“If every university in America halved the size of its bureaucracy overnight, the result would be an enormous improvement in financial stability and a corresponding improvement in faculty productivity. For, as with every bureaucracy – public or private – the worst tend to get on top and to promulgate and police regulations and restrictions that severely damage the efficiency of the education process.” Just imagine, half of these overpaid useless paper-pushers with their community-building initiatives, their annoying double-speak, their unintelligent pronouncements just disappear from your university overnight and the money goes towards the library, the science labs, the infrastructure, the faculty salary raises. This would be a dream come true.
“Ivy League job seekers (and of course this category could be stretched to include another four or five top private universities) do not have an inherent and indisputable advantage on the tenure-track job market. Many of them have a great deal of trouble finding tenure-track jobs, and a significant proportion of them fail, just as do Ph.D.s from other schools.” I can testify to the truth of this statement.
An instance of extreme lameness at a Swedish University.
“The city where I live isn’t really that small. I shouldn’t have to meet old lovers at the grocery. Yet I do. The conversation has been cordial; she’s married now… but her husband isn’t around much because he works construction and moves around. I know they spend time together and I assume their relationship is good, but her smile is too welcoming and genuinely pleasant considering how I treated her and how we left things. Either he’s an ass or she’s not so sure about pulling up stakes and moving twenty years after coming to town. I don’t do married women – it’s not worth the risk of bodily harm – but I’m wondering if I should tease out some info if I see her at the grocery again, then plan accordingly.” Or maybe she had a very rich personal life and didn’t have a clue who the hell you are. I always greet people with a smile that shines as brightly as the Sun to hide the fact that I have forgotten them completely.
The Last Psychiatrist is as brilliant as ever: “Ryan listened to the Rage Against The Machine in the precise way it was produced to be heard: as soundtrack to your own movie, stripped of its intended meaning. It is not an accident that it found its way as an actual soundtrack to an actual movie. I’m sure Rage is earnest in their core belief system, but you can’t argue that you’re part of the counterculture if you’ve been #8 on TRL in between Destiny’s Child and Lou Vega’s Mambo No. 5. You aren’t the counterculture, you are the culture. The partisanship that everyone desperately clings to is a media construction serving the necessary function of letting you self-identify, in the absence of anything in your life more substantive. In other words, Fox & Friends are doing you a favor.”
I know there is nothing funny about Todd Akin’s comments about rape but I think it’s very healthy to laugh at him and people like him. Do read this superbly well-written post on the subject. I was getting so traumatized by all this tactless and cruel discussions of rape that I started having horrible nightmares. This post is one of the things that helped me breathe deep and start getting over it.
“I have my own beliefs, and those beliefs are very dear to me. One of them is that I do not impose my beliefs on other people. Many, many years ago, I had a dear, close family relative that was very close to me who passed away from an illegal abortion. It is since that time that my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter. And you will not see me wavering on that.” This was said by one Mitt Romney in 1994. Probably the relative has resuscitated since then.
“Even if you’ve had sex with someone five hundred times, you still need their consent before you have sex with them again. Even if they’ve had sex with half of New York City, you still need their consent before you have sex with them. Even if they’re your spouse, you still need their consent before you have sex with them. If you don’t obtain their consent and have sex with them anyway, you are raping them. Even if they choose not to accuse you of rape, you’re still raping them. This is not a difficult concept.” This is not supposed to be a difficult concept, I agree. Yet for some people it still is. I think the statement I quoted has to become part of sex education everywhere.
“Latest research. . . showed that women who work steadily full-time after the birth of their first child report better physical health than women who don’t.” This is for people who insist that turning a woman into a housewife makes sense to them financially. As I always say, denying her dental care, visits to a doctor, clothes and food will also help save tons of money. Who cares if this insignificant creature gets sick, right? As long as her male owner finds the setup convenient, all is well.
How to make an ultra-Liberal professor vote Republican. Hilarious!
“Evangelicals in a school district in Louisiana are objecting to a palm scanner that kids could use to pay for their lunches, thus eliminating the need for lunch money. Why? Because it sounds too similar to “the mark of the beast.” OK, “the mark of the beast” objection is weird, if it is true. But can anybody explain to me why there is such a burning need to get rid of lunch money? This is normally a blogger I like a lot but this specific post is stupid. There can be any number of reasons why people might be uncomfortable with getting their palm-prints taken and stored in a database. I only found out that Evangelicals existed a few years ago, so I’m definitely not one of them. Yet I can’t say I’m all that comfortable with palm-printing people who are not suspected of any crime just because somebody finds it more convenient. What next, a DNA database for every person in the country?
There is a beautiful series of auto-biographical posts written by a transgender woman called “The Secret History of Jaime.” Here is the first post in the series but there are six other posts in the series already published on that blog. The posts are so well-written that I read each one like an installment in a mystery novel, wondering what will happen next in the story.
Come join the discussion about a poster that I like and a fellow blogger dislikes.
And the post of the week: “The only coherent outcome of granting the fetus personhood is to deny the pregnant woman personhood. The fact that misogyny often accompanies pro-life positions is not an unfortunate accident — it isnecessarily entailed by the pro-life position. The pro-life position takes an autonomous adult human being and makes her into the unconditional servant of another (ostensible) human being.” The entire post is brilliant. Do read.
Clarissa's Blog 
I really need to read that Last Psychiatrist and that Immoral Minority more regularly.
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The immoral minority guy is great whenever he manages to get over his unhealthy obsession with Sarah Palin, her looks, her hair, her makeup, etc.
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The most obvious justification for getting rid of lunch money and replacing it with palm scanners that I can see is that it makes it harder to steal. If someone steals your money and spends it it is impossible to track. There’s no equivalently easy way to do it with a palmprint.
And BTW, I consider this completely unnecessary.
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Thank you so much for the kind words and the link! And for interested parties, part 8 is up now as well.
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To reduce bureaucracy you have to simplify laws first… without limiting the scope of government’s intervention reducing bureaucracy is pretty much pointless. Deregulation is key.
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No, this bureaucratic bloat has come in at the same time as deregulation. Both are results of the same attitudes, namely, let corporations rule. In the case of the universities, when you so much relegate teaching to adjuncts, you don’t have regular faculty to do all the related support work for teaching. So, you have to have adminstrative staff to do that (less well and for more money, of course).
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Why are you going on about governments? The post is about universities. And what’s more, as Z points out, universities are overly bureaucratized *because* they’re being corporatized.
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Thanks for the link!
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Hello, Clarissa. A pingback was an interesting way to hear from you, mostly because it probably drove a lot a traffic to my blog, which doesn’t get much traffic. So, I guess thanks are also in order.
Thank you.
I’ll address your comment on my blog.
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You are welcome! Feel free to self-promote in the comment section.
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Can a woman with a lifelong math phobia learn to love and understand math?
Apparently, though a bad recent experience is making an upcoming calculus class terrifying:
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The “mark of the beast” fear is thanks to the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. It’s a Christian fiction series about the Rapture and ensuing Tribulation, which is a prophecy interpreted from passages in the bibical book of Revelation by Tim LaHaye.
In the book, the mark of the beast is a tattoo/computer chip implanted in the forehead or left(?) hand that serves as one’s pledge of loyalty to the one world government, identification, and electionized currency. If you get it, you’re going to hell- you’ve lost your chance at salvation forever.
I used to be a fundie, so naturally I read the books. I still have them somewhere.
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I never had my lunch money stolen as a child, but it was and is a popular form of bullying. Anything which can reduce bullying seems like a good thing to me. It is all a matter of who has access to the palmprint information.
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I don’t think this would stop bullying. Bullies don’t bully because they are in need of money but because of hatred and aggression that they carry inside. If it isn’t lunch money, they will find something else.
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“If it isn’t lunch money, they will find something else.”
Yes, but the children will not have to go hungry for the day. This is the problem it solves.
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About the “Do you find this sexist?” post you linked to I’ll say here what I said there.
Considering how people seem to have no problem saying that men who support Romney hate/don’t respect/etc… women I don’t have much problem with this.
Because honestly if this were an image calling men that support Romney woman haters this wouldn’t be even be a question. But calling out women that seem to be supporting something that goes against the interests of women is sexism?
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I don’t find the poster sexist and find it wonderful if a little too mild and insipid. I think it could be improved with a good dose of “vile freakazoids.” But that’s just me. 🙂
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I’m thinking the discussion over it is based on trying to hold women on a pedastal that protects them from being called on something on a count of their gender.
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“I’m thinking the discussion over it is based on trying to hold women on a pedastal that protects them from being called on something on a count of their gender.”
– Completely off-topic: I had a dream tonight that you were getting married and invited me to the wedding. I have no idea why I had that dream. 🙂
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Don’t joke Clarissa. I just started dating someone a few weeks ago.
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“Don’t joke Clarissa. I just started dating someone a few weeks ago.”
– That’s great news! My dreams have a tendency to come true, so watch out. 🙂 🙂
I wish you tons of fun in this new relationship!
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