I really didn’t want this blog to become a bastion of academic navel-gazing, but there’s good linkworthy stuff here and there—a few of these are a little old, since I’ve been lazy in clearing out my Google Reader feeds:

• Stephen Karlson reacts to various and sundry articles on such things as public universities attempting to compete for good students with the Harvards of the world, rising standards at California’s community colleges, and reviving intercollegiate football as a carrot for getting male students in the door. One wonders if anyone at SLU (birthplace of the forward pass, running 57–43 in favor of the ladies at last count) looking at the last one…
• Tyler Cowen and Alan Wolfe (via Margaret Soltan) review Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education.
• Richard Vedder says too many kids go to college.
• Finally, the Dean Dad looks at department cutbacks at Florida.

From Stephen Karlson: “By definition faculty without tenure are on the job market all the time.”

I have yet to master the art of being a “non-tenure-track but otherwise nominally co-equal” faculty member, an art being made more problematic by (a) being expected to attend departmental faculty meetings, at which grand and lofty visions are discussed and (b) participation in said vision being contingent on my continued employment, the odds of which are nominally in the 25–33% range, all job candidates being equal—which surely they are not. That’s better than the 0.5–2.5% range that probably exists normally in these searches, but it’s hardly the sort of odds I’d be betting on either.

It’s hard not to become invested in things in a situation like this one, although working on job applications is a relatively mind-numbing distraction from thinking too hard about these things.