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Neo, neoliberals, and nonsense #2

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  Neo, neoliberals, and nonsense.   After taking the plunge with blog number 1, I now have to decide on some sort of direction of travel (making the assumption that more blogs will follow and that they may actually have to lead to somewhere or something). Thinking about coming up with that direction reminded me of how many years ago a colleague at another University asked me about my “five year research plan”. At that stage of my career, I was quietly confident of a rough sketch covering the subsequent 5 days or so, but months or years was well beyond my limited attention..>-SQUIRREL! [1] Now of course I have some ideas about things I would like to read about, summarise and share with you, but I have some concerns. First, a hypothesis 6 (about why I might want to write a blog), might be that it would compel me to read at least something of an economic and political literature that isn’t exactly unpleasant per se, but has a tendency to raise my blood pressure beyond its typica
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if a tree falls in the forest....#1

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  As a Ph.D student some years ago, I was walking down a hallway, singing “if a tree falls in the forest, would anybody hear it”? Instead of this, the correct line from a Bruce Cockburn song, I sang “If a tree, falls in the desert…”. One of my fellow students was passing, and adroitly finished with “…that would be surprising!” in perfect tune and tempo, no less. He is now a highly successful neurologist. My error, the neurologist would tell us, was a “semantic paraphasia” (meaning the word error was a related word, “desert”, to the intended word, “forest”). That I was making such errors many years ago is worrisome, now that I think about it (see below).   I digress. Why that song line now? Well, why do any of us want to blog? Why do I want to blog, and would it matter if nobody read it? In my case, in the words of Lilly Allen, it certainly is to some extent to have a “whinge [1]  and a moan” in main part about the state of British Universities. (If I do get a sufficient head of steam
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