A Somewhat Interesting Question from a Terrible, Terrible Writer

At Slate, regular higher education writer Rebecca Schuman raises the question whether a professor should ever assign to students a book that he or she has written. Her answer: No, never! Except, yes, sometimes. And adjuncts probably should do so, because the mistreatment they receive matters more than the mistreatment that students receive.

I find the question an interesting one. But, I readily confess, I link to it here mostly to make publicly a point I've made more privately elsewhere: Rebecca Schuman is, by leaps and bounds, the worst writer on higher education I've ever read. That's not a critique of her views or her complaints about the university, only some of which are wrong. Nevertheless, taken on the whole, article for article, screed for screed, she is just awful--so consistently "love-to-hate" awful that I almost can't get enough of her work. This is not true for everyone--I wouldn't say it of Eric Jarosinski, for example--but in this case I would say that the fact that Schuman is leaving the academy for web journalism says far more about web journalism than it does about the academy. Nor does her regular column at Slate speak well for Slate, which used to be quite good.