Southern Illinois University at Carbondale does not make national news very often.  Occasionally the Salukis will pop onto the radar for sports fans, but given just how much “news” (using that term loosely) gets generated in the field of sport, those developments tend to age and be forgotten rather quickly.  When the university does draw national attention for academic, rather than athletic matters, more often than not, the story is a negative one.  And that is certainly the case when it comes to the latest development.

Two weeks ago, an internal memo got leaked.  It was from an associate dean for Research, Budget, and Personnel, Michael Molino, and addressed to department chairs in several of the colleges.  The SIUC Alumni Association – and as it turns out, the provost (though not mentioned in the memo) – were starting a pilot program looking to bring in qualified alumni with Ph.D.s for three year appointments with “zero time adjunct status” in graduate programs.

Within hours of the leak – first as a Facebook post by “The Professor Is In” – a variety of conversations, questions, knee jerk reactions, and rants flooded the internet, particularly on Twitter.  Nearly all of it was clearly negative in nature, but hard information about the precise motivation and meaning of the memo was lacking, and as an alumnus of SIUC, the first thing that struck me was how a very unlikely school had suddenly become –  in the minds of many people – a stand-in for their (often legitimate) gripes about contemporary academia in general. Continue reading →

Since the years of the George W. Bush administration, pundits have been poring over electoral maps, and drawing inferences – alternately illuminating, plausible, and at the very least interesting (though quite often false) – from the information conveyed in those representations.  By this point, enough pieces focused on the fundamental cultural and political divisions between rural America and urban America have been published that one could probably assemble an edited volume on the topic.

The latest of these, Red State Blue City, by David Graham, has just come out in the Atlantic.  It raises much of the same issues as the previous decade and a half of similar pieces.  If instead of focusing on the state-by-state electoral map, and you focus on the counties, it is clear that, with a few exceptions that seem to be based on racial demographics, there’s a significant and well-established split at the county level.  Rural counties go hard red, the majority of their voters supporting Republicans.  Urban counties show the opposite trend, deep blue, supporting the Democrats.  The urban counties, of course, wield a lot more votes  since they are densely populated, but there are far more rural counties, at least in most states. Continue reading →