Karl Steel 🍉 @KarlSteel Twitter profile

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

9 months

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

4 years

Minnesota cops slashing the tires of medical workers.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

3 years

Do I have this right? A UK cop murdered a woman; the UK right, without much opposition from the nominal left party, made it illegal to insult a statue or look weird at the cops; and now the cops are beating anyone who doesn't like it.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

8 years

It's a small thing, but when jerks leave anonymous comments on your blog, you can use that anonymity against them

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

15 days

Got fired from an office job c 1995 for which my only responsibilities were generating weekly, monthly, and annual reports, and which id automated so much that I worked 10-3, w 2 hour lunches, when my boss saw me and said outloud 'you still work here?'

Liam Bright

@lastpositivist

15 days

Was being an office worker in the 90s really as hellish as cultural media memory would make it seem?

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

2 years

@dee_bee_h @chrisecrowley "my husband and my wife"

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

4 years

in re: arguments that slashing tires prevented cars from being used as weapons against protesters or the police. um. not sure how a parked car without a driver in it is gonna get up and try to run someone down, but, you know, New Yorker here, so I don't know cars. Gee whiz???

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

4 years

all personal news happens in parentheses these days but

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

15 days

If I'd taken longer lunches I'd probably be on the verge of retirement by now.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

4 years

@loadedonloaded two pages later: "where's your antithesis statement?"

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

6 years

Remember that this year's freshman, perhaps born in 1999, have no memory of - Sir Thomas Browne' Hydriotaphia - William Prynne's Histriomastix - Richard of Bury's Philobiblon But they are all deep fans of the Vampyroteuthis Infernalis Update your pop culture references.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

3 years

political conservatives are not underrepresented at US universities. Boards of Trustees are not leftwing. Any University with a major football program is definitely not powered by leftwingers. Business programs are not left.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

4 years

whoops, going viral I guess? Muting for a while, but if you have the $$, you can join me today in donating, for example, to a bail fund

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

1 year

You must love vase as I love vase

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

5 years

Just a reminder than "millennials" are between 23 and 38, which is to say, on the youngest end, many have graduated college, and on the older end, 60% of the married ones have already been divorced once. So, he offers tediously, just say "young people"

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

4 years

@_FelipeAzambuja @llchristyll they're....cops?

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

1 year

extremely uncanny to see my 1992 copy of Finnegans Wake just floating around online here on twitter I know it was lent to the journal Glossator for a cover, and from there, who knows how it slipped out to the general internet....

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

3 years

Columbia Faculty who are annoyed that the union activity is making their jobs harder. The president and board of trustees can change that, you know.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

5 years

Cover design!! I like it a lot.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

1 year

@dabeard @NatGeo Red tape would have kept the sub out of the water in the first place. Try again.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

1 year

Collecting useful material on the WVU bloodbath. Here's a thread / list

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

7 years

Will you just look at these little feet on the front cover of the Morgan Library's Lindau Gospels #medievaltwitter

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

4 years

NYC public spaces as d presidential candidates: Pete: Hudson Yards Amy Klobuchar: Long Island City waterfront Yang: the Oculus Biden: Penn Station, not the old one Warren: NY P research library Sanders: all the other NYPublic libraries Bloomberg: closed for a private event

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

4 years

Saying that academia is mostly finishing school for rich kids tries to come off as a critique of how out it touch academics are, but in fact, because most higher ed in the US is 2-year colleges, it's actually a confession that the critic's out of touch.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

1 year

they found my bones in a midden and are trying to determine if I represent a throwback version of my species relative to the other bones around me

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

15 days

@SanjayNadaraja Some windows product. Some other stuff with FileMaker pro.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

5 years

Let undergrads in on a big secret. We're reading Foucault's MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION, and I said, 'well, here's how I think it might end.' Students: 'you haven't read this before?!' Me: 'I don't think so. And that's often why profs put things on syllabuses. So we can read them.'

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

3 years

The Muppets take Constantinople in 1453

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

2 years

With your encouragement, I tried watching SEVERANCE, the tv show, and abandoned it when I saw it'd been renewed for a second series. Shows with no set end structured around a mystery means either deferred or inadequate revelation.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

3 years

I'm really trying to hold off on making fun of Sinema, bc she wasn't the only no vote on minimum wage, but learning that her diss uses Agamben and Mbembe is just: we all know this type among nominally leftist academics.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

6 years

Holy smokes, I just got used as an epigraph (for the first time!)! #medievaltwitter Bragbrag.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

1 year

@lizkimtweets @NYCComptroller Adams is such a hateful goon

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

4 years

Some 18k follower jerk is declaring edited collections a waste of time. Subtweeting, bc she's dead wrong. Some are good, most aren't or of extremely limited value, like peer-reviewed articles. But, obv, I've read so much good work in them.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

4 years

Currently holed up with gf and her two teenagers, and if we have a 'shelter in place' order, these kids are gonna come out of this knowing Middle English whether they like it or not

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

3 months

sending email

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

7 years

If you're curious to know how midcareer academics respond to revision requests for things they've submitted, here's me:

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

8 years

@LS19Rob thank you for your important contribution with a point I have certainly never considered before.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

3 years

welp, in support of the strike, not teaching my Columbia Seminar tomorrow.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

6 years

Okay everyone get mad at Seneca now

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

2 months

@MikeJam72144692 @richmintz love how people like this don't think restaurant workers are workers.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

7 years

@tao_lin @MelissaEJordan How fucking embarrassing for you

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

7 years

Leah for President

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

6 years

Fellow proffies: once again, never insult your students' writing in public. If their ideas are offensive, go after the ideas, but w/out naming them as coming from students. And if they make mistakes, in grammar, eg, TEACH THEM. It's the decent thing to do. And it's your job.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

6 years

"Also, please list three features that make your book unique." 1. it's the only second book I'm ever going to write 2. several word combinations (eg "from cow to cat") appear here and nowhere else 3. god this is so hard I can't even finish it in joke form

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

1 year

@DavidKlion B U-S's father is a medical doctor with a phd. breathtaking.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

2 years

the chronicler Robert of Torigni tells us of a magnificent dinner in 1172 thrown by Henry II. One room held 110 feasting knights, all named William, who ejected anyone not so named. Even so, there was a surplus of Williams, as some of them ate with Henry.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

2 years

A lot of academic literary criticism uses "subversive" when they should just use "fun." I know you'd *like* it to be "subversive" -- a kind of aimless apolitical restlessness -- but what if dominant systems aren't as rigid as all that, and have a capacity for fun built in? Jeez.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

5 years

once again, recited opening to the General Prologue into my phone. The result this time: #medievaltwitter

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

4 years

Whatever you think "feudalism" was, its distinguishing feature wasn't its cruel exploitation of farm labor. I mean, that's common to *many* political systems, including many more relevant for 21st-century analogies than "feudalism."

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

7 years

The invention of the white race surely numbers among history's greatest crimes.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

6 years

2017 was, personally speaking, garbage; 2018 was, ditto, bananas for me and for nearly anyone who fell into the Miasma of Karl. So I'm allowed to brag about having submitted Book2 and signing a goddamn contract and teaching my classes and finding a good therapist, woo.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

5 years

If you're going to get my new book, get it through : If you want to read (or assign!) my first book for free, here's a pdf, provided, happily, by the publisher, the Ohio State University Press:

How Not to Make a Human: Pets, Feral Children, Worms, Sky Burial, Oysters a book by Karl Steel

From pet keeping to sky burials, a posthuman and ecocritical interrogation of and challenge to human particularity in medieval texts Mainstream medieval thought, like much of mainstream modern...

bookshop.org

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

3 years

Funny to me that average person believes medieval writing is somehow mostly beholden to the church or king, unable to speak freely, when the most widely encountered narrative forms today are beholden utterly to investers. Even Lydgate could wiggle in ways Sam Raimi can't anymore.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

1 year

Loss of Periodization in English Departments and the turn to methods rather than coverage etc obviously opens the pit to never rehiring lines lost to death or retirement.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

3 years

Who wore it better

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

5 years

No it's not, because there's no system of mutual obligation. What you're talking about is capitalism.

Locus Magazine

@locusmag

5 years

"There's a name for societies where a small elite own property and everyone else rents that property from them: it's called feudalism." A new article by @doctorow !

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

2 years

I too fear pizzas

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

1 year

@lionel_trolling 3rd grade I had to explain to a future cop that the US didn't fight Germany in WW1 and Japan in WW2 as, like, separate wars. That was third grade though ! And the kid already had cop brain.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

8 years

@tradercoach @WillMcPhail compared to the repulsive grifter in this allegory who actually ended up 'flying' the plane, yes.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

6 years

Not only am I reduced to using 'element of surprise', because my writing brain can't do any better than clichés this morning; I nearly typed it as 'elephant of surprise,' which is at once wonderful and also sadly irrelevant to what I'm trying to say.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

6 months

Another problem with CUNY Chancellor insisting that no classes be run unless full is that our students generally have working lives outside school. We run classes to meet the students where they are, not vice versa, ideally, because we serve working people.

CUNY On Strike Campaign

@cunyonstrike

6 months

Memo from CUNY’s Executive Vice Chancellor to all of the college presidents and deans outlining new harsh cuts to be implemented at all of the colleges, including “academic program review”

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

5 years

From Spring 2019 student evaluations: "You can also tell that he really loves the field he works in because of how he will always show us recent news articles related to his field of study and his passionate hatred for inaccurate uhaul advertisements."

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

8 years

may a blessing be upon all articles that compile and translate primary sources and make boring arguments, for lo, they are helpful.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

8 years

@amodernsisyphus @derekahunter @KFILE happen to have it on hand. look at all those beautiful quotation marks. gosh. so nice.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

4 years

@Dustin_McK lead pipes, the spread of Christianity, ethnic dilution of pure Roman stock because of invasions of variously ethnically homogeneous Barbarian tribes, and loss of manly virtue.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

9 years

whenever you retweet a manuscript image w/ proper identification and a link to the source, an angel eats a slice of delicious pizza for you

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

3 years

my most on the nose english prof response to THE CHAIR is having read many essays about it now while having watched only half of it, with no intention ever to finish it.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

7 years

MEDIEVAL NONHUMANISMS (forthcoming U of Minnesota) - 73,868 words here. Only an as yet unwritten introduction away from a submittable draft. Wooo.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

3 years

why wasn't grunge called The Puget Sound

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

5 years

Eeeeeeeeeeeee Eeeeeeeeeeeee

Doug Armato

@noctambulate

5 years

Especially excited to see advances of ⁦ @KarlSteel ⁩’s new book hit my desk this afternoon. As with all my favorite scholarly books, it is at once marvelously arcane and truly universal.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

4 years

The "come and take it" right wingers forget that the Spartans lost

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

7 years

Broke the NAH rule. Never Assign Hegel. Because now I have to read it. And understand it just a *little* bit better than my students.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

3 months

@BLACKTIVIST5 @BarakRavid because ISIS wasn't doing this with funding from the USA

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

6 years

midcareer prof sits on couch, finishing grading, softly singing alphabet song, attempting to remember whether l comes after k

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

8 years

@marianryanese and then there's being a sympithizer, which is one of my favorite instruments

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

5 years

One problem with blaming a "medieval mindset" for continued antisemitism is that medieval Jews targeted by medieval antisemitism were living in the Middle Ages, and therefore had as much of a "medieval mindset" as their murderers. Maybe the problem isn't the Middle Ages per se.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

6 years

Checking my rate my professor and bravo to the student who wrote "If it were possible, I would take him every semester repeatedly until one of us dies" and who has clearly learned things from me about ambiguity.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

3 years

No Mr Bond I expect you to die

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

4 years

Decameron really is the work for this time, in that it's about a set of media-savvy rich kids who dodge the plague at their vacation house, while the rest of the world dies back in crowded cities.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

1 year

Tried to comfort a colleague who's unsettled by the sound of her own voice by explaining that what she thinks is her voice is just her words echoing in the chamber of her skull.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

4 years

@jasoninmia Nearly all my conference travel. It's an expensive hobby at this point.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

8 years

Dear people of America: if you don't read books, this is what you sound like. Read books.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

3 months

This chore coat from Brooks Bros (bought on sale, yeah) makes me look like I'm here to nationalize your extractive industries.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

4 years

Had a great (outdoor) birthday party with someone who did a dramatic reading of a shitty review one of her novels got in the NYT 21 years ago: no one ever forgets these things

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

8 years

I'm at a library in small town upstate NY for reasons, and let me remind you how great and vital small town libraries are.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

4 years

10 tweets on medieval pets. In the 13th century, Bonaventure asked why God made animals, and he gave a (mostly) standard answer. To help humans: for food, for clothing, and for labor, but then, surprisingly, also "for comfort, like certain birds, or little dogs, and the like"

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

7 years

From a friend - very $$ Mercedes Jeep in Madison, with SS insignia. Heads up, Wisconsin.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

1 year

podcast on what happens to rural communities when their higher education institutions are destroyed

What a decline in rural colleges means for rural communities

Rural colleges in America are struggling. Due to enrollment and funding shortages, many have had to close or slash core majors to stay afloat.

www.wbur.org

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

7 years

All tenured professors should write for the general public, which is why I write about MEDIEVAL OYSTERS.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

8 years

Bless my students. Bless my student who's terrified to walk to school. Bless my students whose Spanish names outrage Anglos. Bless them.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

6 years

Want to assemble a GOOD PRACTICES CONFERENCE PRESENTATION BINGO. Maybe crowd source it? Here's a start: 1. has own dongle 2. 2 minutes short of time 3. good anecdotes! 4. short, generous question

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

7 years

I may or may not have posted a punctuation troll on fb to get English profs disagreeing so I could show the debate to my undergrads.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

2 years

@ConceptualJames hi stretchy boi

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

5 years

Can I also just observe that what I did here was SCREENCAP AND BLOCK. Don't amplify racists by giving them a link or alerting the original account to our attention.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

2 years

American Gothic

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

7 years

Most email to academics that begin with "I'm sorry for the delay" should, instead, begin with "We've both been too busy to think about this"

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

5 years

That weirdo crap Science article seems to have found its audience

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

6 years

Sometimes think that men who complain the scholars don't write for real people are just blaming me for the difficulty they have in reading material that requires their attention and uncertainty.

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Karl Steel 🍉

@KarlSteel

6 years

Not too unproud to share me in the NYT today, looking hot and resolute/uncomfortable as a representative protester

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