Monday, October 5, 2009

Something I DON'T like about my job.

Happy, happy, joy, joy. Nearly always.

Perhaps profs at larger institutions are shielded from the requirement to read the primary literature of other fields and suffer through belletristics and jargon. But since even the folks in English are my colleagues here, I cannot sit in my happy comfort zone of people who speak the same language as I do.

Here's a paper I'd better read before my promotion / tenure push, because I will need to discuss something like this for tenure:

Faith Integration and the Irreducible Metaphors of Interdisciplinary Discourse

Which has phrases such as, "Much-probably most-Christian scholarship that discusses academic discourse as such has focused on its fragmentation of its knowledge, its "Balkanization" as it is called sometimes".

Yes, my colleagues and I discuss the Balkanization of academic discourse all the time.

And, "The approach I take here will obviously be subject to my own disciplinary identity as an English professor, yet part of my argument is that no one academic discipline possesses the conceptual machinery to provide a comprehensive and definitive account of such a subject"

Indeed!

4 comments:

  1. And people say it is science papers are hard to understand??

    And why haven't I heard about this aspect of the tenure process at a PUI before?

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  2. In out tenure packet, we have to write paper which explains how we integrate our faith into the classroom. I am not aware of other institutions that do this, and it is a current experiment at mine.
    You can imagine that the folks in math, for instance, are going to have a much harder time than those in say, The philosophy or social work departments!!

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  3. Yes, it's funny to me that those in the social sciences are sometimes the worst writers of all. There seem to be many more who abhor punctuation, and adore run-ons. All I can say is, when I read what they write, suddenly I understand why our departments have a LOT more money. If you can't get to the bottom of the paragraph, much less the bottom line, fuhgeddaboudit.

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