During the departmental meeting on Friday, I made a very loud and clear statement to the effect that nobody should approach me with requests to teach 1, 2, 3, etc extra courses for no extra pay. Actually, I wouldn’t teach them for extra pay either but that’s not the point.

Nobody has been asking me to take on extra work for no pay, mind you. I made my statement preemptively. And aggressively.

The sky didn’t fall down and the apocalypse did not begin after I said this. Now a question: why do tenured people with Full Professorships meekly accept teaching extra courses for free when I’m not afraid to “just say no”?

I just met an instructor who didn’t get to teach this semester at all because a tenured professor agreed to teach his courses for free.

Why are people doing this?

Yes, I asked them in person but the answers don’t convince me.

As a result of yesterday’s bombing of the residential areas of Mariupol, 30 people have died and over 100 were wounded. Just imagine the horror these Ukrainians experienced. They are sitting at home, enjoying their weekend, playing with their kids, doing the dishes, chatting on the phone, reading blogs online, and all of a sudden there are explosions everywhere, their houses are being shelled, buildings catch fire, there is death and destruction everywhere.

There is absolutely no reason for this to be happening. Russians decided that it would be a good idea to bomb these peaceful residential areas, so they went and bombed them. And then left. Of course, there is no reason to hope that they will not do the same thing tomorrow or the day after. And there are other cities close to Ukraine’s border with Russia. They can be bombed, too.

Obama, Beiden and Merkel have all made statements about the bombing of Mariupol and promised more sanctions. Because the previous sanctions have worked so well, obviously. The tragedy of the situation is that there isn’t anything anybody could do to stop Russians and prevent another Mariupol, another Volnovakha (a site of a recent terror attack against peaceful Ukrainian civilians), another Donetsk, another Slovyansk, etc. from happening. As I’ve been saying this entire time, what Russians are doing is not reactive. The West keeps imposing impotent sanctions because there is nothing else anybody can think of. 

Have you heard, by the way, that, for the first time since 1990, Russians have refused American help in guarding and keeping safe Russia’s nuclear arsenal? Americans have been paying enormous sums (about $2 billion up to now + $100 million scheduled to be paid this year) to Russia each year to ensure that Russia’s nuclear arsenal didn’t end up being sold piecemeal on the black market. This was an extremely successful effort at collaboration between the US and Russia. And now it’s over.

In view of the crisis, Russia has no money to invest in this program. Yet it refuses to go ahead with a system that’s been working beautifully for 25 years. Because pretending that Russia is the US’s equal on the world arena is more valuable than keeping nukes safe. 

Today, people in Moscow came to the Ukrainian Embassy and brought some flowers to commemorate those who were killed the day before during the bombing of the peaceful Ukrainian city of Mariupol.

The peaceful Russian citizens with flowers were beaten by the Russian police that was blockading the embassy and were forced to disperse.

“Ukrainians bombed themselves,” they were told. “It makes no sense to bring the flowers here.”

Several of the people with flowers were beaten. The snow in front of the Ukrainian Embassy was covered with drops of blood.

I have a colleague who has decided to “battle the stigma attached to depression.” Now he sends everybody who works at the university lengthy emails that describe the symptoms of his depression and exhort his colleagues to treat depression “just like any other illness.”

Of course, this man himself doesn’t believe that depression is either stigmatized or is “just like any illness.” I’m sure he’s had other illnesses in the course of his life, yet he’s sent us no emails detailing the physiological consequences of those diseases for his body. We have people with all kinds of medical conditions on campus, including terminal cancer. Yet nobody sends out detailed narratives of their symptoms and the suffering they cause through professional email.

The colleague in question knows that we cannot avoid reading the emails we get through this professional email service. He also knows that we are all polite and kind and won’t tell him how disgusting his behavior is. He keeps insisting that depression is a disease and not a character flaw, yet his behavior is that of an immature drama queen whose character has nothing but flaws.

I hate these professional depressives and their abusive behavior, so I need to vent here.