That the judge is allowing a political litmus test which is entirely unrelated to the actual court case under consideration is a very bad sign.
Jaded Leaders
Our operational papers do not allow us to remain in the position of department chair for more than two terms. However, there are people who have been in that role for over 15 years because “nobody else wants to do it.” It’s not surprising that nobody feels like hurting a colleague’s feelings by trying to dislodge them from a job they held since before the Obama administration. Such people would have to go back to teaching and doing research but how do you come back after a couple of decades outside of these pursuits?
This is wrong, though, because look at me. I’m completely jaded and exhausted after only two terms. If I remained for an additional term, not only would it be undemocratic, it would also be completely impractical. I am of no use to the department any longer. With every new round of administrative madness, I just want to give up. And this is precisely why the administration so gladly grants exceptions to our two-terms-in-office rule.
Our Dean says this openly. “I’m supposed to be a historian but I haven’t taught or done any research for such a long time that I no longer remember anything,” he says. He is terrified of not being Dean any longer and that’s why he is very convenient to the higher-ups. “The provost is my boss. I have to do what my boss tells me or I will be out of a job,” he keeps saying. He’s tenured, so not having a job does not mean that he will be fired. It only means that he will have to become a regular professor and this is something he no longer knows how to do. I am grateful that he says this so openly.
The whole system is completely messed up because of this issue. Professors should rotate out of academic leadership jobs at regular intervals. But, again, it’s convenient to do it the way it’s currently done. Convenient to the administration, that is, but definitely not for faculty members or students.
The Award Lottery
Remember the drama around the award ceremony at my university? That whole story about the sweet elderly widow?
As you know, after a protracted struggle, I defeated the administration and forced it to include the widow’s award (and other scholarships) into the second part of the ceremony. Love, peace, butterflies. However, season two of this drama dropped yesterday and it’s a doozy.
From now on, we were told, professors are not going to be allowed to choose the students to award. Students’ names are going to be fed into a database, which will assign a random number to each student. Professors will be choosing whom to award but no longer between Jessica McBride and John Smith. We will be choosing between number 4,583 and number 7,912.
“But why?” I asked, making inhuman efforts to control my temper.
“Because,” I was told, “this will prevent professors from cherry picking which student will receive the award.” Cherry picking. This is the actual word that was used.
“That is the whole point, however,” I responded. “We pick the students who deserve the award based on our interactions with the students and our knowledge of their achievements.”
“Yes,” the administrator said in an accusatory tone. “Precisely! That is what makes the whole process unfair. Under the existing system there are students who have no chance of ever being awarded. We are trying to bring fairness to the process.”
“By turning it into a lottery?” At this point, I most definitely deserved an award for keeping my voice calm and my countenance mostly composed.
“I don’t understand why every professor who is being informed about this important and crucial change is so opposed to fairness,” the administrator pouted.
I am very glad I will no longer be department chair and will not have to find ways to bypass the system in the next award cycle. The next cheer is a wonderful person, a friend and the fellow Conservative. I feel very bad for her because I have no idea how she is going to handle the new process. I keep telling myself, I don’t have to care. I don’t have to care about this any longer. But it’s hard because this is absolute, shameless, ridiculous lunacy.
Book Notes: Los días perfectos by Jacobo Bergareche
I haven’t been able to find a good book to listen to in Spanish in two months and this put me into a vile mood. I drive and I need to listen to something while driving. I will be on the road at midnight tonight, for example, going to fetch an unwell friend from the airport. On Friday I will be on the road for a total of up to three hours. Which is great. I love it. But I also need some listening material.
Finally yesterday I came across a novel by a Spanish author, Jacobo Bergareche. The author reads it himself and he’s the perfect voice actor for his own book. The novel is excellent, so much so that I actually already finished it and am now experiencing the same conundrum of not having anything to listen to in Spanish when I go on the road.
Leaving aside my drama of endless book-searching, here is what makes the novel so interesting. Los días perfectos talks about Luis, a liberal, low-earning, middle-aged Spanish journalist in a dead marriage to a much more successful wife. In a work-related trip to Austin, Texas, Luis starts a tawdry affair with a random Mexican woman. The work trip is short and the affair only lasts for three days. A year later Luis returns and has another short sojourn with the same random Mexican woman. When he tries to repeat this escapade for the third year in a row, his paramour refuses to meet him and Luis composes a long imaginary letter to her explaining why their affair meant so much to him.
Luis is pathetic, weak, and excessively prattly. Everything in life is relative, though. Luis comes off as a paragon of happy masculinity in comparison to the main character of Ben Lerner’s novel Transcription. I would have despised Luis if I hadn’t read Transcription first. His rebellion through sporadic infidelity (the random Mexican woman is, of course, not the first of his random infidelities) does not inspire much respect but at least he does consider himself entitled to rebel. Luis’s narrative voice could not appear in a novel published in English because it’s not remotely subservient enough to the ruling ideology.
Bergareche’s novel is a reminder of the unevenness of ultra liberal ideological conditioning. Luis a reminder that we are not completely cooked.
If you are going to read the book, I recommend listening to the Audible version instead because it makes half of the novel’s charm.
What Caused Replacists?
I have no idea either. Everything people provide as an explanation is a description of the consequences. I have not yet seen a remotely interesting or convincing explanation of the causes.
Henry Nowak’s father praised inclusivity and blamed “knife crime” for the murder of his son. Mollie Tibbetts’ father prattled excitedly about “better food” that immigrants contribute. These young people were murdered by migrants in extremely brutal ways. Their parents then immediately proceeded to make a mockery of their own children’s brutal deaths by spouting replacist slogans.
And yes, I know that there are special governmental services that work with victims of these crimes to make them say convenient things. But so what? I’m surrounded by people at work who look like they bit into a lemon whenever anybody says the words “white people.” I went on Facebook not three minutes ago and discovered a post by a parishioner from my church, a homeschooling Orthodox mother of five, ranting against deportations of illegal criminals. “They are Americans just like us,” she wrote. People absolutely sincerely and genuinely want to undo their civilization and replace themselves. I respect Auron for honestly saying he can’t understand this. I can’t either.
Difficult Sleepovers
It’s becoming increasingly hard to do sleepovers because children insist that they cannot fall asleep without staring at TikTok videos in bed until midnight. They are appalled by the idea of bedtime. They’re shocked that at our place Klara is usually asleep by 8:30 pm and they throw tantrums when I refuse to give them the wifi password. These are children in the 9- to 10-year-old range. They’re all from very religious, good families.
I am all for kids staying up late during a sleepover. We turn off the lights and they giggle and tell stories in the dark or with a flashlight under a blanket until the wee hours. I am really into that kind of thing. I don’t force anybody to be asleep during a sleepover at a ridiculously early hour. But they are not going to lie there staring at devices and neither are they going to roam the house until midnight because I’m human too and I want to have a life.
A Scary Appetizer
I was about to get a new appetizer at a restaurant today. I was going to have it instead of the main course and I thought, it’s just pieces of fried chicken. How bad can they be?
Thank every saint in the prayer book, I checked before ordering. The appetizer contained 141 grams of carbs. My eyes almost popped out of my head. And then I realized that people usually have a main course and probably even a dessert plus some sugary drink to go with the sugar chicken.
I Could Write the Script
Today I attended my penultimate Chairs’ meeting. I have been going to these every two weeks for six years. At this point, I know exactly what everybody is going to say and at what moment in the meeting. I could write a script.
About 30 minutes in, the Chair of Social Work is going to say, “I don’t want to make this about myself,” and then will proceed to talk about herself for the next 30 minutes.
Almost immediately after that, the Chair of Criminal Justice is going to start to flirt clumsily with the Dean, while the Dean, who is very gay, is going to look extremely uncomfortable and disturbed.
The Chair of Mathematics is going to talk in a very quiet voice for a very long time about something utterly incomprehensible.
The Chair of Geography will wake up briefly and in a booming voice inform us that he is very unhappy with everything.
Thirty minutes before the scheduled end of the meeting, the Chair of Foreign Languages—that’s me, obvs—will get up and start crashing through the undergrowth on her way to the nearest exit.
Sabbatical Begins
For my upcoming sabbatical I got out of the gate flying. I’m still Department Chair and I’m teaching until the end of June but it feels like the sabbatical already started. I’m working on two articles that I’ve been wanting to write for a long time:
1. One is going to be on Chirbes’ diaries. I’m eager to write something where the word neoliberalism will not be mentioned or hinted at. Which I hope I’ll manage to do.
2. Another one is on the construction of neoliberal subjecthood in a book by Cristina Fallarás. So I won’t be completely bereft of opportunities to mention neoliberalism.
Both articles already have takers even though I haven’t written either one yet. Back when I was in my first year on the tenure track, we were revising the publication expectations for my department, I suggested that Full Professors should be expected to publish more than early-career academics. The colleagues who were Full Professors laughed me off, saying that it is just as hard to publish as a Full Professor. I had nothing but assumptions to support my point of view so I lost that argument.
Of course, now that I am a Full Professor, I know that I was absolutely right. It is enormously easier to publish. Even the most antisocial and curmudgeonly person becomes known after 20 years in the profession. People know the kind of stuff I write because they had many opportunities to read it. I still go through the blind peer review but I always have a bunch of people interested in publishing whatever I produce before it even materializes.
After I’m done with these two pieces, there will be one on the ecstasy of a neoliberal subject.
But Hitler
Chirbes was an absolute genius as a writer but he was infected by the same mind virus that is present in the heads of so many extremely intelligent people. He thought that any form of nationalism or patriotism was an inevitable precursor of fascism. He was so terrified of any expression of group allegiance that even seeing soccer fans cheer the home team made him fear a swift rise of a new Hitler.
It is curious that the writer’s most passionate denunciations of patriotism appear in the same entries where he anticipates the spillage of neoliberalism into art. I’ve seen this reaction in many people. They agree that neoliberalism is bad but they believe that the proposed remedy of preserving the nation state is worse. “But Hitler” is a sort of a psychological defense mechanism which helps them accept neoliberalism.
Condemnations of Hitler have become the most anodyne respectable pastime. They are no longer about Hitler, however. They are about showing allegiance to the new affective regime. We will never crawl from under the neoliberal machine unless we understand how this avoidance mechanism works. We need to let Hitler go. We need to walk away from fascists, Nazis, and communists. It all happened and it was all in the past. We’re failing to notice the present because we’re so obsessed by winning rhetorical victories against what is long gone.
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