An anti-intellectual, anti-scholarship, “research is useless and literary studies should die already” article has appeared in Chronicle of Higher Education. Well, what else is new? you will ask. That’s all CHE does any longer. The first three sentences of this embarrassingly stupid piece, however, are kind of interesting.

Before I get to the minuscule part of the article that makes sense, I want to say that the article’s author, Michael Farber, should have the courage of his opinions and leave his position to those who are not too lazy or too stupid to have a productive research career. It is offensive to see somebody whine so pathetically and wordily about how hard it is for a scholar to make himself read.

Leaving the idiocy of this unintelligent and dishonest fellow aside, his article contains an interesting question (which he didn’t even come up with on his own, of course):

There are books we all know we should have read but we never actually got around to reading them. Is there a book you don’t want to confess not having read?

I think this could be a fun discussion.

From the mandated crime-reporting training I’m undergoing:

So if you have sex with somebody who does not appear to be conscious or cannot consent, that could end up being rape or could end up being reported as a rape. I mean, if the other person says the next day, “Oh, I didn’t want to have sex,” then that could end up being reported as, you know, a sexual assault.

I think I was better off before the training, to be honest. The “could end up” part is very depressing. And the rest is even worse.

The best new book on the Spanish Civil War I have read recently is Helen Graham’s The War and Its Shadow. It will be of interest both to those who know absolutely nothing about the war and those who know a lot.

Here is a great review of the book by Richard Baxtell.

I’m really afraid people will start picking up the widely reviewed and advertised book by Treglown, and that will be a horrible mistake.

Helen Graham is a great historian. I’d even say, a Great Historian.

And another absolutely phenomenal historian is Michael Richards whose new book on the Spanish Civil war I haven’t read yet. My most recent article’s bibliography reads like a tribute to Richards. Well, it isn’t my fault that everything he says is so insightful.

What I really hate is when people substitute analysis with clumsy attempts to fit reality into facile pseudo-intellectual categories. For instance, a colleague declared that the reason why certain departments and programs within a university are considered more important than others is gender-based. Engineering has the majority of male students and professors, so it ranks higher than Sociology and Education, which are almost 100% female.

When she offered this idea to the group, people embraced it avidly. Nobody wants to tell Sociology and Education that they don’t do anything, their fields are a useless waste of time (I mean, there are now fields like “Educational Leadership”, which boggles the mind with its uselessness), so it’s easier to agree with these pseudo-feminist bouts of silliness.

Of course, what we all knew but didn’t want to say to avoid upsetting the Sociologists is that, at our university, the most important program of all whose needs always trump everybody else’s is our highly accredited School of Nursing. And I’m yet to see a single male in that program. One male student I knew applied but was rejected because his grades in biology were not outstanding.

It is obvious to everybody but the most obtuse that a program where people learn to tend to the sick will matter more than a program where people shoot the breeze about how to be educational leaders, whatever that even is. Let’s not hide from that reality behind empty pseudo-feminist slogans.

So I’ve been reading about the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil war, and it’s fascinating stuff, people.

As you know, people from many different countries came to fight against fascism in Spain in 1936-9. Did you know, however, that over a quarter of people in the Brigades were Jewish? And that the language the different battalions in the brigades used as their shared language of communication was Yiddish?

These Jewish fighters were all anti-Zionists because they saw nationalism as the root of all problems faced by the world in the 1930s.

Also, the majority of people in the Brigades had experienced multiple immigrations / displacements before coming to Spain to fight the forces that called themselves “Nationalists.”

My information comes from Helen Graham’s new book.