Two things: in my e-mail, the list of the members elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the 2026 class, including two linguists and two scholars of LGBTQ+ matters (I might have missed others); then through the USPS, the information booklet for this June’s California direct primary elections, with its massive list of candidates for governor (61 of them).
Archive for the ‘Academic life’ Category
In the mail
April 22, 2026The Vishnu of philosophy
March 12, 2026The philosopher Bill Lycan (an old friend, once my colleague at Ohio State, a prolific writer, and an enormously entertaining person) came to my mind when a friend was amazed that I managed to write at least one essay a day — every day of the year — as a posting on this blog (this posting is the second for today, and it’s not yet 9 am; I’m on a roll). At least once at Ohio State, a student asked Bill how he managed to publish so much (perhaps, like Vishnu, he could write with four arms at once). Bill’s wonderful reply:
I have a very high tolerance for error.
This was, in fact, a deeply serious reply, worth some reflection.
Remarkable sinecures
March 6, 2026From NOAD:
noun sinecure: a position requiring little or no work but giving the holder status or financial benefit: political sinecures for the supporters of ministers. ORIGIN mid 17th century: from Latin sine cura ‘without care’.
And now a juicy bit of political news as it appeared on Facebook today (4/6):
You just don’t know that you don’t know
March 3, 2026The phenomenon, from Wikipedia:
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that describes the systematic tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability. The term may also describe the tendency of high performers to underestimate their skills. It was first described by the psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999. In popular culture, the Dunning–Kruger effect is sometimes misunderstood as claiming that people with low intelligence are generally overconfident, instead of describing the specific overconfidence of people unskilled at particular areas.
As then in my mail recently, as a benefit of my being a member of the American Academy: “Why Do Fools Think They Are Wise? Should the Wise Believe Themselves to Be the Fool?” (a conversation between new American Academy member David Dunning and Academy President Laurie L. Patton about the Dunning-Kruger effect), Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Winter 2026, pp. 44-57.
How long is it?
February 25, 2026This is, first of all and primarily, the announcement of a dissertation oral presentation in Stanford’s Department of Linguistics:
The role of syntactic structure, contextual information, and supra-contextual information in durational patterns of words in spontaneous spoken English by Tony Velasquez
on Monday, March 9, 2026, 10:00am-11:15am, in Wallenberg Hall, Room 124. Committee: Arto Anttila (advisor), Robert Podesva, Dan Jurafsky, Katherine Hilton, and Tanya M. Luhrmann (Professor of Anthropology serving as University Chair); the format for this open part of the oral exam is a 30-45 minute talk by the PhD candidate followed by questions from those attending, for a total of no more than 75 minutes.
Service record
November 25, 2025The background, from my 11/24 posting “Work weeks”:
Back when I still had an academic life, 60 hours a week was the absolutely standard work week, combining teaching, teaching prep, research, publication, preparing and delivering public lectures (see the alarming record of these in yesterday’s posting “Scholarly communication”), and extensive service to the university and the profession.
This is about that extensive service to the university and the profession. Which is chronicled in my giant c.v., along with the teaching and public lectures; once again, the record of enormous amounts of real work, especially reviewing applications for grants from the NSF, NEH, and the Fulbright Program:
Work weeks
November 24, 2025Briefly noted. Lynneguist on Facebook today tracked her work weeks: typically 45 hours, rising to 60 at this point in the fall. I reported:
Back when I still had an academic life, 60 hours a week was the absolutely standard work week, combining teaching, teaching prep, research, publication, preparing and delivering public lectures (see the alarming record of these in yesterday’s posting “Scholarly communication”), and extensive service to the university and the profession. My man Jacques took on himself the burdens of seeing that I kept close to the 60-hour week; of preventing me from allowing commitments to take me towards 70- and 80-hour weeks (which he viewed, probably correctly, as dangerous to my health); and of acting as my helpful assistant. That was a great gift of love, offered in the gentlest way — but with an iron fist inside that velvet glove.
Scholarly communication
November 22, 2025In an old NCIS episode (“Bikini Wax”, S2 E15, 3/29/05), the chief medical examiner Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard (played by David McCallum) recollects that he’d considered a career in teaching but didn’t find the idea of lecturing on esoteric subjects attractive. Chacun a son goût and all that, but (resisting every digression beckoning me to another profession) I happily signed up to do just that when I was a graduate student at MIT, and went on to appointments at three universities (UIUC, OSU, and Stanford), with visiting teaching gigs at dozens of other institutions over the years.
With the responsibility of teaching, my positions came with a parallel responsibility to engage in research — and to report on that research, not only in writing but also in public presentations, where work in progress can gather useful critiques, and where completed work can be broadcast to new audiences. Face-to-face interaction, in a classroom or in a lecture room, is irreplaceable for scholarly communication, because it’s interactive and can be adjusted on the spot to fit the needs of the moment.
For years now, these interactions haven’t been available to me, so I’ve had to find interactive forms of scholarly communication in different modes: blogging on the internet (inviting commentary) and using social media. More popular and less esoteric, but still in their own ways pedagogical.
Thanks to Ducky Mallard for spurring me to go back to my great big c.v. that has everything in it, to look at the summary of what I did by way of scholarly communication in my previous life. I find it incredibly hard to believe that I was that person, but here’s the evidence.
Tomorrow x 4
November 21, 2025Tomorrow is 11/22; on my calendar this brings up a set of two deeply discordant anniversaries and the birthday of an admirable colleague and friend. And this year 11/22 is the date of Stanford’s preeminent sporting event, to add a note of passionate silliness to the whole business.
LSA news bulletin: awards
October 27, 2025Today turned out to be the annual awards announcement day for the Linguistic Society of America. Two awards of special interest to readers of this blog, in e-mail from the LSA (both announcements edited, rearranged, and expanded here):
The Bloomfield Book Award Committee, recognizing a volume that makes an outstanding contribution of enduring value to our understanding of language and linguistics, congratulates George Aaron Broadwell — Aaron Broadwell, of the University of Florida, Gainesville — as an award finalist (there are two finalists) on his book The Timucua Language: A Text-Based Reference Grammar, published by University of Nebraska Press in 2024. The award is named after Leonard Bloomfield, author of the influential textbook Language (1933), one of the founding members of the LSA in 1924, and its president in 1935.
Join the Committee on LGBTQ+ [Z] Issues in Linguistics (COZIL) in congratulating Kira Hall — of the University of Colorado, Boulder — as the 5th recipient of the prestigious Arnold Zwicky Award, intended to recognize LGBTQ+ scholars and those whose work in linguistics benefits the LGBTQ+ community. The award is named for Arnold Zwicky, the first openly LGBTQ+ president of the LSA.
So it’s LSA President’s Day (Bloomfield and me), and also LSA Pride Day (Aaron, Kira, and me).