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Speculative Diction

BY MELONIE FULLICK | DEC 15 2017

Melonie Fullick wraps up her blog at UA, and looks ahead to new adventures in writing and higher-ed analysis online.

BY MELONIE FULLICK | JAN 19 2017

A frank discussion about open access publishing, Dr. Eve’s own Open Library for the Humanities, and what future he sees for the academic publishing industry.

BY MELONIE FULLICK | NOV 30 2016

There are times when it’s very difficult to be living “next door” to the United States. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been trying to write a post that wouldn’t be connected in any way to the U.S. election results, but given the way the election has saturated my social media and news feeds […]

BY MELONIE FULLICK | OCT 20 2016

Last week saw the announcement of another round of Canada Excellence Research Chairs (CERCs). The CERCs are another example of the federal government’s ongoing commitment to targeting large amounts of funding to “priority areas” determined to be of strategic importance to Canada — one strategy on which the Conservatives and Liberals seem to agree. Universities […]

BY MELONIE FULLICK | SEP 16 2016

This week’s post is a sort of “happy new academic year!” greeting, and I thought I’d ring in September (even though half the month is gone already) with a bit of a round-up of recommended higher-ed-related reading. At Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, which still gets points for its title alone, check out “The economics of SSHRC […]

BY MELONIE FULLICK | JUL 29 2016

A new Walrus column fits into a narrative that’s not really in line with the usual critiques of contract faculty hiring

BY MELONIE FULLICK | JUL 04 2016

Yes that’s right, it’s time to take a look at university websites and why they are perennially difficult and unpopular. For quite a while I’ve been meaning to write a post about this; it’s a problem that’s ongoing, and one that generates much wailing and gnashing of teeth among regular users of the sites, including […]

BY MELONIE FULLICK | JUN 15 2016

This year at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, I was invited to a University of Calgary faculty of graduate studies event to respond to a talk by Paul Yachnin about the TRaCE project. The project acronym stands for “track, report, connect and exchange”, and its major goals are to find and make […]

BY MELONIE FULLICK | MAY 19 2016

Recently the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario released the results of a study that was designed to track down the employment outcomes of a single cohort of Ontario PhD graduates. I was interested to read this one because back in January, early coverage of this study was already positioning its results as a sort of […]

BY MELONIE FULLICK | APR 19 2016

In my last post, I spent some time digging into one example of the problem with media amplifying particular kinds of voices, while ignoring others that would bring more knowledge and perspective to the issue. You could consider that post part of a series, since I’ve criticized media coverage of higher ed a number of […]

BY MELONIE FULLICK | MAR 29 2016

Some of you may recall that there was a piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books last December that was a strong contender for “Worst Higher Ed Article of 2015.” Written by University of Prince Edward Island professor Ron Srigley, it was in some ways the epitome of a recognizable type: what you might […]

BY MELONIE FULLICK | MAR 16 2016

In a post last year I wrote about how usually, when it’s argued there is an “overproduction” of PhDs, “demand” for doctoral graduates is being implicitly defined by the number of tenure-stream jobs available while “overproduction” usually points to “not enough academic jobs for doctoral graduates.” So how do you define the demand for doctorates […]

BY MELONIE FULLICK | FEB 26 2016

On February 11th I participated in the Confronting Precarious Academic Work conference put on by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations. While I was only able to attend for the first day, I got to moderate a pretty kick-ass panel—the speakers were Maria Maisto, co-founder and president/executive director of the New Faculty Majority and […]

BY MELONIE FULLICK | FEB 02 2016

We need to examine why, exactly, it is taken for granted that teaching work is less valued and less prestigious than research.

BY MELONIE FULLICK | JAN 08 2016

Grad students and early-career academics often can’t afford to go—but, for the sake of their careers, they also can’t afford not to go.

BY MELONIE FULLICK | DEC 16 2015

Recently on Twitter and Facebook I’ve seen more articles on taking care of ourselves and the practice of “self-care” in academe, which makes a lot of sense at a time of year when (in the Northern hemisphere) the combination of colder weather, anxiety and exhaustion at the end of the semester—and the potential added stress […]

BY MELONIE FULLICK | NOV 27 2015

The Conference Board of Canada (CBoC) has been working on a study about PhDs in Canada, their career paths and contributions to the economy and society, titled Inside and Outside the Academy: Valuing and Preparing PhDs for Careers. The report, by Jessica Edge and Daniel Munro, was published earlier this week. I was keen to […]

BY MELONIE FULLICK | NOV 04 2015

Blame for lack of success falls on students, but it shouldn’t.

BY MELONIE FULLICK | OCT 20 2015

A few of weeks ago, an article about Canadian universities’ hiring of teaching-intensive faculty positions was published by the Globe and Mail. The article by Simona Chiose focused on universities’ use of these positions as a means of handling the ever-expanding amount of teaching that needs to be done, without increasing the number of regular […]

BY MELONIE FULLICK | SEP 25 2015

A few months ago on Twitter I got into a conversation that I’ve been meaning to come back to, based on a post by Pat Thomson, “don’t be a BAW—Badly-behaved Academic Writer.” This list of “don’ts” for academic publishing was compiled after a session with graduate students, and included such pointers as avoiding “tantrums” (after a […]

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