Back in the olden days, when students would complain that I took a week to grade and return their writing assignments, I would counter them thus:
"Let me be honest. I grade 5 essays per class, per day. That works out to one week to grade your essays, and it allows me to take breaks during grading. Why do I need these breaks? Because after the 3rd or 4th time seeing the exact same errors that I corrected in your draft version making a reappearance in your final paper, I begin to get annoyed. Do you want to take the risk of your paper being the one I look at when I'm annoyed?"
There was rarely any complaining after that little explanation. I also graded in pencil, because my writing remarks tended to become caustic when my irritation levels rose. The pencil allowed me to vent my spleen, and then to return to the paper with a clearer head and replace my previous snark with actual helpful advice.
In a similar vein, I often type out entire emails full of sarcastic bile in response to some academic's or administrator's annoying request, and then delete the email and respond in a more professional manner. I remain sane and employed by doing this, and recommend it to anyone - provided you know the difference between "DELETE" and "SEND."
I'm thinking that perhaps this guy should have employed my method. Or maybe he did, but he got Delete and Send confused.
How's this for an opener:
I say this reluctantly but not so subtly: you are not suitable for a graduate degree. It does not matter if your father died or if you have a medical certificate.
Now apparently the student in question was a slacker, and the professor finally lost patience. But anyone who works in academia (or PR) should know that you never, ever put anything in writing that you don't want published...
Unless it's in pencil.
If you're not up on this ongoing saga, here's the deal in a nutshell: TNR publishes one of those first person SHOCKER stories about American troops going all Heart of Darkness in Iraq. There are questions about veracity. And away we gooooooo!
That'll all shake out eventually, and it's not what I'm interested in. But the academic angle, and the types of writers our overly-insular, MFA circle-jerk programs are turning out, are what I'm interested in. Mainly because those people are RUINING MY LIFE by getting twee, pretentious and utterly useless fiction and nonfiction inserted into magazines that I used to enjoy--arg. I digress, sorry. It's a sensitive issue with me.
Anyway, during the course of following about ninety million links in order to determine what sort of serial miseducation results in the production of prose like this:
"Sliced writsts recovering from barbwire night mission in a furnished 1600's bedroom window open to the stars strained notes The Magic Flute from further down the hall when I'm off work early she brings me coffee and a fresh stack of freshly pressed laundry while struggling through The World According to Garp auf Deutsch...warum?...now you are a citizen of the world, son, so she rents a car to take me to Bamberg this weekend and maybe plane tickets to London the next because through a month of silence and guilt and regret, reciting the Zarathustra quote over and over in your head, "I've always carried a disdain for creatures who considered themselves kind merely because they were clawless"..and you "get it" and you "understand" and you see yourself maybe not for the first time and finally a perfect rearrival of yourself..."
Holy God. Sorry, just had to pause for a moment to clear my head.
As I was saying, in my search for something academic to blame for craptastic modern writing, I came across this bit of textual analysis from a semiotician named John Barnes. Don't know much about semiotics as a profession (he explains it in the blog entry), but the dude does a killer analysis here. Here are the money graphs, but read the whole thing--it's worthwhile.
"He (it is always a he) is an MFA candidate or recent graduate at one of the big-name creative writing programs in the USA, sometimes in poetry, usually in fiction, and increasingly in "creative non-fiction" (the litsy byline that "feature writing" took on when it moved uptown, became significant, and stopped having lunch with its old buds at the newspapers). Usually he is in his mid-twenties and is probably among the bright stars in the tiny constellation (and complicated pecking order) that MFA programs create. His particular niche in that social ecology will be the Big Talent With Big Balls, a role that requires some claim to a "dangerous" or "edgy" past, meaning some connection to interpersonal violence and to having seen some gruesome sights. (Being recently back from combat duty in Iraq, particularly if the young man is a reservist who will be going back for another hitch there, would certainly fit the bill nicely – at various times I have known such characters to claim to be motorcycle gang members, to have smuggled cocaine into the US in small boats, and to have competed as Ultimate Fighting professionals)....
"Scott Thomas", however, writes exactly like the mid-20s macho MFA student who is lying about an adventurous background. That list of symptoms I gave above is what every one of them I have encountered – probably around 50 in my lifetime – has written like. The point of those stylistic tics and content-fetishes is the same as the point of all the bizarre stories of mayhem, cruelty, and sheer shit-headedness that they tell in the bar after writing workshops: to confirm their role in the MFA program social system. Among the benefits of that role are free passes on certain kinds of bad behavior in class, sexual attractiveness to some other grad students (those with a thing for bad boys), and the maintenance of their interior movie in which they are played by some combination of James Dean, Bob Dylan, the younger Norman Mailer, and Hunter S. Thompson."
Beautiful.
Ya know, it's probably bad of me to deliberately wait until Inside Higher Ed publishes its version of the Ward Churchill Gets Fired story to post a link, but the usual suspects on that comments forum simply leave the regulars at the Chronicle in the dust.
So read and enjoy.
Oddest bit of "this question cannot be answered" logic from a blog referenced at the end of the article:
“Should the fact of a witch-hunt be enough to bring academia to the defense of one of its own? The knee-jerk answer is ‘Yes.’ But what if it turns out that the person in question (the details of the Churchill case aside) really wasn’t qualified for the position, by background or by scholarship? What if it turns out that there certainly was dishonesty going on? Should the defense be continued?” Barlow wrote. “The results of the Churchill case will not answer these questions..."
Why won't they? What academic institution would want to continue to place its own reputation on the line for someone who should never have been a member of the faculty--according to both the institution's and the discipline's standards--in the first place? Either you're qualified or you aren't. Either you plagiarized or you didn't. Some things just aren't subjective, particularly if you're trying to maintain trust in the integrity of higher education.
The comments are the usual bag of laughs. The upside? If you make political hires, you'd best be prepared for political fires. Because for all the vaunted talk of academic freedom, your butt is totally at the mercy of donors, trustees, and nervous fundraisers with the administration's ear. And if you're a professional "provacateur" whose credentials and ethics are, shall we say, less than stellar, a low profile is your best friend if you want to stay at the higher ed trough. But that's a life lesson for another day, kids.
Cynical? Me?
Shut your mouth.
From a course description in Women's Studies, an example of why institutionalized feminism in the US is no longer being taken seriously:
The final set of interrelated questions attempts to think about the great apes—and animals in general—from a feminist perspective. On the one hand, it is interesting to note that the majority of published primatologists are women. In the world of science where women are almost always underrepresented, what kind of story do we want to tell about that fact? Is it the case that primatology is a field ignored by male scientists and so an opening was left for women? Is the connection between women and apes (and all animals?) different, or deeper? How would we talk about this without falling into essentialized assumptions?
Yes, how would we talk about this? I, for one, am left speechless.
Perhaps my essentialized assumption that I neither want nor require a connection between myself and an ape limits my rhetorical feminist potentiality and means that I am merely an oppressed tool of the speciesist (white)man!
Or perhaps I could draw on my inner english major and note that this professor's fascination with women and apes only serves to demonstrate that she has internalized the existential brainwashing of post Civil War anti-miscegenation propaganda and is expressing her (white)womyn's internal turmoil about race, class and gender relations in the postmodern era through the lens of the primate, in the process objectifying and demeaning the very thing she wishes to liberate--proving that the patriarchy is all-powerful, inescapable, and that maybe we should all just take a load off and have a 3 appletini lunch at the local organic whole food commune/tapas bar.
Or maybe I could have a beer and a hearty laugh.
From here.
So once upon a time there was a scientist who found a really freaking huge fossil of a flightless bird.
And there was a science writer at the scientist's university, who had to write about the fossil's discovery, and prepare the scientist for the resulting publicity--of which there was Quite A Lot.
And lo, all of the poor science writer's time--including free time, because of those pesky time differences and the Global Hunger For Giant Flightless Bird Fossil News--was sucked into the vortex of really freaking huge flightless bird fossils, resulting in the science writer being forced away from things she liked, such as blogging.
But there may be a light at the end of the tunnel, and perhaps tomorrow will find the science writer once again able to indulge a hobby.
Or the writer's article might get translated into Chinese, as promised by the Giant Science Funding Foundation, in which case she may never be heard from again.
Wanna know why I haven't been posting?
Because I'm obsessed.
Not even Hublet can free me from my obsession.
Why? Well, since my brain has been eaten, I'm having a hard time explaining why this thing has its hooks in me, but the best reason I can come up with is that it's like the total package of postmodern political and social and academic tensions all wrapped up in one case. And it's fascinating. And also kinda scary.
Ahh, finally. Another article at Inside Higher Ed about Ward Churchill.
My humble .02 - He's done. Now there will be lawsuits, etc., but he's not going to win those, either. His lawyer, however, will insist on taking this thing ever higher, because, well, paycheck.
But that's neither here nor there. The important thing is this: I am positively giddy at the wonders that the comments section will hold!
Wheeeee!
I can't believe it's been two years since the Ward Churchill brouhaha took place.
Especially since the Privilege and Tenure Committee at UC Boulder has only just given its recommendations on discipline for Churchill to the powers that be at the university. On May 8, in fact. 2 years later.
But commentary on the slow-moving (or barely-moving, your pick) nature of academic committees aside, the recommendation is interesting:
"Ward Churchill’s lawyer said today that a faculty committee at the University of Colorado had recommended that the ethnic-studies professor on the Boulder campus be suspended for a year — not fired."
Okay, let's recap.
Last May, almost a year ago exactly, a committee at Boulder delivered a 125-page report that reviewed "charges of misconduct," including:
"...misrepresentation of federal laws regarding American Indians, fabricating material regarding a smallpox epidemic in 1837, and several instances of plagiarism."
And here's where it gets hinky. If undergraduates can be expelled for plagiarism--and I would think that repeated instances of plagiarism (which is what the committee found that Churchill did) would result in expulsion--then shouldn't professors be held to at least that standard, if not a higher one?
Of course, as the original article noted:
"The investigative committee emphasized that it was uncomfortable with the timing and the motives of the accusations against Mr. Churchill, noting that several of them had been well known by scholars years before but had not been brought up formally until after the professor became publicly reviled."
So, what to make of this? The still, small cynic inside my head is telling me that the committee's recommendation is likely based more upon their reluctance to be seen as "kowtowing to the man" than to upholding academic standards.
I hate it when I agree with the cynic in my head. Darn thing starts getting all smug about being right all the time.
Came across this article in the Chronicle today which announces that the majority of high school students avoid MySpace and Facebook when doing research on which colleges to attend. "Fewer than 10%" use networking sites, in fact.
Well, thank God, but again - who the hell would look for info. on a college at MySpace?
Yeah, you might post to your friends list and tell them what schools you're looking at, and you might ask if anyone on there attends or is planning on attending, but fortunately it seems that most college-bound high schoolers are at least intuitively able to distinguish between anecdotal and factual information and the relative values thereof.
You may allow yourselves a small sigh of relief concerning the intellectual acumen of those who will be wiping your butt in your dotage.
I may print out a copy of this article and wave it about the next time we are forced to attend a "webinar" (and just typing that word makes my skin crawl) on "Reaching Generation Next" or whateverthehell the marketing wonks are calling it this week. Perhaps I will be saved from a 2-hour brainstorming meeting on "leveraging the marketing power of MySpace" to increase enrollment.
Or rankings. Because anytime higher ed folk start talking about leveraging the marketing power of anything, the only thing they're really looking to do is increase rankings.
This helpful factoid brought to you by BAW, Inc. - distilling crap into soundbites, so you don't have to!
Came across this blog today, via a link from this short article in the Chronicle (I think the content is free--if you can access it, read the first comment at the end of the article, b/c I can't figure out if it's for real).
Anyhoo, the blog deals with academic bullying and "mobbing," which is the PhD equivalent of all the chickens in the barnyard ganging up on the wounded one and pecking it to death. Fascinating reading.
The more I hear about carbon offsets, toilet paper conservation, and other schemes that Our Betters have devised for saving the planet while they continue to purchase palatial manses and jet hither and thither on private planes, the more I am reminded of this fellow:
But of his craft, fro Berwyk into Ware,
Ne was ther swich another pardoner
For in his malebag he hadde a pilwe-beer,
Which that he seyde was Oure Lady Veyl:
He seyde he hadde a gobetpiece of the seyl
That Seint Peter hadde, whan that he wente
Upon the see, til Jhesu Crist hym hente.
He hadde a croys of latoun ful of stones,
And in a glas he hadde pigges bones.
But with thise relikes, whan that he fond
A povre person dwellynge upon lond,
Upon a day he gat hym moore moneye
Than that the person gat in monthes tweye;
And thus, with feyned flaterye and japes,
He made the person and the peple his apes.
But trewely to tellen atte laste,
He was in chirche a noble ecclesiaste.
The Pardoner is Chaucer's most contemptible character. I think he'd be right at home among the wealthy greenies, selling fake peace of mind to folks whose talents lie more along the "talking a good game" end of the environmental spectrum.
And I have to admit I'd have a good old-fashioned schadenfreude moment while watching a hypocrite fleece other hypocrites. I wonder if the modern-day Pardoner would make the pilgrimage to Canterbury in a private jet?
I realize that I am prone to cynicism. However, I don't think my cynical nature is solely responsible for the fact that when I read something like this (may be subscription only, so I've excerpted below):
After adopting a new, "holistic" approach to reviewing applications, the University of California at Los Angeles has reversed a decline in the share of black students in the freshman class it has admitted for the fall, university officials said on Thursday. ...
Prior to the university's adoption of the new admissions policy last year, two application readers reviewed each prospective student's academic records while a third took into account the applicant's outside achievements and any challenges he or she might have overcome. Under the "holistic" approach, every application is read and considered in its entirety by two readers, and the readers give more consideration to the opportunities that had -- or had not -- been available to applicants.
My "cut the academic crap" detector translates it like this:
Okay, we can't overtly take race into consideration in admissions anymore, and we're in trouble because our numbers are askew. Hmmm. Perhaps a new approach is in order, whereby we "closely examine" each and every application, which will give us details about where the students lived and attended school...not that we can figure out someone's ethnic background just from that information or anything. And then we can sort of subjectively triangulate advantages versus disadvantages, and "correct" for the "imbalance," and then, based upon that information and the signs and portents that the Provost sees in the weekly reading of chicken entrails--we make admissions offers!
The mental acrobatics involved here are astonishing. If administrators spent as much time trying to fix the public education machine that perpetuates these problems as they do trying to fix their admissions numbers, maybe they wouldn't have to tie themselves into holistic knots anymore.
This is why certain programs on campus will never, ever be taken seriously.
Because if just showing up to WATCH a game qualifies someone to do sports management professionally, well then, I should be running a franchise and raking in the dough.
You'd think that the hardest part of this job for someone with a humanities background would be having to assimilate, condense and translate information about theoretical nanophysics or chemisty or genome sequencing into engaging prose for the masses.
You'd be wrong.
It's the politics, and I don't mean that in the donkey/elephant sense of the word. See, the scientists are competing for grant money, and the development people are competing for alumni donations, so they want the scientists to get the grant money so they can say "Look at our cool research!" to the donors, and the deans want their colleges to be firstest with the mostest so that both streams of revenue keep a rollin' in, and the grand high muckety-mucks just want the national rankings to go up, because then you get better grad students and better research and--yep, more funding.
Now, if you're dealing with just one scientist working solo (or with a bunch of grad students, which is pretty much the same thing), this is not a problem. But introduce colleagues, either from other universities or, God forbid, the same department, and some of these folks can give Hollywood stars who demand top billing a run for their money. Here is a sample conversation I had with a college communicator/development type over some research that the media were actually asking for--a rarity, btw.
Me: "Okay, I've gotten 2 or 3 queries about Science Project X. Who's the official PI on the work, Aged Politico, or Young Upstart?"
Communicator: "Aged Politico."
Me: "He's not available. He's never available because he's too busy politicking."
Comm: "I know."
Me: "I'm going to give them the Upstart."
Comm: (Sigh.)
Me: "What?"
Comm: "It's complicated."
Me: "How is this complicated? They both know the research and can talk about it to media."
Comm: "Well, Politico thinks that Upstart is trying to take credit for work he didn't do."
Me: "But Politico didn't do it either, right? The actual WORK was done by Unappreciated Foreign Grad Flunkie."
Comm: "Sort of."
Me: "We can't do phoners on this one - they want video. Can the Flunkie speak on camera?"
Comm: (hysterical laughter)
Me: "Scratch that, then. Look, this research is a big deal and we've missed opportunities to let folks know about it before because of their infighting--I have a folder full of passive-aggressive email back-and-forths between these two--and can I remind you that this is big picture stuff here? Promoting the university, not individual scientists or departments?"
Comm: "You don't have to sell me."
Me: "So what will happen if I give them the Upstart."
Comm: "Politico will complain to the Department Head. Who actually hates Politico because of something Politico did to him long ago, and Politico knows this, and then Upstart will say that Politico is trying to undermine him and poach his students, and the whole thing will devolve."
Me: "The odds of the Dean telling these two to play nice?"
Comm: "About the same as you getting hit with a meteor in the next 2 minutes."
Me: "And thus we are all doomed to obscurity."
Comm: "Welcome to the university."
You know, the thing that I find most tiresome about each and every instance of Academic Overreach Versus The Public is how it inevitably becomes a ginormous whinefest of epic proportions, with keening cries of "Oh, I've been silenced!" and "Oh, the dread Chilling Effect!" being given air by every public and media forum around.
Look, it's my old friend Irony! How ya doin'?
Irony: I demand beer. Copious amounts of beer.
Me: Why? Because it's Wednesday?
Irony: No, because I am working my ass off with this whole Group of 88 "we're so oppressed we have to have a public seminar about it" crap, and not ONE PERSON in the group has bothered to recognize me. Seriously, is it too much to ask that a "silenced" academic take one or two minutes out of his or her full slate of media interviews to thank me? IS IT?!?!
Me: I'm detecting bitterness, I.
Irony: You bet your bippy! I mean, it's one thing when a bunch of "silenced" singers releases AN ENTIRE ALBUM ABOUT HOW SILENCED THEY ARE, because hey! I don't expect artistic types to be able to pull their heads out long enough to recognize my presence, but these people are PhD holders in the humanities! They should at least have a passing familiarity with literary terms! WHAT is the university coming to?
Me: Do you really want an answer to that?
Irony: No. I'm depressed enough. Beer me.
Me: Done. Mind if I join you?
Over on the Durham in Wonderland blog, KC Johnson has posted a lengthy description of a course being offered this spring by one of the faculty members who signed the "Group of 88 Listening Statement" last April. The course is called "Hook-up Culture at Duke," and is fairly representative as far as these things go; i.e. it's largely a useless conglomeration of specious cultural studies that are conducted through the almighty lenses of PC culture: race, gender, sexuality and power.
The interesting thing about this class isn't so much the fact that it exists primarily to condemn Duke lacrosse players (read KC's post for those examples), but that it seems to serve as more of a vanity project for a professor who wants her personal viewpoints validated than as an opportunity for critical inquiry.
See, here's the thing - it isn't that you CAN'T have valid discussion and analysis about power relations and how groups of people interact with one another, it's just that professors like Anne Allison WON'T do it--reading her syllabus, it's pretty apparent that her arguments are one-sided, which I think gives me legitimate cause to believe that her discussions won't be much more balanced. And I blame that on a campus culture that not-so-subtly teaches its PhD candidates that it's okay to use scholarship for personal vindication--as a means to a political end.
No, I'm not saying that you should separate politics and scholarship. But when the approach to scholarship is taken from a political angle, rather than from a starting point of apolitical inquiry, what you end up with reams of inaccurate scholarship (Bellesiles, anyone? Churchill, anyone?), and departments filled with crusaders for whom the truth is what is most politically expedient.
And they should be ashamed of themselves.
From a psych professor, of all people, explaining why understanding human consciousness will magically end all yuckiness in the world:
As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. Yet once we realize that our own consciousness is a product of our brains and that other people have brains like ours, a denial of other people's sentience becomes ludicrous. "Hath not a Jew eyes?" asked Shylock. Today the question is more pointed: Hath not a Jew--or an Arab, or an African, or a baby, or a dog--a cerebral cortex and a thalamus? The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer.
Why on God's green earth would people who--as the author correctly points out--have managed for centuries to ignore their shared humanity based upon things like eyes and shared impulses toward family, love, etc., suddenly beat swords into plowshares upon confronting the fact that everyone is sentient?
They won't. The excerpt is from this longer piece in which yet another academic extols the virtues of scientific knowledge as the panacea for our times. And you know what? Scientists may one day be able to talk about the ways in which genes and electrical impulses control our thought patterns, but unless you're gonna start practicing active eugenics on every child in utero, you won't ever be able to correct for human nature.
And no, over-excited psych professor who has faith that this research is the true path for getting rid of that pesky "God" guy, that wasn't a suggestion. Sheesh.
Came across the latest 3-part piece by Charles Murray in the WSJ that basically states that too many folks who shouldn't be in college are. I agree with that general assertion, based on a lot of the kids I saw when I was a TA. You could predict who would wash out after the first semester, and you wondered why they wasted their time--they seemed dispirited and uncomfortable from the start, and beyond a certain point, there just wasn't much in the way of remediation that would benefit them. To put it bluntly, they just weren't smart enough to do the work--it wasn't a socio-economic thing, a home environment thing, or anything else.
I admire anyone who wants to get a college education to better him or herself, but watching the struggle and subsequent depression some of these kids experienced was painful. So I'm down with the whole "everyone doesn't necessarily need college" argument, and no, I don't mean that those folks without degrees should be doomed to low-paying jobs. Murray argues much the same way, but he will inevitably be called a racist, or sexist or elitist, because of what his argument is based on.
Murray's assertions are based on simple math formulas and IQ scores, which is what makes them so controversial and unpleasant. And I wonder what reaction other folks had to reading these pieces?
For me, I understand that not everyone is created equal, not intellectually or physically. But as someone raised in the fullness of the American dream--trust me, I could totally run as a populist and tell horror stories about my mill-worker grandparents with the elementary school educations while shoveling muck in the aftermath of some natural disaster, blah, blah, blah--it grates on me to hear that IQ determines educational success. "What about good old-fashioned elbow grease and spirit and bootstraps?" cries the tiny voice in my head.
Murray points out that high IQs don't necessarily lead to prosperity, and that low ones don't lead to poverty. And he's right. So why am I so disheartened by this? Is it because it seems awfully deterministic? Or am I so sensitive to things that seem deterministic because I was raised in the age of "you're a special flower of individualism"?
Hublet wanted to chime in on the whole "Theory, has it destroyed the earth?" debate, in response to Michael's comment that referenced Berube, by referencing an interesting review of Berube's book.
Everyone clear on that? Good!
Anyhoo, read it--Hublet's post, not Berube's book--here
Further thoughts on the post below, brought on by Locomotive Breath's request in the comments to be told how, exactly, this whole theory thing works. And by a post I came across yesterday that seems to be dealing with some of the same issues I am in terms of the "whither the humanities" or "withered humanities" debate.
And so, let me enlighten some of my hard sciences brethren and sistren. Caveat - this is going to be pretty darn general, so cut me a bit o' slack, english folks.
Back when God was a child, in the days before the Rise of Theory, most English majors participated in straight textual analysis or reader response - you read a book and dissected the language the author used, the metaphors, word choice, tropes, etc., looked at the larger themes, discussed its relevance to the human condition, blah, blah, blah. Scholars often focused on painstaking dissections of the text, particularly when dealing with older works, or they did research on the author's life and times. Some people even dared use the phrase "authorial intent" unironically! All very interesting, and an English degree was a pretty good way to get a handle on history, the arts and the human condition in a "big picture" sort of way. It honed mental acuity and analytical/communication skills. In short, if you were an English major, you could apply those basic skills to any field you ended up in. It was a good, solid, all-purpose education for smart people who didn't have a particular career path in mind after college.
The obvious drawback, as most college freshmen point out, is that eventually you kind of run out of new things to say about Shakespeare. Now, this isn't actually true, because the best literature is "living," in that its lessons are applicable to the human condition in whatever new configuration it finds itself, and the study of language is always relevant to people who use it, but I think that those thoughts helped bring about the rise of theory, which was originally proposed as a useful way to open texts up to new interpretations.
Well, okay. I don't have a problem with situating a text in history, or looking at it from different perspectives, or even playing around with the nature of language and meaning, but here's where it went pear-shaped: english stopped being about analyzing a text, which implies that you will form your our own ideas about a text, and became all about applying someone else's ideas--or theories--to texts, which led inevitably to making the text fit the theory. And somewhere along the way, critical thinking gave way to parsing, and sometimes, to deliberate misinterpretation, in order to make the theory "fit."
So now, instead of just being asked what literary era or genre you specialize in, you're also asked "the theory question"--which theoretical school of thought do you subscribe to? Are you a marxist? A feminist? A new historicist? Lacanian?
And the balkanization of theories has gone hand-in-fist with the balkanization of literature. Where it used to be large chunks of eras in lit, so that you were exposed to the big picture and conversant in all of it even if you later specialized in a small area of it, now you have subgroups based on regions, races, religions, political ideas, and literary theories. And within those balkanized subgroups, smaller subgroups exist; for example, if you're a feminist, do you follow the French or the American feminists? If so, which one? And this being academia, the inevitable, tired politics of the academy ensue, so that the discipline is now politicized, and balkanized, and snippy about it.
So you have a bunch of PhDs who come out of the educational process pigeonholed into a tiny area of expertise, training students who don't have a broad enough base of knowledge to understand that what they're learning is only a fraction of reality, or a particular view, and so you get people with English degrees who have a bit of surface knowledge about the entire discipline, and a lot of narrowly focused knowledge in one tiny area, and that area tainted with one particular theorist's ideas. It's knowledge in a vacuum, as opposed to the university's original ideal of "unity from diversity"--all areas of learning building upon each other. (It probably doesn't surprise you that I subscribe to the latter notion.)
I think the end result has been that it's very difficult to get a solid, broad-based education in english anymore, and I think that our communication skills have gone down the toilet as a result. We're focused on being glib, on parsing the language and twisting the texts, on questioning whether meaning exists instead of finding it, and you can see the end result of that when people start asking you to define "is." In other words, we're not doing anyone--least of all ourselves--any favors.
Step 1: Decide to specialize in either Medieval or Renaissance writers.
Step 2: Obtain an advisor who matriculated before 1980.
Step 3: Remain strong in the face of temptation to apply any of the following theories to Medieval or Renaissance writing: feminism, marxism, post-colonialism. New Historicism might do in a pinch. Yes, I realize that by doing this you will actually be forced to think, as opposed to excising passages from different theorists' books, inserting them block-quote style into your paper for maximum page-wasting impact, and then ignoring the actual text in favor of performing a series of simplistic mental gyrations that magically transform Troilus and Criseyde into a Marxist pamphlet, but trust me - the extra work will be worth it, because you'll actually learn something useful.
There are a number of additional tips that I could pass along to the determined English major on which classes to avoid at all costs, and which are unfortunately predicated on simply looking at the professor's door decorations and sartorial choices--yes, I realize that this probably makes me guilty of "obeying the imperative of the objectifying gaze" OMG--but it can really be summed up like this: If the syllabus contains any of the following words - hegemonic, privilege, the Other - or more than 3 words ending in the suffix "ist" that precede the word "analysis," RUN. RUN, AND DO NOT STOP UNTIL YOU FIND A COURSE IN READING BEOWULF IN THE ORIGINAL OLD ENGLISH. PREFERABLY ONE TAUGHT BY A PROFESSOR WHO IS OLD ENOUGH TO HAVE KNOWN GRENDEL PERSONALLY.
Wondering what brought this on? This did.
Everyone always complains about the lack of research funding in the humanities. Piffle! The money's there, but you have to do relevant research--you know, add to the larger body of human knowledge and experience and stuff.
Relevant and important research! Like looking into the cultural phenomenon of punk! (Scroll down to entry for Noah Eber-Schmid.)
Yes, you too can get $25 grand to study punkology--25 years too late!
Sigh.
But that's not all - you can study surfing as advocacy, learn why people braid stuff, and discover whether basketball is a force for change in the world.
Just so you know, I would gladly take $25 grand to study its effects on my 5 year old's college fund, but unfortunately I doubt that a) the money will make much of a dent in what it will actually cost to educate him, and b) the education will be worth a quarter of what we end up paying for it.
Maybe I can propose a trip to Cozumel instead, to study the effects of too much sun and bottomless margaritas on me.
Yeah, sorry I'm doing consecutive posts on the lacrosse thing, but it's like watching a slow-motion train wreck and I'm fascinated. And extremely glad that I don't have to handle Brodhead's p.r., but that's another story.
So yesterday the first civil suit was filed against a prof accused of deliberately failing 2 lacrosse students in "retaliation." The fact that the university changed the students' grades after the semester means it might not look too good for the prof.
Then today I was treated to an extremely long-winded op-ed from one of the authors of an ad that appeared in the student newspaper at Duke after the party--signed by 88 Duke profs--that's full of weeping and lamentation about the fact that hey, the world isn't a very nice place.
The op-ed is, well, long. And manages to do the thing that only the rarest of op-eds can do: make everything worse. There's puling of the high-minded "We had no IDEA that we'd make things worse" variety:
The ad we signed explicitly was not addressed to the police investigation or the rape allegations. The ad focused on racial and gender attitudes all too evident in the weeks after March 13. It decried prejudice and inequality in the society at large. "It isn't just Duke, it isn't everybody, and it isn't just individuals making this disaster," the ad insisted."
There's the retreat to moral high ground of the "I'm a brave professor saving the world 'cause God knows no one else on the planet is aware of racism! Or sexism! Or that strippers can actually be hired--of either gender--pretty damn easily! And I'm gonna shoehorn every social cause I can think of in here, because I'm an english professor who wants you to know that a bunch of stupid drunk jocks are a METAPHOR for all this stuff!" :
We are in the midst of a social disaster where 18 percent of the American population lives below the poverty line and a disproportionate number of those are African-American. We live in the midst of a social disaster where 30 percent of our students do not graduate from high school (making the U.S. No. 17 in the world). We live in the midst of a social disaster where women's salaries for similar jobs are substantially less than men's (and, as of this year, starting to go down again, not up). We live in the midst of a social disaster where we do not have national health care or affordable childcare. And we live in a situation where a group of white athletes at a prominent university can get drunk and call out for a stripper the way they would a pizza.
And finally, the coup de grace - the "Now I'm going to name-call everyone who disagrees with what we did and paint them as mentally unstable, or worse--violent--or EVEN WORSE: REPUBLICANS, so that no one can actually address the argument itself without suffering the taint of my mischaracterization, plus it makes me seem even braver! In literary terms, that's what we call 'creating a foil!'" paragraph:
On the other hand, most of my e-mail comes from right-wing "blog hooligans." These hateful, ranting and sometimes even threatening folks don't care about Duke or the lacrosse players. Their aim is to make academics and liberals look ridiculous and uncaring. They deliberately misrepresent the faculty and manipulate the feelings of those who care about the lacrosse players in order to foster their own demagogic political agenda. They contribute to the problem, not to the solution.
Wow, bitter much? No one is making you look ridiculous. You're competent professionals, and I'm sure you're more than capable of accomplishing that all on your own.
See? I still have faith in the professoriate.
But why, why, WHY, is it always the English profs? Sigh.
Like I told Hublet's sophomores when I spoke to them on Career Day, English is vital to your ability to get a job. Why? Because people like me will be reading the cover letters and resumes that you send in, and when people like me think you're an illiterate douchebag, your chances for successful employment in our companies will decline substantially.
Cases, many, many cases, in point.
My favorite? Living proof that self-esteem building efforts in education are working, even if actual education in academic topics isn't:
"I need real world experience and after reviewing your web site I get the impressing that your company believes in maintain a lax work environment while efficiently meeting the needs of it's customers (right?)." [We replied to this college senior, on an ill-advised rescue impulse, gently suggesting he get some remedial help with his writing, since he had an error in every single sentence of his three-page letter. His furious four-page reply included some amazing stuff, such as]
"...you should be straight forward and ... simply state that your company is seeking a grammar teacher who lacks creativity but knows how to properly write a letter and knows exactly where to place punctuation. If your company takes such a serious position towards proper grammar then I think you guys are in the wrong profession. I believe even the leader of this country that we live in lacks proper grammar yet he is still our leader. I can assure you that he leaves grammar and punctuation to the proper authorities such as his receptionist or grade school English teacher. ...I am not precisely sure why you choose to take such a stance perhaps because you have nothing better to do, or maybe because you have personal insecurities that seep out and you feel the need to degrade or target others based on stupid little infractions to make yourself feel better, I don't know what the case is ... if I am out of line please let me know but if I recall properly your companies web site is not the most professional site there is. If you guys are trying to project a laid back yet hard working image through your site and request the same from prospective employees then you should not be so prudent about minor infractions such as punctuation and grammar.... (I reread it before sending it and it states my point clearly and unless you lack the mental capacity to make out the meaning without having exact and precisise grammar maybe you should seek a new proffsion, I hear this country lacks alot of grammar school teachers perhaps that would be a better fit for you) In conclusion I have indeed made many mistakes in this e-mail many on purpose and many accidentaly I did not have the time nor the patientce to deal with it I will leave the grammer checking to the professionals such as yourself." [Editor's note: although his response fascinated us, you can understand why we no longer reply to the Differently Stable.]
Shamelessly stolen from the Cranky Prof.
So I came across this article--well, more like a straight transcription--yesterday in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. Seems that Michael Berube and David Horowitz had lunch.
Were salads flung with great pique? Soup spoons wielded with extreme prejudice?
Not so much. Basically, it was your typical academic conversation, which is to say it took a whole lot of words for Horowitz and Berube to get to the point, which appears to be, um, well, Horowitz called Berube a crazy radical and that apparently made Berube all mad but Horowitz promised to retract that, so yay. Oh, and professors should, you know, teach and not be nuts about it. Your definitions of "teach" and "nuts" may vary according to your political leanings, of course. As do your definitions of pretty much everything else, nowadays. Sigh.
Really the most interesting part of the whole thing was the fact that when face-to-face, the fiery rhetoric and glib insults that are so much a part and parcel of Web life were notably absent. You could argue that decorum won out, but the still, small cynic in me thinks that maybe it's a little harder to be a total asshole in person NOT because humans are bred to politeness, but because humans have been bred to fear a punch in the nose.
Maybe I'll give Don King a call--I bet there'd be a lot of interest in a series of Blog Rumbles.
Well, it's a toss-up between showing up for a dental appointment an hour early and having to reschedule and suffering an opthalmic migraine in the midst of discussing genome sequencing with a professor. I report, you decide.
I recently exchanged a few emails with a buddy from high school who is now an entomologist, and as usually happens, we started talking about academia and "collegiality" within departments. He had noticed that english departments seemed to be (as he put it) "snake pits" no matter where he was, and wondered why that might be the case.
Naturally, I prepared to leap to the defense of the beleaguered humanities, but then I started thinking about it, and came up with a possible explanation--which, since I came up with it, I rather like. Warning: sarcasm ahead! Like you needed that warning, but still.
Why are English departments the way they are? It seems to me that the explanation for their behavior is simple: you spend decades of your life studying something that's essentially static, and trying to come up with new reasons for it to be relevant, because it's simply not hip anymore to insist on the value of literature for its own sake. And really, there's only so much post-feminist Lacanian theory that you can apply to Chaucer before it becomes patently absurd. So you know you're smart, and you know that literature has value, but you're always having to justify your existence to each other and the world at large. It will eventually either drive you insane or turn you into an embittered scheming husk of a human. Which is why I do science writing.
You know, the irony is that English departments were the main proponents of the post-modernist theory that essentially gutted the "lit for lit's sake" position. What's that saying? Hoist by their own petard? Yeah.
You know, between listening to Hublet's laments about his 10th grade honor students who can only write at a 7th or 8th grade level and then reading about this nonsense at a supposedly Ivy League campus, I'm done. Apparently, teachers gave up on teaching reasoning and logical argument in about 1972.
"Why whatever do you mean, BAW?" I'm sure you're asking.
Let's let the students speak for themselves, shall we?
First off, we have the brilliant deductive and reasoning skills on display (literally) on this banner:
Two students in the International Socialist Organization unfurled a yellow banner reading, "No one is illegal!" which prompted other protestors to rush the stage.
Hate to break it to you, wee socialists, but a whole hell of a lot of people are illegal in this country, according to our laws, which apparently you haven't bothered to READ, because it's only COLLEGE, after all, and we shouldn't go around getting all hysterical and requiring COLLEGE STUDENTS to, you know, DO RESEARCH or anything. Everyone knows it's all about the beer and feeling good about yourself on your parents' dime! Jesus.
And then there's this charming bit of rationalizing sanctimony from a student whose ONLY good decision apparently is to remain anonymous--perhaps he or she subliminally realizes how stupid he or she is?
"We were aware that there was going to be a sign and we were going to occupy the stage," said a protestor who was on stage and asked to remain anonymous. "I don't feel like we need to apologize or anything. It was fundamentally a part of free speech. ... The Minutemen are not a legitimate part of the debate on immigration."
And why aren't the Minutemen legitimate? If a random group of socialist weirdos can make ignorant banners and act like 12 year olds in a place where such behavior was totally uncalled for, then why doesn't the person invited to speak at a specific event have the right to finish his speech? Ah, yes, the old "Because I'm RIGHT and I SAY SO!" argument. Which is always grounded in logic and cool reason. Idiot.
Here's a tip for the Ivy Leaguers: If you're gonna get all het up and exercise your 1st Amendment rights, you might want to exercise some reading comprehension at the same time.
Because otherwise you just end up looking dumb.
Paglia, that is. She's written an article on our current rediscovery of Marie Antoinette and parallels to our own time--frankly, it goes further toward explaining the weird feelings of surreality I've been experiencing over the past few months than anything else I've read.
The first half of the article is a pretty straightforward reviewing of the current spate of Antoinette-themed media offerings; skip to the bottom half for the interesting analysis.
You know, for all the mocking of the silly in academia, the only thing that actually really makes me angry when dealing with academics is when the person in question has an undeserved sense of entitlement. Actually, that makes me angry when I see it just about anywhere, come to think of it, but it's particularly galling when I have to deal with it as part of my actual job, and so the option of hitting someone with my shoe is not on the table. Not that I regularly whack people with my super-cute summer slides, but you get the idea. Restraint is not really a friend of mine.
And when the sense of entitlement is conveyed via an email tantrum over a TINY FREAKING ISSUE, it just makes my head explode.
Case in point - we updated our website, and in an attempt to drive traffic to the new, improved site, made a temporary change to our homepage. Now, our campus has a population of 30,000 souls, give or take. Out of those 30,000 people affected by this--let me reiterate--TEMPORARY change, 28,998 seemed unbothered.
Can you see what's coming? If you have ever worked in, around, or near a university I bet you can.
Yes, our TEMPORARY disruption caused trauma to exactly two people, both of whom were professors. Interestingly enough, one was a Humes type, and the other a Science type, and they were both just beautiful examples of self-important, humorless idiocy.
Let me summarize the emails we received: We had created an aesthetic NIGHTMARE! Who gave us the authority to do such a thing?! It was TOO MUCH INFORMATION and might result in one of the professors NOT READING THE NEWS!
Now, I am uncertain as to how his not reading the news was going to be detrimental to anyone besides the professor making the threat, but I don't have a Ph.D., so perhaps I just don't get it.
Irony would like to point out the academic tendency to show disdain for all types of authority EXCEPT that authority which might help an academic get his or her way in a situation. Irony would also like to point out the humor inherent in an academic complaining about receiving too much information.
The most annoying thing was the tone in which the emails were written--like it never occurred to them to send a missive that politely inquired about the reasoning behind the changes, they just immediately launched into threaten/attack mode. One would think that people who have to communicate for a living might understand the importance of reasonable discourse. But I suppose that if one is a professor, his or her pronouncements should simply be taken as gospel. Sigh.
From the last line in today's Chronicle story about UCLA's response to the animal rights terrorist group in their midst:
A spokesman for the university said on Sunday that the primate and other animal research conducted at the university was tightly regulated by state, federal, and university officials.
"UCLA takes very seriously the human treatment of animals," the spokesman said. (emphasis added)
Yes. And that does seem to be part of the problem, doesn't it. Because it's only after a bomb doesn't go off that UCLA decides to "explore" legal avenues against crazy idiots who are USING UCLA's NAME while trying to kill people. I'm sure the ALF is quaking in fear. Quaking!
Animals aren't people, no matter how much we anthropomorphize them. If my beloved feline were the size of a tiger, she would have no moral qualms about devouring my entire family, no matter how loving we were to her. See Treadwell, Timothy, for further clarification on this score, as well as for an explanation of what eventually happens to folks who over-identify with animals and who forget that nature is "red in tooth and claw."
See also 28 Days Later for a fun exploration of the role of animal rights activists in the apocalypse.
You know, it would be cynical even for me to admit that I was waiting for the "official story of the demise of Easter Island" to be contradicted, but I totally was.
And now it has. T'wasn't short-sighted human deforestation that killed Rapa Nui, 'twas rats and people.
See, eco-suicide is a neat little theory to put forth--especially when you've got a book to sell--but reality is that eco-suicide just takes too damn long, especially when you've got an opportunity for human beings to do what comes naturally and destroy each other. Guns, smallpox, and rats eating all the native plants work a lot faster than stone axes to decimate a civilization.
On the bright side, this new revelation will at least sell books for the post-colonial screw whitey crowd.
And maybe it'll open up a heretofore untapped market in the "rats are evil tools of The Man" school of social theory.
David Horowitz will EAT YOUR BAYBEEZ! Yes, perhaps that seems a bit overstated, but while perusing the two pieces on solving the culture wars in academe, his name appeared quite a bit, both inside the editorials and in the comments following.
The part of me that secretly wishes to be an evil overlord is envious of the Horowitzian ability to make academics wet themselves.
I also have learned that academia leans left because only liberals a) like to think critically, and b) are focused on helping others by taking, say, lower-paying jobs like teaching. Really. I suppose I should tell Hublet that he needs to get out of education Right Now and start working on that whole "screw you, every man for himself" Godon Gecko personality thing. Glad I discovered that before he wasted his life or something.
And Inside Higher Ed gave me another example of something I already knew--PIOs and department heads are paid to be paranoid. Unfortunately, it looks like some PIO is probably no longer on the payroll after that particular debacle. Paranoia only works properly if paired with a modicum of smarts.
So a pretty big part of my job consists of talking to scientists and then translating their research into "real words." Please don't go all deconstruction-y on me here for that terminology. Basically, I make the research lingo accessible to the general public. This is not without its challenges, but it's fun, and I get to learn all about cool science without ever having to balance another chemical equation, so I like it a lot.
The flip side of this is talking to the media and then trying to locate a scientific "expert" on a particular subject for them to interview. This is much harder, because media always want what I call "bare bones" science, and since our faculty are all research scientists, the bare bones science has disappeared under years of complex specialization. In short, it's hard for a lot of these folks to come down to the level that the media wants.
Today is a perfect example. What do the media want? Someone who can talk about "liquid explosives"--what they are, how you make them, etc. What are our faculty members working on?
New synthetic methodologies, strategies for asymmetric synthesis, directed metallation reactions, stereoselective reductions, catalytic asymmetric synthesis, new chiral auxiliaries; Development of nanostructured materials and studies of their electronic and optical properties; metalloprotein (re)engineering via incorporation of unnatural amino acids into enzyme active sites; Development of novel organometallic complexes for catalysis...
You get the idea. Still, it beats applying Lacanian theory to Middlemarch.
Or equivocate, or ramble wildly on in a blind panic because a random faculty member has suddenly revealed himself to be a bit nutty in a very public way.
Just a couple of Barrett-related items I found amusing, because nothing is funnier than silly academics except panicked administrators.
Based on this quote, lifted from this post about the Barrett hoo-ha, wherein the Provost opines:
“I think the political correctness — or non-political correctness — of his views outside the classroom … should not have an impact on whether or not he’s allowed to teach."
Umm. We're not talking about whether or not Barrett is using "charged or offensive language," dude. We're talking science.
And then the provost, bless his heart, wants to stand up for academic freedom and freedom of speech, provided that the freedom isn't too, you know, loud or noticeable:
UW-Madison Provost Patrick Farrell also warned Kevin Barrett to stop associating himself with UW-Madison when he advocates his views. Otherwise, Farrell wrote in the July 20 letter, he would reconsider his decision to allow Barrett to teach a course on Islam this fall.
``In summary, if you continue to identify yourself with UW-Madison in your personal political messages or illustrate an inability to control your interest in publicity for your ideas, I would lose confidence ... ,'' he wrote in the letter, obtained by The Associated Press in an open records request.
Good Lord. Here's a free tip for all you aspiring administrators out there:
Rule number 1 for Provosts Attempting to Walk the PR Tightrope of Embarrassing Weirdo Faculty: DON'T SEND EMAILS, MEMOS OR LETTERS ABOUT OR TO THE WEIRDO! The open records request is not your friend. When the shit hits the fan, the shat-upon would do well to pick up the phone, or something like that.
Geez.
So I read this article, over at Inside Higher Ed. It's written by a professor who teaches rhetorical studies, but the entirety of the article is about the challenge of teaching queer theory to Texans, and whether or not he has somehow compromised his radical street cred by relying on liberal humanism.
Well, fine. I'm a traditionalist, so I'm not gonna waste time arguing about it--just call me a pawn of the phallocentric culture, yadda, yadda, yadda. But that's not even my point.
The writer spends some time lamenting the death of academic freedom and growing public hostility toward the professoriate at the same time that he creates an interesting meta-example of why these things may be the case.
First off, the paragraphs wherein the professor describes the subject matter read like a parody of an academic written by someone like, well, me. When you start a paragraph with
The day after I lectured on heterosexist norms in heavy metal music videos, I was summoned to the principal’s office to get a talking to.
you might be inviting some ridicule from the outside world. I read the prof's email to his class, his explanation as to why he's doing what he's doing, and have to wonder what would happen if he sent it to the parents of the students he teaches.
Because here we see the disconnect between the real world and academe. Like it or not, the image of the ivy-covered walls that the public has of academia does NOT include a classroom full of co-eds involved in a discussion of The Man forcing his phallus on society via Warrant's Cherry Pie video. Seriously.
It's obvious that part of the university's job is to expose students to different points of view and to force them to examine rhetoric and rhetorical strategies. It's also apparent to anyone who's been in academe and then left for the "real world" that the compartmentalization and obsession with minutiae that serves professors so well in getting published and getting tenure doesn't translate well outside the academy; in fact, it tends to seem like so much meaningless mental masturbation. And when you're paying someone up to six figures a year on the taxpayer's dime to talk about interchangeable sex organs as represented in the music of a "polyamorous figure" named Peaches--well, I can see where the public hostility is coming from.
There's room in the university for both academic freedom and the ability to fire hacks, proselytizers and plagiarizers without apology (not that this professor is any of the latter). But I don't exactly trust academia's leading lights to figure out how to do this any time soon. How's that for radical?
Interesting post on the latest goings-on at Duke here, with the focus on silliness by the usual suspects, and I'm not talking athletes or overly ambitious DAs. When the facts come out--whichever way it turns out--this will not end well. Durham is a tense town on a good day.
Now that the academic update is out of the way, I would like to declare my love of William H. Macy to the world*. Thank you.
*The above love-fest has been brought to you by TNT's airing of Nightmares and Dreamscapes.
I think I need to put down the keyboard and back slowly away from the internet, because the crazy? It seems to be catching.
I've followed the Goldstein/Frisch thing with my mouth hanging open in dumbfounded astonishment. Although I have to admit that I've learned a few things, like if I decide to go over to Daily Kos and start flinging random threats and nonsensical insults around that have nothing to do with the topic at hand I wouldn't be "trolling," I would merely be "engaging in provocative debate," or "sharing my fantabulously fabulous super-brained academic knowledge with the great unwashed--damn them all to hell." So that's good to know, I guess.
And I see that U-W Madison will allow the teaching of "911 is a conspiracy" in the classroom in the name of academic freedom. Which, okay, except have they thought this through? Because courses like "Intelligent Design 101," "We never went to the moon," and "The Holocaust--Just a big fat lie!" cannot therefore be far behind. You know, the idea that the truth is subjective? It's fun when you're discussing Joyce or Faulkner, but it doesn't really apply to stuff like GRAVITY. Just sayin'.
By the way, I really enjoy the fact that any time someone mentions Barrett in an article, the comments immediately get spammed by "OMG YOU IGNORANT SHEEPLE GEORGE BUSH TOTALLY DETONATED THE WTC AND IF YOU DON'T THINK SO YOU'RE JUST A BIG DUMMY!" types. It's fun!
For a slightly more cerebral take on what exactly it means when administrators adopt an "anything goes" attitude under the guise of "academic freedom," check out Erin O'Connor's blog.
I don't think that the freedom folks were describing when they defined academic freedom was "freedom from logic, sense or quality," but there I go again, making a definitive judgement about what words MEAN. Damn. Grad school must not have been as effective as I thought in teaching me how to think.
An actual excerpt from an article at the Chronicle on "fat studies:"
By the time she earned her Ph.D. in 1998, the 100 pounds she'd lost had begun creeping back on. Ms LeBesco, who earned tenure at Marymount Manhattan two years ago, began writing more about her identity as a fat person. At the National Communication Association's 2004 meeting, she delivered a talk called "I'm Here, I'm a Sphere, Get Used to It: Being ‘Out' as a Fat Professor." Her 2004 book, Revolting Bodies? The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity (University of Massachusetts Press), is a seminal work in fat studies. "Katie is trying to erase the line between fat and thin," says Marilyn Wann, an activist who started a fat-studies e-mail list last year that has 120 subscribers. "Her work is foundational."
The field takes its cues from queer studies and disability studies — subjects pursued primarily by activists who feel they have been discriminated against because of their identity. Scholars held the first academic meeting on fat studies two years ago, and the first fat-studies reader is in the works.
At a joint meeting of the Popular Culture Association and the American Culture Association in April, Ms. LeBesco picked up a fuchsia-colored notice that she now keeps tacked to the bulletin board in her college office: "Weight diversity is welcome here. Kindly refrain from diet talk, body disparagement, and other unpleasantries."
You know, I don't care if people are fat or thin. I do, however, care that universities are spending money on scholarship about the "politics of fatness" when half of the freshman class can't read or write at the college level.
It's annoying as hell, but when a grown man and alleged academic does it, I become enraged.
What am I talking about? Simple. Failure to accept responsibility for your actions.
Yeah, yeah. I realize I should be all jaded and "oh, but civilization has sunk so low what do you expect," yadda yadda yadda, but I refuse to go gently into this particular good night, dammit.
So let's get this straight. A year-long academic inquiry finds that a professor has plagiarized and fabricated substantial amounts of his research. The professor is fired. Who is at fault?
Why, the university of course! The public at large! The evil philistines who don't understand the greatness that is the professor! The evil political cabal who just wants to silence his brave dissent! Anyone, in short, except the psuedo-intellect in question, who--by the way--PLAGIARIZED AND FABRICATED HIS RESEARCH!
And he's gonna sue until they agree with him, golly gosh darn it!
Yeah, Ward Churchill again.
That annoying buzzing sound you hear in the background? Me, grinding my teeth down to a fine powder in a fit of rage.
True, the university of Colorado should never have hired him, as any research into his background and qualifications would have raised several red flags. But so what? Just because you can pull a con-job during the hiring process doesn't mean you should. And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling teenagers--oops, I mean if it weren't for his inability to follow the first rule of thumb for con-artists: stay below the radar.
Plus, the cabal of anti-Churchill conspirators didn't write his papers--actually, he didn't either, apparently. He cheated, he got caught, and he got the grown-up equivalent of time out. And so now he's throwing the grown-up equivalent of a tantrum, and so out of the goodness of my heart I will share these words of wisdom in the form of a letter to our errant ex-academic:
Dear Ward:
Grow the hell up.
Sincerely,
Me
And as for the cries of "it was politically motivated!" that resonate throughout Inside Higher Ed and the AAUP--Irony is holding for you guys on line one.
One doesn't normally associate physics professors with conspiracy theories--what with them being the traditional milieu of humanities types--but the gods have smiled upon us all today with this article in The Chronicle of Higher Ed. It's subscription only, so let me quote and summarize:
"Last November Mr. (Steven E.) Jones posted a paper online advancing the hypothesis that the airplanes Americans saw crashing into the twin towers were not sufficient to cause their collapse, and that the towers had to have been brought down in a controlled demolition. Now he is the best hope of a movement that seeks to convince the rest of America that elements of the government are guilty of mass murder on their own soil.
His paper — written by an actual professor who works at an actual research university — has made him a celebrity in the conspiracy universe. He is now co-chairman of a group called the Scholars for 9/11 Truth, which includes about 50 professors — more in the humanities than in the sciences — from institutions like Clemson University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Wisconsin.
But even as Mr. Jones's title and academic credentials give hope to the conspiracy theorists, his role in the movement may undermine those same credentials. What happens when science tries to function in a fringe crusade?"
Short answer? Real scientists pretend you don't exist, and crazy people hold conferences in hotels, engage in circular reasoning and send mean emails to the scientist who's debunked your theory. Business as usual, in other words.
Fun random quotes:
"Usually, Occam's razor intervenes." Unfortunately, Occam and his razor are less successful at whacking errant pixels than you would think.
"By many accounts, scholarly contributions to the movement began with Mr. Griffin, who retired from the Claremont School of Theology in 2004. About a year and a half after September 11, Mr. Griffin began reading books and Web sites arguing that the U.S. government was complicit in the attacks. Eventually, they won him over." There are only FOUR LIGHTS!!! FOUR LIGHTS!!! Sorry, Star Trek reference. In other words, if you spend enough time reading crazy crap, eventually it will start to seem less crazy. RE: The existence of scientologists even AFTER they've been introduced to the concept of Xenu.
"You can't just appeal in terms of straight argument," he [Griffin] says. "You've got to do something to break through, to get people to look at the evidence." Yes, when your straight argument is CRAZY, then I guess you do have to get a little bit out there to make folks pay attention.
Some people just aren't happy unless they aren't happy. At least I can take cold comfort in the fact that this trait isn't just prevalent in sociology departments.
I didn't get to this yesterday, what with my astonishment at the Slate message boards, so I will post it today: a discussion on what effect, exactly, Ward Churchill, ACTA and all the factions involved in the "Humanities are a roiling cess-pit of (pick one) a) communists, b) brave dissenters, c) ignorant hacks, d) pseudo-intellectuals, e) race-baiters and permanent victims" war are having on the academy and the public perception of same.
This particular set of arguments only takes a backseat to the mommy wars for me because, well, the mommy wars have a larger margin of carnage, and a smaller tendency to use words like "hegemony" in the arguments.
But I digress. Read and enjoy.
My super-short opinion? I think it's valid, given the Churchill case's exposure of sloppy hiring and self-policing on the part of the academy, to ask how many more frauds there may be out there exploiting the uber-PC campus culture for their own benefit. I also agree with many of the commenters who believe that the real crime against the humanities here isn't so much the political nonsense that professors may or may not spout in the classroom, but in the degeneration of real critical thinking in the classrooms. My grad school experience was illustrative of exactly this point: when you can memorize the basic tenets of a particular "flavor" of theory and slot them into any piece of literature as though you're constructing an Ikea bookshelf, then I've gotta say that something's a bit awry. At the very least it certainly sucks the fun out of the humanities.
Well, it's here in all its pixellated glory. The verdict is in on Ward Churchill, and it isn't surprising. Here's the full report.
And here's the Inside Higher Ed story. The comments, as always, are far more entertaining than the story itself, and for the most part are sane and logical. However, there are quite a few folks out there who need to take Remedial Argument 101. Read and be entertained, and notice my extreme forebearance in resisting the temptation to point out that the least literate commentary comes from those who self-identify as being in the field of ethnic studies. Oops. Okay, so maybe my forebearance isn't that extreme.
I would, however, like to point out to the unfortunate commenter crowing about Churchill's "authoritative body of work" that citing your own (plagiarised) work in support of your own (plagiarised) work does NOT, no matter how fondly you may wish it, make your work "authoritative" in any way. At least not on planet earth.
Everyone is linking to this piece. Not sure why, other than as a perfect example of academic verbal diarrhea. Let's see...19 paragraphs to say "Hey! Academics are too busy engaging in an intellectual circle-jerk to have any real impact on America!" with a whole lot of unintentional irony thrown in for kicks and giggles. Sheesh. Tell me something I didn't know circa 1996, dude.
And via Erin O'Connor, the Sheldon Awards. Read 'em and weep.
ETA: Fixed second link. Sorry about that!
Okay, so now there's no DNA match in the Duke lacrosse sexual assault case.
Oh, boy. Let's review, shall we?
Drunken lacrosse players invite strippers to beer bash. The stupidity of this is glaringly apparent to everyone except the drunken lacrosse players.
Now, according to who you believe, either
a) The strippers, who were paid for an hour of stripping, decide to take the cash and leave after three minutes, resulting in the liberal use of ethnic slurs and threats of violence but no actual violence by aforesaid drunken lacrosse players, or
b) The strippers are physically, verbally and sexually assaulted, or
c) Possibly some combination of a and b.
Result? No more lacrosse, lacrosse coach, or student who sent stupid email after the fact; sit-ins, candlelight vigils, calls for heads on stakes; DA with political ambitions making the most of photo ops; and, in keeping with Durham's fine traditions, racial tensions out the wazoo--or more accurately, the same old omnipresent racial tensions back on the front page.
Let's set aside the question of what actually happened here for a moment, because frankly I think it'll take longer to figure out than we tend to have patience with in the Age of Teh Internets, and concentrate on this quote from a young co-ed upon discovering that the DNA evidence was a bust (from The Chronicle of Higher Ed--may be subscriber only, so I'm reproducing the quote here):
Ashley K. Bateman, a senior sociology major, expressed concern that students may lose sight of the questions of race and gender that the incident raised. "My hope would be that people wouldn't just kind of drop the issue," she said. Ms. Bateman, who works with Duke's Center for Race Relations, said she worried that because of the negative test results, discussions about broader issues would "lose momentum."
I will pause for a moment while you make the obvious jokes in your heads. All finished? Good. Now on with the show.
Oh, dear lord. So the fact that a young woman apparently wasn't sexually brutalized is bad news? Because it may mean that your personal crusade might "lose momentum?" And yes, the cynic in me tends to substitute the word "funding" for "momentum," but I'm evil, so there you go.
See, here's the crux of my problem, and why I cannot take campus politics--the external variety, not the internecine internal position jockeying--seriously anymore: these groups are parasites, more concerned about getting enough butts in seats at the rallies and facetime on tv to "raise awareness" than they are about the victims, real or alleged.
And I'm not even gonna go near the implications for the consciouness raisers if this turns out to be a false report --mainly because there won't be any, not really, if you don't count the fact that the folks whose consciousnesses (consciousness-i? consciousness'ss'ss, gah.) they're trying to raise will stop listening.
But I don't count that, because I'm not convinced that the great unwashed is really the intended audience anymore. If it ever was.
So, students aren't prepared for college?
Blame the school boards! Not the teachers, and ESPECIALLY not the teachers who are products of education schools, those fine institutions of pedagogical research that have IN NO WAY affected curricula across the country.
Boys not performing? Surely it has nothing to do with the 20 years of changing teaching methods to favor girls, and even if it does, well, the education schools didn't do that! Much! Really...
Seriously. Broken homes effect scholarship? Sure. Colleges admitting students who they figure will wash out in order to get that first year's or semester's tuition? Yeah. High school teachers underpaid? I'm down with that, though given Hublet's profession and my unrealistic dreams of glassed-in bookshelves and leather armchairs for a study in a larger home I could be biased.
But you don't get to have it both ways--touting your educational research but not accepting blame for the goofier stuff that happens in the classrooms, like putting the kibosh on marking papers in red pen for "self-esteem reasons." 'Cause that just sounds like whining.
Related to my previous entry, the New Criterion has a great article on one of the more colorful characters in modern lit (I'm hoping the link lets you read it--let me know if not and I'll do a longer summary).
Fun introductory paragraph:
Novelists today tend to be pretty bloodless creatures. Look at their bios: They’re mostly workshop professors or M.F.A. hatchlings. They review their peers’ books, sit on grant panels, give readings and interviews, and, during their free time, cook up soft-boiled bores to pay their children’s tuition.
Basically, old Houellebecq has made a name for himself in French literary circles by wallowing in degeneracy and despair, and bemoaning the meaninglessness of life and death while cashing his checks and continuing to write.
Irony and I had a chuckle and some beers over that.
Unrelated aside - watched Grizzly Man this weekend, and was amazed. Not at the self-delusion and myriad mental problems of Timothy Treadwell, because duh, but at the way Herzog put the film together.
My favorite technique was the way he kept the camera rolling just a bit too long at the end of each interview, so that the subject didn't have anything rehearsed to fall back on, and was just--exposed. It was very uncomfortable in some places, but interesting to watch.
And the cast of supporting characters were awesome! The matter-of-fact pilot who found what was left of Treadwell and his girlfriend, the search and rescue guy who opined that the bears must've left him alone as long as they did because they probably thought "he was mentally retarded," and the World's Creepiest Coroner were every bit as fascinating as the subject himself.
The contrast between the folks who actually deal with the reality of nature and its place in the world and the people who can't seem to is really well drawn.
And Herzog's impromptu German doom and gloom soliloquy was great as well.
No matter what you think of him as an intellectual, you can always trust David Horowitz to bring out the academic wankery.
Here we have a Horowitz rebuttal to a review written by Inside Higher Ed's Scott McLemee. Now, if you've ever read anything by McLemee, you'd know he tends to go for the snark, which is fine as far as it goes, I guess, but that's neither here nor there.
Hilarity ensues in the comments following Horowitz' rebuttal, complete with the academic equivalent of "Shut up!" "No, you shut up!" "You're a poopy-head!" "No, you are!" And at least one weird-ass comment about black helicopters, but I didn't bother to try and decipher that one.
It would be amusing, if it weren't for the fact that these folks are completely missing the point, which, as one commenter remarked, isn't about Horowitz at all. It's about the changing public perception of the university, and what may happen as a result.
Tuition costs keep rising at a higher rate than salaries. We've got kids coming out of school with more debt load than I have with a mortgage and a family. It seems pretty natural for folks to start questioning the value of college education, and to start paying attention to what, exactly, these tenured "untouchables" are doing in their classrooms.
Academics should be worried, and not about David Horowitz, because it seems to me that--fair or not--we're heading toward a place where "learning for its own sake," no longer justifies the expense, and the consequences will be dire indeed--and not just for the academics.
From the "If I could make stuff like this up I'd be a much wealthier person," files:
This is a somewhat truncated transcription of a voicemail that our office received yesterday. Name has been changed to protect the dangerously stupid, and drunk, recent graduate who left it. Read it and weep--weep!--for our future.
Voice Message received at 6:49 a.m.
"Um, hi. This is Cynthia, C-Y-N-T-H-I-A Simmons, S-I-M-M-O-N-S, but really my friends just call me Cindy, C-I-N-D-Y. And yeah, your voicemail system is good with the emergency number to call and everything even though I haven't spoken to a human being."
"I graduated in 2002, if you need to look that up. I majored in Philosophy and Business."
"But I'm calling because I need to talk to someone about a refund? Because I only work 15 hours a week at this job that pays $7 an hour and it's just not working for me because who can live like that? So I want a refund of the money I spent because it's not helping--like, I want all my tuition money back."
"So someone needs to call me, Cynthia, C-Y-N-T-H-I-A, Simmons, S-I-M-M-O-N-S back at 111-111-1111. Or if you could tell me if your office is hiring, because I need a different job. Thanks."
Ah, Cindy's got her crunk on. It could explain why she's working 15 hours a week for $7 an hour. Although the more likely explanation is the fact that she got a Philosophy degree from a land grant university that specializes in agriculture and engineering.
So maybe the next time Davidson calls me for a donation I'll ask for a refund. Because obviously I should be pulling down 6 figures simply because I went there and got a degree! My own ambition, work ethic, and abilities have nothing whatever to do with it!
Just think! Cindy, C-I-N-D-Y, and her buddies will be running the country when we're old!
And it has nothing whatever to do with the Summers ousting at Harvard. My take on that boils down to "typical." Interpret it however you see fit.
No, the dumb quote of the day comes from a local story on schools separating middle school boys and girls for the core classes, ostensibly to remove the distraction of those burgeoning hormones and the self-consciousness that entails and to tailor the classes to the learning patterns of boys and girls.
Personally, I think that's a great idea. But it wouldn't be journalism without the obligatory "dissenting view," (and don't get me started on the number of professional cranks this particular journalistic practice has created--grr) and so we have this little "I'm totally missing the point but I'm on auto-pilot and it's a decent soundbite" gem from the local NOW dingbat:
Groups such as the National Organization for Women have likened classes split by sex to the unconstitutional "separate but equal" reasoning used to keep schools racially segregated.
"I really feel this is dangerous," said Anna Worthen, president of North Carolina's NOW chapter. "What if you're a little girl that doesn't learn the 'girl way'?"
Teachers should challenge assumptions about sexes, she said, not cater to them.
"When kids say science is for boys, that's just what society has told them," said Worthen, who works in the technology field mostly around men. "If I had not learned to interact with men, how could I go into my workplace and encounter them every day?"
Anna, WTF? Did you even pay attention when the reporter explained the article to you? Let's break down the stupidity bit by bit, shall we?
1. Ooh, the eeeeevilllle spectre of "separate but equal." Let's see...they're in the SAME school, being taught the SAME subjects by the SAME teachers. Yep, it's practically apartheid. Man-de-la! Man-de-la!
2. Girls being shortchanged because they DON'T learn "the girl way?" Then they're being screwed right now, sweetie, largely because organizations such as yours have been instrumental in changing the pedagogy so that everyone is now learning "the girl way," with the result that boys are suffering. Or didn't you read that article, because it didn't portray girls as helpless victims of the patriarchy? Do you hear the words that come out of your mouth, Anna, or are you just reading the talking points memo aloud again?
3. Where in the teacher handbook does it say that in addition to managing classrooms full of unruly teens, piles of useless administrative busy work, psycho parents, and school politics, teachers should be "challenging assumptions about the sexes?" When exactly are the teachers supposed to TEACH THE SUBJECT MATTER, Anna, before or after the Up With People fireside singalong?
4. Oh no, these poor stunted middle schoolers will have no idea how to get along with the opposite sex if they don't diagram sentences together! Again, Anna, did you pay attention? The sexes are only separated for a few classes. There's plenty of time to interact both inside and outside of the classroom.
Grr. My tolerance level for the stupid has decreased exponentially today. Just...between reading this tripe and dealing with a shirty reporter from a large Yankee publication, I'm done for the day.
So here at the U., we have a yearly forum-y hoo-ha in which movers and shakers from academe and politics convene to solve the world's problems! Fun (and a free lunch, if our office plays its cards right) is generally had by all.
This year's topic is economics, with all the excitement that entails for me.
But the highlight of this year's forum was definitely the high-profile lunch speaker, whose name rhymes with Saul Moogman.
I have never witnessed a professional academic with less public poise, ever. Seriously, I don't even remember what he was talking about, except that it obviously was geared toward policy wonks and not a lay audience, but I do remember the copious amount of sweat he produced while at the podium.
It was a LOT of sweat. And his hands were all trembly. And then he spilled water on his laptop. And did I mention the nervous cough that prompted some kind soul to give him the water that he then spilled on his laptop?
The coup de grace was when he let fly one final cough into his hand, which he IMMEDIATELY offered to our former governor and the host of the event. Hee!
All I could think was, "Dude, you're a professor! And a much-ballyhooed columnist for a high profile Yankee paper! Surely public speaking isn't new!"
But maybe he was afraid that the red state minions of North Carolina would rise up as one and set him ablaze for his heretical ideas. Of course, the red state minions would have first needed to rouse themselves from their stupor--oh, and stop laughing at the flailing economist.
As a counterpoint, the former presidential candidate and scion of publishing whose name rhymes with Jeeve Morbs was clear, concise, and used real-world examples. Also, he didn't sweat, spill water, or infect our former governor with whooping cough. However, he was a bit, erm, forceful in his delivery, which is why he will never succeed in politics. Motivational speaking, perhaps, but politics? Oh, hell no.
Nothing good can come of it.
Here's a novel approach to historical research--become the thing you're researching! Which, okay, if you're doing a dissertation on the inner life of waiters, should be no big deal.
But if, like Professor Pluss, your topic is neo-nazism, well...do I even have to finish this sentence?
Alas, given the prevailing views of the day, I probably do.
See, Mr. Pluss thought that only by immersing himself in the neo-nazi experience could he understand it. Uta Hagen--the lady who put the "meth" in method acting--would weep with pride. But historians aren't thespians, and I would argue that pretending to be something you aren't (and I'm giving Mr. Pluss the benefit of the doubt here) doesn't get you any more "authentic" information than regular research would. It does, however, get the perpetrator a lot more press...not that I'm waxing cynical or anything.
I'm thinking that maybe the professor in question has spent a little too much time watching James Lipton fawn over celebrities who detail their Method-heavy "preparation" for roles in films like Dawn of the Dead ("Well, I had some steak tartare, and let the juice dribble down my chin and imagined myself as a flesh-eating zombie, hee hee!"), and too little time doing plain old boring research.
Although this could spawn a whole new genre of research--Xtreme Scholarship! Criminologists committing crimes! Psychologists self-inducing insanity! Sociologists forming primitive cannibalistic tribal groups on the Quad!
It would definitely put some oomph back in the humanities, that's for sure.