing scientist, almost invariably someone in the question period asks about humans.  Are we still evolving?  The answer of course is “yes,” and one of life’s biggest paradoxes is that no one wants to deny this.  The Young Earth Creationists—six days of creation, six thousand years ago—are more gung-ho on human evolution than the most hard-line of Darwinians.  On the one hand, they think that, since the time of Adam and Eve, there has been major degeneration thanks to deleterious mutations.  This was why it was perfectly okay for Cain to marry his sister.  There wasn’t the worry back then about genetic disease from inbreeding.  (Why his sister lived in the land of Nod goes unanswered.)  On the other hand, since the time of the Ark there has been all of that evolution into...

Earlier this year I flew to Rochester, Minnesota, where I learned how fast heat will depart from the human body if you're dumb enough to travel north of the 44th parallel in winter without proper insulation. (Answer: very.) I also visited the new branch campus of the University of Minnesota and wrote an article about it, which you can read here.

They're doing a lot of interesting things at UMR. (See also David Glenn's excellent profile in The Chronicle last year.) There are no academic departments and every undergraduate (the first class matriculated a year ago) is pursuing a B.S. in health sciences. Professors from the humanities and the sciences coordinate their curricula on a week-by-week basis, so a student might synthesize a compound like creatine in chemistry, design an experiment examining its effect on muscle fatigue in biology, debate the ethics of performance-enhancing drugs...

Yesterday the NY Daily News reported an interesting and annoying item. Eight members of Congress from New York State and one high-ranking member of the Obama Administration are collecting sweet little pension paychecks from the State of New York every year. Before heading to DC, you see, they worked in New York state government, and they’re older than 55, and they now work outside the state’s pension system. Here’s a rundown of the payments, with party affiliation:

• Paul Tonko (D)--$64K
• Pete King (R)--$40K
• Maurice Hinchey (D)--$36K
• Jerrold Nadler (D)--$20K
• Eliot Engel (D)--$15K
• Jose Serrano (D)--$14K
• Nita Lowey (D)--$10K
• Louise Slaughter (D)--$9K
• John McHugh, Secretary of the Army -- $30K

Those dollars sit on top of the $174,000 base pay that Members of Congress pull in. It’s called double-dipping—retiring from one public position, taking pension payouts, and working in a...

In my previous post, I observed that whenever I blog on art, there’s nary a peep. When I blog on politics, on the other hand, there’s a cacophony of voices. Although facts are often tossed around in discussions of art and politics, both subjects are matters of opinion. How is it we’re so insecure about offering our opinions about art in public, while so bold in expressing our opinions about politics?

In my first post, I suggested that a lot of people hold back offering opinions about art because they think they don’t know enough about it to talk about it intelligently. Understandably, then, even if they use a pseudonym, they’re reluctant to go on record talking about art in a public forum like Brainstorm. Educated people, in particular, don’t want to appear unsophisticated, and when talking about art, it’s easy to end up sounding either like a Philistine or a nincompoop. A few readers...

Hello class. Hello former students who are willing to go another round in this ring, and welcome to the new folks—the ones who have no idea what this course will be like.

Let me tell you who’ve never taken a class with me before a little about what to expect. And please understand that while I’m delighted that you're here, I will also understand if you decide that you can’t work within the boundaries I’ve set up.

The points I’m talking about today are non-negotiable. That’s why I mention them up front. On a number of other issues, I can be flexible. Concerning the following, however, you will find me intractable:

1. No electronic devices. No laptops, no cell phone, no Blackberries, no pacemakers, nothing. If you have an electronic bracelet around your ankle monitored by your parole officer, you can leave that on. Everything else is switched off before you enter this classroom. You don’...