Everybody is quoting Delphine de Vigan. Is anybody on here familiar with her? Is she worth the effort?
I am so afraid of hoping for something good. This whole situation hit me very hard because of how important…
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Continue reading →: My Conspiracy Theory
My conspiracy theory regarding Lindsay Clancy are that these were Medea murders. I read the findings of online sleuths, and they do demonstrate that it’s highly likely that Lindsay’s husband was cheating on her.
In Greek mythology, Medea murdered her children to spite her husband for preferring another woman to her. Online sleuths found information that Patrick Clancy went on vacation with another woman a couple of weeks after the murders. Of course, if true, the prosecution couldn’t bring that up without tanking the whole case. It explains Lindsay’s motive, but it makes her irresistibly sympathetic to the nine women on the jury. People have been wondering about the motive. Here’s a motive.
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Continue reading →: AI Replaces Labor
AI has improved dramatically. I can ask it, for example, “where did Pierre Bourdieu talk about the embodied state of cultural capital?” and it immediately reminds me of the source. And then pulls up a link to the .pdf. I’d find it myself but it would take longer. I haven’t worked with Bourdieu since my Master’s thesis, so of course my memory is tenuous. Now I’m rediscovering him, and it’s a great joy.
Going back to my point, I’m not hiring any student researchers any more because AI does it faster and with zero drama. Of course, if I came across a student who’d be genuinely interested in the research and would want to have conversations about it, I’d hire in a flash. But that is almost never a thing.
I hired student researchers for almost two decades and it was never worth the trouble, the handholding, and the drama. These were all male students, by the way. Zero female students ever applied.
So I’m now one of the evil employers who uses AI to get rid of human labor.
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Continue reading →: Averages
Right. There’s enormous variation in fertility among women, so this must mean that saying that women are the biological sex that gets pregnant and gives birth is wrong. The smugness with which people routinely roll out this nugget of wisdom is extraordinary. “Women in menopause can’t give birth, so what, are they men?” “I know one Asian guy who is stupid, so you must be wrong about Asians having high IQs on average.” “I know this one very tall woman, so you can’t claim that, on average, women are shorter than men.”
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Continue reading →: A Ukrainian Boy
I have a viscerally negative reaction to weak, mumbly men with no initiative. I grew up around young men who were like that, and even now I’m still not over it. I shared before how shocked and confused I was when I became a college student in Canada at the age of 22 and discovered that male students actually spoke in class. Back home, male students would invariably sit in the back of the classroom, giggle, blush, and most certainly never express anything that could pass for an opinion.
Of course, there were enterprising, decisive young men in the post-Soviet Ukraine of the 1990s. They were bandits. I was not hanging out with them. I spent time around normal boys, college students, computer programmers. And they all had zero-initiative, weak and pliable personalities.
Apparently, though, things changed completely in Ukraine.
Last week, our new Ukrainian Fulbrighter came, and this time it’s a guy. He is very young because he wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country if he were over the age of, I believe, 23. He was very excited about teaching his Beginner Ukrainian course, but when he went into the classroom on Tuesday, it was empty. I looked into it, and there had been an unfortunate bureaucratic glitch that resulted in the students being dropped from the course. I was, of course, very unhappy about this.
“Don’t worry about this,” the Ukrainian Fulbrighter said. “I’ll handle it. I’ll find students.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “The semester started. Everybody’s schedule is complete.”
At the initiative of our neoliberal administrator, the practice of students wandering around for a couple of weeks sampling courses and deciding which one to take has been destroyed. Once classes start, everybody is locked into their schedule, and breaching that requires loads of unpleasant paperwork.
“Seriously, it’s ok”, said the Ukrainian guy. “I’ll take care of it.”
I’m not used to people who work for me in academia telling me that they will take care of anything, so I was puzzled.
But guess what? The Ukrainian guy found a big student event going on somewhere on campus, created flyers, somehow found the place to print them in color for free (a feat that I would not be able to accomplish even after 17 years on this campus), and convinced the organizers of the event to give him a table. He decorated the table and started recruiting students.
Long story short, Beginner Ukrainian 1 now has students. I have professors teaching courses with only two or three students, provoking deep ire of the administration, coupled with threats to close down their entire programs. And they haven’t figured out how to do what this boy has done.
Of course, if this were a 20-year-old American guy, this wouldn’t be surprising. The situation is blowing my mind because this is a Ukrainian son of two college professors who, in my generation, would not be capable of any of this.
Something happened in the 28 years that I spent away from the country, and a completely new type of young people came into existence. My sister now hires a lot of Ukrainians and works with Ukrainian business partners, and she confirms that this is not an exceptional case. These are very different Ukrainians from our generation. This would be a great area of research for sociologists. Was it capitalism? Nationalism? What created this transformation?
People will say, “N is not like that, so why are you so surprised?” But N left. He wasn’t like that and he left because he wasn’t like that. I wasn’t like the Ukrainian girls of my generation, and I also left to be with people who are like me.
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Continue reading →: Q&A: Why Care about Arday?
I understand completely that the whole hullabaloo seems bizarre to people outside of academia. But imagine if the lead ballet dancer at La Scala were an amputee with no legs. The poor legless ballerina is crawling across the stage, and we are told to observe her beautiful leaps and fouettés. People who dare to notice and say out loud that she has no legs and can’t dance are called Nazis and get visits from police.
This is the Jason Arday situation. He’s the ballerina without legs. Cambridge belongs to us. It belongs to you and to me. It is part of the great patrimony of our Western civilization. And our inheritance, this precious, beautiful mechanism that our ancestors worked on for over 800 years, is being shat at by these legless ballerinas.
We are being robbed. Within a single generation, these amazing things that took centuries to build are being destroyed, thrown away, because a few eager grifters want to make a quick buck. Our culture, our knowledge, our civilization have withstood two thousand years of wear and tear. And they only got stronger. Until now.
This particular attack on our ramparts has been repelled. The enemy retreated. But the battle is far from over.
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Continue reading →: A Good News Update
As an update to the preceding posts: because of vast international pressure and an active intervention of the US Ambassador to Belgium, Nathan Cofnas has been reinstated at Ghent University.
The evil rector has been vanquished.
This is what political scientists call the soft power of the US. This power is finally being used for good.
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Continue reading →: Pro-establishment
I saw this after publishing the preceding post:
Nobody’s preparing any hit pieces on the academics who are busily fellating the university administration by signing an anti-Cofnas petition. If it wasn’t entirely clear which position is pro-establishment, it now is.
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Continue reading →: Academics and Administrators
I feel great disgust for the academics who are clamoring in support of Nathan Cofnas’s suspension from Ghent University. Leaving aside all ideological considerations, this is a conflict between a postdoctoral researcher, meaning a contingent low-paid employee, and a massively overpaid top administrator. And you’re going to side with administration? Because an administrator, exactly like the rector of Ghent, is not going to come for your job tomorrow? How facile can you possibly be?
Oh, you’re not entirely in agreement with Cofnas’s theoretical apparatus? You don’t like some joke that he made in some stupid interview? And now is the moment to air that out, just as, by complete coincidence, it strengthens the administrators?
Go get into it with people who have a higher rank than you. Go get into it with those who make several times more money than you. What was all that screeching about punching up, not down?
I have gone to bat for every contingent employee at my department, including the one who was very nasty to me personally when I had no power. Including the one who is sleeping in the office right now because she likes being an absolute pest. Both these people are mega woke but I didn’t use their ideology as an excuse to side with the administration in a self-serving fashion. I made myself toxic to the administration because in a fight between the powerless and the powerful, I will not side with the latter.
By the way, and this is fascinating to me, every single person I have encountered in real life and in online discussions who is standing with the administration and piling on the postdoc is male. All of them use the word “literally” in every comment and accuse everybody who disagrees with them of being Nazis, fascists, and “literal murderers”. They sound like teenage girls on TikTok. And then we wonder why academia is going to the dogs under the leadership of dishonest neoliberal administrators. Academics are no longer even interested in self-governance. They have infantilized themselves and allowed dishonest neoliberal operators to step in and manage them like this sheepish human resource that they are.
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Continue reading →: Not the Problematic Colleague
We have a colleague in an already dying program who wants to work 100% remotely. But in our college, this doesn’t exist. We are not an online school. The administration is refusing to allow this, and rightfully so. The enrollments in this program are already abysmally low, and students are not interested in online courses.
The colleague made several overtures in this direction when I was department chair. They were very unsuccessful. Now that the new department chair is in place, the colleague in question decided to lay siege to her. She announced that, unless her request is granted, she is going to move into the office and camp out there indefinitely. She dragged a small couch from the student lounge into the office and is now camping out there.
There is no shower in the office, so the situation is already getting a little ripe.
The funniest part is that this person is not our most problematic colleague. We got somebody even more difficult than this.
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