This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Tie Day: R.I.P. Professor Gusfield - Doug Hartmann at the Society Pages: 'His primary accomplishment is to show how our usual focus on drinking-driving as the moral failing of individual citizens distracts from  the institutional and structural problems of traffic and transportation, leisure-time use, urban design, ambiguities in the law, the power of corporate marketing, and the inherent dangers of driving itself are so very much a part of the “problem” as well.'
• What’s the Point of a Professor? - Mark Bauerlein in the New York Times: "You can’t become a moral authority if you rarely challenge students in class and engage them beyond it. If we professors do not do that, the course is not an induction of eager minds into an enlarging vision. It is a requirement to fulfill. Only our assistance with assignments matters"
• Australia's Own Version Of Islamic State Destruction Of Sacred Objects And People - William Scates Frances at New Matilda: "According to the New South Wales office of the Environment and Heritage, in a single year between June of 2012 and June 2013, over 99 applications for destruction of sites of Aboriginal heritage were considered. All were approved."
• The University after Conservative Victory - Chris Newfield at Remaking the University: "Trivializing society has of course been a highly successful core project of the political Right. That doesn't change the possibility of showing  that most of the total value of education is collective, based on network effects (I'm smarter because my neighbor is smarter and also because an unknown Scottish villager became smarter 30 years ago, with endless ripples outward and everywhere). All these spillovers, externalities and indirect effects through multiple variables, though they seem beyond the grasp of current political rationality, are the deep sources of real progress." Or, as Brendan Behan would say, "I never went to school, but I met the scholars coming back."
• For-Profit Colleges Face a Loan Revolt by Thousands Claiming Trickery - Tamar Lewin, NYT: "'So the department first makes the loans that lets students go to these fraudulent for-profit colleges […] and then when the students can’t pay back the loans, the department goes after them.'"
• Life in the Accelerated Academy: anxiety thrives, demands intensify and metrics hold the tangled web together - Mark Carrigan at the LSE: "As David Cameron put it recently, “if you’re not good or outstanding, you have to change … if you can’t do it yourself, you have to let experts come in and help you”. He was talking about secondary education rather than higher education but I’ve yet to encounter a more succinct statement of what the political theorist Will Davies memorably describes as heating up the floor to see who can keep hopping the longest."
• What Tony Abbott talks about when he talks about ‘welfare’ - Gabrielle Meagher and David P. Wilkins in the Australian Review of Public Affairs: "The most significant way that Mr Abbott’s talk expresses his politics is through the direction of the relationship between ‘having a go’ and ‘a fair go’. As we showed above, a fair go is dependent on having a go in Mr Abbott’s framing. The Prime Minister presents this as a causal argument: generous social support (‘welfare’) can come only after the economy produces the necessary resources. The point has a certain (trivial) force—it is desirable to fund social security from a surplus in total economic output in any particular period. However, the causal relationship between the extent of economic success and the level social support has been much debated. And there is at least some good evidence that the direction of causation goes the other way—from generous social supports to economic prosperity . In day-to-day party politics, debate about the direction of causation is played out in an ideological conflict, in which Mr Abbott comes down on the side of economic growth before social support."
• The New York Times’ Secret Rule Forbidding Its EU Writers from Reading Krugman - Bill Black at NEP carries out an autopsy on New Labour and finds death by mediamacro: 'New Labour has had “no clear guiding philosophy” from the beginning because its strategy of becoming Red Tories and joining the Conservative Party’s assaults on the working class and regulation and its championing of the most corrupt elite bank officers in the world is not a “philosophy.” At best, it is a craven political tactic that depends for its (temporary) electoral success on spectacularly unpopular Tory leadership.'
• Cameron rebooted: five more years of a shiny computerised toe in a prime-ministerial suit - Charlie Brooker playing Charlie Brooker at the Guardian: "The glaring disparity between the weeks of pre-election polling and the actual result is surely useful scientific data: perhaps the most comprehensive investigation into the difference between what people claim to think and what they actually think ever undertaken. Clearly, voting Tory is a guilty pleasure some people won’t readily admit to – like masturbating or listening to Gary Barlow. Or masturbating while listening to Gary Barlow. In the voting booth. Using your free hand to vote Conservative. Cameron’s Britain."
• The last gasp of (US) neoliberalism - John Quiggin
• The Secret Corporate Takeover - Joe Stiglitz provides Project Syndicate with the if-you-only-read-one-article-on-the-TPP article