Sifting and Winnowing

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And happy Thanksgiving!

The campus has been awash lately in profoundly important new developments, ranging from the narrowly-averted forced unionization of RAs to the clawback of raises to the mandatory furloughs to the proposed restructuring of the Graduate School.   All of these issues deserve, but have not yet been receiving, a fully open and informed airing by campus citizens from across the spectrum of opinion.    The exceptionally urgent need for a public forum has given me the impetus to finally solve the spam problem and reopen this site.  This I have now done by adding a reCaptcha plugin to the comment function (for those who are interested, reCaptcha also helps digitize old books! — read more here).

There remains, of course, a significant hurdle to be overcome:  For there to be readers, there must be writers.  For there to be writers, there normally has to be at least the prospect of readers.

During the coming weeks, I will  try to break the logjam by  actively recruiting colleagues who are willing to invest in the future of this forum by contributing opinion pieces even before a significant readership is established.  If you would like to be one of those contributors, I urge you to contact me with your proposed topic.

In the meantime, I thank you for your patience, and I look forward to your support.

- the Editor

Anyone who has peeked into this site anytime in the last few months will have noticed a complete dearth of visible activity.   There’s a couple of reasons for this, not least the fact that we do not yet have a critical mass of both contributors and readers to sustain regular postings.  However, one major contributing factor has been that this forum has become a total spam magnet!  Having to manually scan and delete over 4,000 accumulated spam comments, as I just did, takes much of the fun out of administering the site.

A long-term solution would lie in the installation of a Captcha plug-in that requires a commenter to prove they are human (by typing the characters in a distorted image) before a comment will even be accepted for moderation.  For reasons I cannot quite fathom in view of the obvious need, the procedure for doing this in WordPress is rather unfriendly, and so I haven’t yet finished muddling my way through it.

In the meantime, I have disabled comments, period.  If you would urgently like to post a comment on an existing article, please send e-mail to admin@siftingandwinnowing.org and we’ll work out a backdoor way for you to get your comment posted.

In the meantime, my apologies for both the inactivity and any inconvenience!  Stay tuned….

- The Editor