Academia

One of my favorite metasciences lines is: “Does anyone look around and say…things are going great, I just think we need MORE PAPERS?” Obviously, we all want more scientific progress, better evidence, broader scope — but I don’t think that this is best accomplished by churning out more of these fancy peer-reviewed pdfs. Indeed, our systems […]

Together with many other academics in the Netherlands, I have been very busy in organizing a nation-wide demonstration next Thursday against the 1 billion budget cuts to higher education that our very-right-wing government has announced. (For background explanation, see this earlier post). Today, I have a long opinion piece in the daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad […]

Obviously people are shocked, and particularly shocked at the rejection of normal sensible politics by the rubes who have elected an oaf, a criminal and a rapist to the White House, again. But the trouble is that this kind of thing keeps happening, or nearly happening, and not just in the United States. And it […]

In the spring, I’ll be teaching the second semester of our philosophy grad program’s first-year seminar. This is the seminar all PhD students in the philosophy department take together as a cohort during their first year in the program. The fall semester of the seminar typically leans towards the metaphysics and epistemology side of philosophy, […]

“We live in an age which silence is not only criminal but suicidal”, wrote James Baldwin in his “Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis”. The year was 1970. I wonder if there has ever been a time when silence was neither criminal nor suicidal. I would like to live there and then, for […]

The prestigious university is resisting demands for fair treatment from casualised staff, despite its vast wealth

Until last Friday, I subscribed to two newspapers: the Washington Post and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. As of Friday, I only subscribe to NZZ. I shared my cancellation on Facebook and was surprised by how many people in my network commented that they had done the same. This included people who almost never comment or […]

The idea of the gold rush is deeply rooted in the American psyche. “There’s gold in them thar hills.” Anyone can abandon his family and community to gamble big on themselves. Thanks to this rugged individualism and the natural bounty of our territory, there’s a chance that you can strike it rich. More than American, […]