
Meaning What We Say, Saying What We Mean
Recently on social media, I posted this Slate article by Sam Kriss criticising Eric Garland’s popular “Game Theory” tweetstorm, which has been shared widely by those on the left who continue to feel shaken and demoralised by the results of the recent US presidential election. I generally try to avoid making too …

Lawyers, Guns and Money (for Science & Education)
“Send lawyers, guns and money. The shit has hit the fan!” – from a song by Warren Zevon I have come to terms with the results of the presidential election, such that I no longer wake up expecting to find Hillary preparing to take office. Donald J. Trump will be …

Sorry Bernie – Tuition free college can’t ever come back!
In the not too distant past, your average college student could get a degree in four years and walk away with no debt from almost every public university. Whatever the costs where, they could be offset with a summer job and maybe a few hundred bucks from the parents. In …

Universities should be employing surplus PhDs–as administrative staff.
Of the many criticisms I hear levelled at the current state of higher education, I would say that the following four are among the most frequent: The current reliance on contingent faculty rather than full-time professors is both undermining educational quality and creating a permanent academic underclass of PhDs working …

Syllabus Adjunct Clause
Hey there, Doubters! As I promised in the last edition of On the Market, here is a sample adjunct clause that can be inserted into any syllabus for courses taught by temporary faculty. Please keep in mind that since situations differ from school to school–and even from department to department–the following …

Our Cultural Obsession with College is Misguided and Dangerous
[Content note: youth suicide, mental illness] One chilly morning in my Junior year of high school, a boy who sat a few desks behind me in my AP Calculus class came into school early, parked his car in the student lot, set up a video camera, recorded himself …

Going Up Against the Good News Club: An Interview with Dan Courtney
Dan Courtney is President Emeritus of the Freethinkers of Upstate New York and is active in a number of Freethought and church/state separation groups. Dan gained international attention for being the first Atheist to offer an invocation at the Town of Greece following the US Supreme Court’s ruling on the …

Pseudoscience in the Non-science Classroom
Skeptics tend to focus on the science classroom, especially with Intelligent Design in the United States always trying to wedge its way in. Even if we succeed in getting all the evidentially unsupported claims out of the science classes, students are still hearing many of those claims presented credulously in …

Top 10 Comparisons of Academic versus Website Writing.
A new directive has come down for us School of Doubters: publish or perish. Get a new posting up every 2-3 weeks, or be replaced by someone else who can. Sound familiar? Academia, perhaps? If you don’t publish as a grad student, you won’t get that great postdoc. If you …

Anti-vax “prof” ignites scandal at Queen’s U
This week the Principal and Provost of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario publicly acknowledged student complaints that an instructor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies was promoting anti-vaccine materials in a basic health class. The instructor in question, Melody Torcolacci, is reported to have presented her Health 102 class …