Opinions, art, debate
The president of the American Comparative Literature Association sent a letter today informing academics that their role is to “explain to students, parents, administrators, and the general public issues like the … weaponization of white, male, hetero privilege.”
Zero lessons learned.
This is absolute crap. Literary taste is honed by decades of intense reading. My book reviews are great because I’ve been reading longer than these kids have been alive. You can’t “reshape criticism” when you are a total noob. You should sit quietly, read, and learn.
I read the article that this image headlines, and do you want to guess how these “hot literati” reshape criticism? They claim to do it by reviewing “sex-worker adjacent literature” and “things that reveal lineages our readers might not have seen before.” These young people are too inexperienced to notice how incredibly stale this posturing is. “I’m going to be all cool and unconventional by writing about hookers” is neither new nor unconventional. It’s been done a trillion times, and it’s always deeply boring.
The Dean floated the possibility that we’ll soon have an automated course scheduling system, and I almost cried with joy. It won’t help me because I built my last departmental schedule in March but it’s still a relief.
In theory, it was good that we were in control of our own schedule. But in reality, I spent 6 years having to schedule almost all of our courses into the same time slot at noon on MW. Our enrollments are in the toilet because students reasonably say, “I’d love to major in Spanish but it will take me ten years to graduate, so I can’t.” Because everything is MW at noon, including large required courses.
Everybody is going to bitch that this is yet another glitchy, expensive automated system and that it’s soulless and inconvenient. The administration is bad, it’s evil, it doesn’t respect faculty. But what’s the alternative? If people refuse to accept MWF at 10 and 11 am, which students love and enroll massively, then what’s the administration going to do?
There are no morning courses on the MW schedule. MW courses start at noon. This means that for instructors who teach 4 courses per semester, the last course on the MW schedule will end at 5:45. Students don’t enroll in such courses because our students work in the evenings. You think I’d be able to explain this simple fact.
“Why do you keep scheduling me so late? It’s unfair!! Nobody enrolls!!!”
“Would you accept an MWF schedule? Because MW means noon to 5:45.”
“No! But 5:45 is too late. Nobody will enroll!”
Of course, nobody enrolls. The program is dying. The Academic Scheduling hates my department for this shit. The Dean hates us.
(We can’t do TTh for almost anything because TTh is when the School of Education schedules its courses and we can’t coincide with them because, again, students won’t be able to enroll and won’t go into the program.)
I proposed many times that we take turns on the MW. One semester colleague A gets it. The next semester colleague B does. Nope. Didn’t work. Nobody agreed. I’ve tied myself in knots to help students advance to degree completion by offering endless equivalencies, letting them count all sorts of extraneous courses in lieu of Spanish and French. “How come you are letting these students graduate in Spanish when they took so little Spanish?” the Dean asks. Yes, I know, it’s nuts but what am I supposed to do?
Sorry for the long rant but when I heard about the plan to automate this process, I experienced extraordinary joy. I hate excessive automation. I hate the destruction of academic self-governance but we are bringing this on ourselves. We really do.
This is beyond cool, people.
This is a country that had no army at all in 2014. And wasn’t even really a country. And now it’s a global leader of defense. It’s extraordinary.
Klara refused to have anything to do with foreign languages her whole life. But today she looked deep into my eyes and said, “Necesito un helado de fresa, mami.”
There was absolutely nothing at that moment capable of convincing me to get her ice cream.
Except that.
Yes. That’s stupid. But this fellow is not forcing anybody to buy the amulets. Better yet, he’s not forcing anybody to inject them into their bodies against their will. Literally all I want from liberals (leftists, progressives, whatever) is that they leave me alone and don’t make me participate. The problem is that the whole leftist (liberal, progressive, etc) project is about forcing others to participate and loudly praise their magic amulets.
Have you noticed that JD Vance ends up assigned only the tasks he is guaranteed to fail? Not only because he’s useless but because the tasks are unfulfillable.
It’s enjoyable to watch.
And by the way, I have very little resentment towards the administration. When people have a strategy that they actively pursue, even if it’s hostile to my interests, I can respect that. The administrators were all here on campus every day during COVID starting on the day when the university reopened. I respect that. Administrators come to every event. I can’t get any professors to come to support their own students at the undergraduate research showcase. But the administrators are always there. Zero colleagues come to the presentations I organize at the International Studies Day. But there’s always somebody there from the Dean’s Office, asking questions, being actively engaged. Administrators are on campus on Fridays when professors treat Fridays like a part of the weekend, refusing even to answer emails on that day. They are always there during all events with students, 100% attendance.
It’s hard to be too upset with people who at least show up.
I know when all joy went out of my job as department chair. It was when the Boomers retired. Once the last one left, all I had was people who wanted to work as little as possible, work only remotely, come to campus twice a week at most, teach only the same old courses to avoid preparing new ones, assign as much stuff from self-grading digital textbooks, use pre-canned tests from those digital textbooks, and who have zero buy in into the future of the department or the institution.
Boomers were the soul of the university. Their retirements coincided with the post-COVID era when people discovered that they don’t like working. Moderate-effort workers turned into low-effort while the low-effort ones went aggressively zero effort.
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