Researchers from Harvard, NYU, and University of Utah publish findings that demonstrate that men married to housewives discriminate against women in the workplace:

In this article, we examine a heretofore neglected pocket of resistance to the gender revolution in the workplace: married male employees who have stay-at-home wives. We develop and empirically test the theoretical argument suggesting that such organizational members, compared to male employees in modern marriages, are more likely to exhibit attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that are harmful to women in the workplace. To assess this hypothesis, we conducted four studies with a total of 718 married, male participants. We found that employed husbands in traditional marriages, compared to those in modern marriages, tend to (a) view the presence of women in the workplace unfavorably, (b) perceive that organizations with higher numbers of female employees are operating less smoothly, (c) find organizations with female leaders as relatively unattractive, and (d) deny, more frequently, qualified female employees opportunities for promotion. The consistent pattern of results found across multiple studies employing multiple methods and samples demonstrates the robustness of the findings. We discuss the theoretical and practical import of our findings and suggest directions for future research.

Who’s surprised?

When entire departments of languages and literature get destroyed, when programs of study are slashed, when tenured faculty get fired, when faculty salaries are frozen, when tenure-track jobs get replaced with adjunct positions, nobody gives a rat’s ass.

But when some overpriced useless administrator gets fired, everybody is in an uproar. Like any other administrator is going to be less overpriced and useless.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe that only complete blabbering idiots apply business practices to universities (especially the really stupid kind). But I’m bothered by how many posts and articles get dedicated to some administrator who lost her job while nobody wants to write a word about people who matter a lot more to the teaching process, the actual teaching faculty.

I just spoke to a colleague (and a close friend) who shared that, at his university, an effort to introduce a foreign language requirement failed because people don’t see any value in getting students to speak a foreign language in today’s globalized world. Are you seeing any posts on that subject? Not really because who cares that a department of foreign languages at that university is about to die when some super rich administrator will not be able to buy yet another mansion?

Soon, people, soon.

I just thought about it, people, and I realized that I work a lot. Here is how my day usually goes during these summer vacations:

9 am – 10 am – I do my athletic activities and eat oatmeal. What choice  do I have if it’s so horribly hot and I have a tendency to get hypertensive in summer?

10 am -11 am – teach my online course (moderate discussions, answer emails and questions, etc.)

11 am – 12 pm – work on my manuscript

12 pm – 1 pm – lunch and blogging

1 pm – 2 pm – work on my manuscript

2 pm – 3 pm – grade student assignments in my online course

3 pm – 5 pm – do research for my manuscript, look up new sources, read them, organize the bibliography, plan the writing

5 pm – 6 pm – cooking

6 pm – 7 pm – a break

7 pm – 8:30 pm – go for a walk with N.

8:30 pm – 12 am – working on my translation

I think that since I work so hard I should stop feeling guilty about my plan to read the entire Palliser Chronicles by Trollope.

Do you know this joke where a person tells her friend, “I saved a dollar today! I missed the bus so I walked to work.” “I’ll tell you how to save ten bucks instead,” the friend answers. “Next time, you just miss a cab instead of a bus.”

I just discovered that I have been saving tons of money without ever realizing it. I had to buy two glossy magazines, the Bazaar and Elle, for a creative project, and I almost fell over when the cashier told me the price. I could buy a paperback book and a cup of coffee with this money. And all that for a stream of advertisements and absolutely no valuable content at all! Just imagine how much money I would have spent overall if I’d been buying these magazines on a regular basis.

Seriously, since they are purely about advertisement, don’t you think these magazines should be free?

Do you read glossy magazines?

Why is it that I always make huge literary discoveries in the middle of the night and then can’t sleep? I’m reading a forgotten novel by the Russian writer Leskov. The novel is titled At Daggers Drawn and is part of my Classics Challenge.

So I read the novel and discover that it’s extremely similar to Dostoevsky ‘s The Devils. And I mean scarily similar. 

I do an online search and discover that Leskov ‘s novel was published 2 years earlier and Dostoevsky kept reviewing it on every piece of paper he could find.  What does this mean, then? Did Dostoevsky plagiarize his best novel?? We all know the guy was a jerk but at least one could hope he wrote his own stuff.

In case you never heard of Leskov, he is the only Russian writer to create a female character who actually likes sex. Not in the novel I’m reading now but still.