Academia

Last week Australia’s central bank (Reserve Bank of Australia, RBA) raised interest rates. Again. Political economists have been talking for decades about the RBA’s tendency to redistribute wealth from the bottom upwards. But now it seems most people understand that the latest interest rate rises requires ordinary people to hand over more of their cash […]

Academics, especially in the humanities, produce texts, and they teach students to produce text. This is a standard assumption, often taken for granted, and maybe not too surprising in times in which productivity is a supreme social norm. Think of the relief – by students and faculty alike – when a text has been submitted […]

by Robert (Robby) Cserni* On a Zoom call, Greg, a graduate student in social work, described a problem that had nothing to do with his ability. Strong grades, clear research questions, two years into a thesis that should have been finished. The reason it was not finished was that his two advisors could not agree […]

The New South Wales gold rush began more than 400 million years ago. It was an age of fire, that ended with ice. Australia was part of the super-continent Gondwana, which was not yet south. By continent standards it was moving fast. By the end of this era, the Ordovician, it would be at the […]

The news from Hungary’s election is so good that I need to write about it, even if not all the implications are clear yet, and even in a disorganised and way, repeating lots of what others are saying. Although the polls predicted Orban’s defeat, nothing I read foreshadowed the scale of the victory – a […]