Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
William McKay and Charles W. Johnson discuss procedural and institutional developments in the UK and the US over the last few months: in the UK, the new Parliament and coalition government, and in the US, the procedural complexities of the heath care reform bill.
Jerald M. Jellison has been a Professor of Psychology at the University of Southern California for three decades. His book, Life After Grad School: Getting From A to B, looks at the unspoken truth that less than 5 percent of the 2.5 million graduate students in the U.S. will realize their dream of becoming a professor. Jellison looks at what the other 95 percent should do, illuminating the transition from academia to a satisfying and well-paying job with a company, government agency, or not-for-profit organization. In the excerpt below Jellison addresses how students should find out if they are destined to become a tenure track professor.
It would be easy to make a list of the stars that I have spotted here at the Hay Festival since I arrived, or indeed the past colleagues I have worked with, but actually what strikes me more, on this visit, is what is going on outside the boundaries of the festival.
This is a weekly blog, and ever since it began I have been meaning to write a post about the word week. Now that we are in the middle of the first week of the first summer month, the time appears to be ripe for my overdue project.
A few weeks ago I had the honor of attending BEA2010 (no not the BEA that happened last week) which was part of the 2010NAB conference. I was there to celebrate the launch of the BBC College of Journalism Website (COJO) a collaboration between OUP and the BBC. The site allows citizens outside of the UK access to the online learning and development materials created for BBC journalists. It is a vast resource filled to the brim with videos, audio clips, discussion pages, interactive modules and text pages covering every aspect of TV, radio, and online journalism. At the conference I had a chance to talk with Kevin Marsh, the Executive Editor of COJO, and I will be sharing clips from our conversation for the next few weeks. This week I have posted a clip which emphasizes the true hard work that journalism involves. Read Kevin’s blog here. Watch last week’s video here.
Harm de Blij is the John A. Hannah Professor of Geography at Michigan State University. The author of more than 30 books he is an honorary life member of the National Geographic Society and was for seven years the Geography Editor on ABC’s Good Morning America. His most recent book, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape, he reveals the rugged contours of our world that keep all but 3% of “mobals” stationary in the country where they were born. He argues that where we start our journey has much to do with our destiny, and thus with our chances of overcoming obstacles in our way. In the article below he looks at North Korea and China. Read his other OUPblog posts here.
Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at quid pro quo. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.