This blog will present a range of posts: short meditations on what I'm teaching or researching, book and film reviews, discussions on the crisis in the humanities and challenges faced by our educational system, riffs on memes and cultural trends, stories and insights gleaned from nearly two decades of teaching (preceded by fourteen years as a post-secondary student). The goal is to demonstrate why the humanities matter, spark discussion, and promote action and change. 

Since this platform is not strictly (or even primarily) for academic audiences, I don't use a lot of discipline-specific jargon, and the analyses and connections may be more wide-ranging than what one finds in a typical peer-reviewed scholarly journal article. We academics "talk amongst ourselves" plenty, and with the current "crisis in the humanities" very much on everyone's radar screen, we're doing a fine--and justified--job of bitching and moaning. That's necessary, as are the many cogent scholarly analyses of the humanities/educational crisis fostered by the corporatization of education. But if we are going to make meaningful changes, we need "buy-in" and active involvement from a whole lot of people, from numerous walks of life--not just those of us who teach college for a living. Let's face it, we're a numerical minority: We'll never win this one alone. 

Finally, my purpose is not to provide a space where people can tear each others' heads off. That's not to say we can't disagree--dialogue is essential to solutions and disagreement is essential to dialogue--but in my space, civility rules. Ad hominem (personal) attacks and red herring fallacies will be called out and/or deleted as necessary, and repeat offenders will be blocked. If you're looking for a fight, there are plenty of other places where you can find one; that's not what we're going to do here. And why would anyone want to fight anyway, when civil yet intelligent, meaningful conversation is way more fun? In the long run it works better too.