David Harvey in Words & Pictures

I bet that silly notion of the "ivory tower" would disappear if all academic talks had a real-time cartoon accompaniment, like this one starring the Marxist critic David Harvey. Heck, maybe we should lobby Fox for a Sunday night animated series based on his work. The show could even feature guest appearances by Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, and Toni Negri.

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Higher Education: Let the Free Market Reign!

Great news for all of my readers who despise profligate government spending! My buddy Kembrew McLeod published a thought-provoking article in Tuesday's edition of the Huffington Post called, "A Modest Free Market Proposal for Higher Education Reform." In it, Kembrew outlines a compelling vision for ending the financial bloat that's endemic to today's public universities.

Among his proposals, he calls for corporate sponsorship of classes. Personally I'm looking forward to the day when the syllabus for my Introduction to Media class, which enrolls 250-plus students every fall, can finally say, "brought to you by the Walt Disney Company." Kembrew also suggests that undergraduates be given the green light to utilize paid-for research assistance companies, which makes a good deal of sense, really, for how else are we to grow the economy in tough financial times? My favorite idea of his, though, is to incentivize cheap graduate student teaching. Soon-to-be PhDs, Kembrew writes, ought to be able to outsource their doctoral dissertations:

By no longer having to conduct original research themselves, graduate students will have more hours to spend in the classroom as adjunct instructors. Let's do the math. PhD-Dissertations.com charges $17.00 per page, which adds up to $3,400 for a 200-page dissertation (plus, their website states that, "A discount of 10% applies to orders of 75+ pages!"). Although this might seem like a lot of money, consider the fact that most colleges pay adjuncts roughly the same, between $3,000 and $4,000, for each course taught per semester. Therefore, by just adding one extra course to his or her roster, a graduate student can pay for an entire dissertation in less than one academic year--while at the same time serving the university's undergraduate teaching needs. Once this new generation of scholar/project managers enters the profession, there will be no more need for traditional professors.

Since I'm an overpaid university professor who's contributing to all the bloat, I'll happily step aside to let someone with a bachelors or masters degree do my job for, say, seven or eight bucks an hour. But don't worry about me. I'll be lapping it up over at PhD-Dissertations.com, where at long last I can put my skills and experience to some real use.

Before Biggy & Tupac

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Before the ill-fated East Coast-West Coast rap rivalry, there was this one: Englishman John Maynard Keynes versus Austrian Friedrich von Hayek. Biggy and Tupac battled it out to determine who was more gangsta. These guys, on the other hand, had a different beef: whose economic philosophy ought to prevail?

Both: "We've been goin' back and forth for a century."
Keynes: "I want to steer markets!"
Hayek: "I want them set free!"

Hilarious...and only in the age of YouTube.

Too bad my flow isn't better. Maybe then I'd be better able to explain the differences between Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau to my students.

A memo to the Republican party

MEMORANDUM

TO: The Republican Party

FROM: Ted Striphas

RE: Gov. Sarah Palin (R, Alaska), VP Candidate

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Congratulations, Republican Party, on choosing your first female Vice-Presidential candidate in Alaska Governor Sarah Palin! You've managed to catch up to where the Democrats were twenty-four years ago. Good show. Clearly you are the party best suited to lead us into the future.

Against "elitism"

Courtesy of last night's Colbert Report comes this pithy segment against "elitism." And no, it's not against elitism per se. Instead, it's directed against a political culture that impugns relativism, only then to turn around and assail those who appear to have a modicum of intelligence or expertise. The segment's about the charge of elitism, in other words, and its disingenuous use. Brilliant (elitist?) stuff. Enjoy.

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Your name in binary code

THEODORE STRIPHAS = 01010100 01101000 01100101 01101111 01100100 01101111 01110010 01100101 00100000 01010011 01110100 01110010 01101001 01110000 01101000 01100001 01110011.

Binarize (is that a word?) your name here.

Star Wars "on Ice"

My only question is this: wouldn't it have made more sense for his Vanilla-ness to have worked his mojo on Hoth, the ice planet?

If only Deleuze had had access to YouTube...

D&R readers absolutely must watch this video! It's modeled after the political "attack ads" that appear frequently on U.S. television around election time. Here, though, politicians aren't dueling, philosophers are, and Immanuel Kant is on the receiving end of the smear campaign. It's truly hilarious, if, ultimately, rather apt.

Thanks to my colleague John Lucaites for passing along the link. Share and enjoy!

Dispatches from the edge of the Eastern time zone

It was dark this morning--until 8:00 a.m. It wasn't murky, it wasn't rainy, it wasn't foggy. In fact, today has turned out to be one of the sunniest days we've had in awhile here in Bloomington, Indiana. But this morning, it was just dark. Really dark.

About a year ago, I posted a short piece on the State of Indiana's decision in early 2006 to adopt daylight savings time. For those of you who don't know, most of Indiana used to observe Eastern Standard Time all year round. Basically, this meant we spent half the year on Eastern Standard Time and the other half of the year on Central Daylight Time. If you're confused, join the club. Nobody ever seemed to know what time it was in Indiana, except maybe those of us actually living here.

For most of last year, I considered Indiana's move to observe daylight savings time a welcome one, since it put us on the same time year round as my friends and family living back east. There were other benefits that followed, too, since Indiana was now effectively the western edge of the Eastern time zone. The best part was how the daylight lasted deep into the evening. In summer, sunset occurred close to 10:00 p.m., and even in winter, daylight would linger until about 5:30 or 6:00 p.m. That was a far cry from when I lived in New Hampshire. There, sunset in December happened around 4:15 or 4:30 p.m.

Anyway, the U.S. Congress has gone and mucked it all up by extending daylight savings time by two weeks this year. Those who observe the time change set our clocks ahead one week earlier than normal this past April, and this coming weekend--one week later than normal--we'll set our clocks back. The result has been the incredible darkness we've lately been experiencing each morning here in Indiana. By the time we do set the clocks back, sunup won't happen until close to 8:15 a.m.

Let me tell you, it's hard getting out of bed when it's that dark, even when you know, rationally, that you normally get up at 7:30 a.m. or thereabouts.

Needless to say, I'm looking forward to the restoration the move back to Eastern Standard Time will bring. Regrettably, it's only a temporary respite. The days keep getting shorter until the third week in December, which means, just about then, sunup won't happen until 8:00 or 8:15 a.m. again.

Who knows? Maybe the old, two time zone system wasn't so bizarre after all....

And the winner is...

After sifting through what can only be desribed as an avalanche of entries (there were four), I'm pleased to report that the winner of the first ever D&R caption contest is "caraf." Her entry: "Daddy, it's not what my poop MEANS, but rather what it DOES that matters!" Smart, witty, and creative stuff. Her caption kind of reminds me of the line from A Thousand Plateaus, "Words are not tools, but we give children language, pens, and notebooks as we give workers shovels and pickaxes" (p. 76).

Caraf is hereby bestowed with the title of WINNER!!! and is presented with the following certificate, which, no doubt, will find a prominent place among her other honors and awards.


Thanks to all of you who shared your time and creative energies. Please don't feel discouraged if you didn't win. It was, honestly, a pretty competitive pool. And besides, I'll probably have another caption contest next year, assuming that I can find an interesting enough image.

The first ever D&R caption contest!

A colleague of mine passed along the following photo to me, and I've been meaning to blog about it for awhile now. There's just one problem: I'm not particularly witty. So I leave it to you, dear readers, to come up with an appropriate caption for the photo--humorous or otherwise. The winner of the first ever D&R caption contest will garner the acclaim of dozens of blog readers from around the globe and will have conferred upon her/him by yours truly the euphonious title of...WINNER!!!!

You can enter by leaving a comment below. Have fun, keep it reasonably clean, and enjoy. The deadline for entries will be, well, whenever I decide....

"Bébé avec Deleuze" - 2000 © M/M (Paris)