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On November 20, 2011, NBC’s Nightly News interviewed Ronald A. Smith, professor emeritus of sports history at Penn State University and author of Pay for Play: A History of Big-Time College Athletic Reform, about the current Penn State football scandal.

The Chronicle of Higher Education

“Fur has flown since the editors of the Journal of Animal Ethics presumed to introduce their new publication with a cry to stop calling pets ‘pets’. . . . The declared intention of the journal, whose second issue is due out in the fall, is obvious from its title. Linzey, a leading figure among ethicists who advocate drastic changes in human subjection of animals has written many books during the last two decades, including Why Animal Suffering Matters (Oxford University Press, 2009). Animals cannot consent, or effectively represent their own interests in human terms, he argues, so humans have a special duty to care for them.”

Larry Kanfer will sign copies of his new photography book Illini Loyalty: The University of Illinois during graduation weekend.

Visit him at the Illini Union Bookstore in Champaign:

Saturday, May 14, 2011
12:00 noon-2:00 p.m.
Illini Union Bookstore
809 S. Wright St.
Champaign, IL

Illini Loyalty includes over 200 color photographs of the state’s flagship university including campus scenes, buildings, landmarks, and more than a century’s worth of class gifts that embellish the campus landscape.

“the tone and prose should follow the usual academic standards of politeness and respect in phrasing. We recognize that these are not consistently met in this particular issue…. We regret any deviation from our usual standards.”

The issue includes discussions on evolution, creation, and intelligent design, which are certainly hot-button topics. But it was the disclaimer that caused the most furor, with some scholars calling for a boycott of Synthese. There’s no word yet on how the regular editors of the journal will respond.

Might I suggest that they don’t include a disclaimer in their response?

“Yes, there have been two major biographies—Joe Klein’s Woody Guthrie and Ed Cray’s Ramblin’ Man—that have included the singer’s political history. But in those, Kaufman writes, the politics are a thread ‘often disappearing into the epic tales of rambling and womanizing and the Greek tragedy of the voice, body, and life lost to the grim reaper of Huntington’s disease.’ In Woody Guthrie, American Radical (University of Illinois Press), Kaufman seeks to reclaim the ‘obsessive thinker and fitful strategist’ buried in the celebration of the Dust Bowl troubadour.”

Of course the real question is, will McCabe and Snyder eventually publish their paper via an open-access journal or a subscription-based journal?

In the December 2008 issue of Radical Teacher, Prof. Ayers contributed a piece on the pedagogy of questioning to the “Forum on Radical Teaching Now,” the overall theme for the issue. According to Prof. Ayers, in order to liberate and humanize education, students and teachers must “remove that distorted, congenial mask of compliance. You must change.”

And the 2009 inaugural issue of Packingtown Review, with its editorial office located at UIC, published Prof. Ayers’s “What I Might Have Said… ,” a commentary in which he recounts what would have been the focus of his talk at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on March 15, 2008, if the university had not rescinded their invitation due to university and public commentary and anonymous threats. In the piece, he suggests that we “try now to create open spaces in our schools and our various communities,” and later builds on that theme:

Here everyone will live in search of rather than in accordance with or in accommodation to. Here we will join one another and our democratic futures can be born.

Both contributions are available in print and online (click the links above). If you’re not able to get your hands on a copy of either Radical Teacher or Packingtown Review, subscribe now!

And best of luck to you in your retirement, Prof. Ayers. I imagine we’ve not heard the last from you.

There are still challenges for open-source books with issues like copyrights, which were examined by the Urbana Faculty/Student Senate in December. But Evans said advantages seem to outweigh technical problems. He hopes to have such a textbook available at the end of the one-year grant. . . . It’s too early to say what the textbook will be about, but Evans gave an example of how different units could work together, from academic departments to the University of Illinois Press.

“Again and again in Beauty Shop Politics, the reader is reminded that the hairdressing profession gave women the security to pursue political activity. Bernice Robinson, who eventually became the first teacher for Highlander’s Citizenship Schools in the Carolina Sea Islands, which sought to widen voter registration by teaching African-Americans to read, attributed her involvement with voting rights in Charleston to her economic autonomy as a beautician.”

The reoccurring theme in the report is that academia is a highly conservative system, largely determined by disciplinary norms and organized around external peer-review and assessment. Starting from this premise, the resultant lack of scholarly engagement in radically new forms of publishing should not be that surprising.