There’s been a lot of focus lately on Crisis Intervention Training for police officers. It’s being billed as an antidote to the failures of police to handle situations involving mental illness. Maryland just became the first state to mandate it state-wide for all officers, thanks to the work of the #JusticeForEthan movement. I’ll be writing…
Yesterday I got a comment on another post from a parent who ended up on my blog. The short version is that at a public play-place her son was hurt by a child with DS and she didn’t know what to do about it, because how can you blame a child with DS for anything?…
I write a lot about privilege and I have a lot of privilege. I’ve long argued that it’s important to be very thoughtful when writing about academic labor while tenured, gender while male, race while white, disability while able-bodied, and so forth. When writing about a given power dynamic, I often have the power by…
Not Nico’s Actual Bus “It’s so sad when people have special needs.” A caring, sweet, 4th-grader said this to me at the bus stop a few minutes ago. My son and I crossed the street, running and laughing, happy. Then he asked me to go see a dog that was being walked across the grass,…
A representation of possible intersections. Not representative of Rodger. The murders in California and the subsequent #YesAllWomen hashtag (an overview) have, appropriately, dominated my social media world since it happened. For some, the murder is a clear call to action – but to act where? How? For others, the response has been to shrug, to say, “it’s complicated,” or just…
It’s Sunday and it’s my birthday. Here’s my blog post. I wrote good stuff this week. Please go read it and share it. 🙂 I published three essays – Chronicle on being a working dad, CNN on trigger warnings, and Chronicle Vitae on labor identity for full-time faculty, which is a record for me. All of these are themes to…
I’m working on a piece about the various ways that writers about higher education, especially those within the academy, write about students with absolute disdain. Here are some of the responses to the Trigger Warning and Commencement issue, both filled with scorn and not getting it. Here’s the worst, one so bad I am hesitant…
Brief rant: 1) Nothing is EVER the “last acceptable” anything. There are multiple types of prejudice at work in pretty much every situation. — David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) May 20, 2014 2) Calling something “last acceptable” is a way of saying no one is paying attention to your cause! But it’s not needed. — David…
On International May Day I wrote a little hymn. I wrote: Teaching is work. Programming is work. Scholarship is work. Science is work. Grading is work. Committee service is work. Today Chronicle Vitae published a column on academic work as labor, as work. It’s a linked column to this first piece on the language of adjunct…
In my Chronicle piece on being a father, I wrote: No one has ever questioned my work ethic to my face because I’m a father. In fact, one day I was so tired from caring for my two children—at the time a 2-year-old boy and a 3-month-old baby girl with colic—that I simply lost my ability…