Your freedom of speech consists not in being able to come to other people’s blogs and say any kind of rubbish you want without being kicked out, but in being able to open a blog of your own and enjoy the freedom to say whatever you please there.

Seriously, is this so hard to understand?

I just told N. a story from my past and it turns out that our reaction to it is completely different. So I decided to post it here and let my readers tell me what they think.

Many years ago, when I lived in New Haven, CT, I once came home and discovered an unknown gentleman waiting for me in front of the door to my building.

“Hi,” the gentleman said. “I live in the building opposite yours and my windows face the windows of your apartment. I’ve been watching you for a while and I really like you.”

“OK,” I said and proceeded to enter my building.

“So would you like to go out with me?” the gentleman inquired.

“No!” I responded and slammed the door behind me.

Now, N. thinks that I was wrong in considering the guy weird and creepy.

What do you, dear readers, think? Was my neighbor being stalky or romantic?

I think that there are two central, basic, extremely important services that any society should offer to all of its citizens for free in order to consider itself civilized: medical care and education. The rest can be debated, discussed and disagreed upon. These two things, however, are two important to deny to people on a monetary basis. The question every civilized society needs to ask itself is: can we offer these two important things to all of us for free? And if not, what do we need to do in order to make it happen? After this goal is reached, we can proceed to concentrate on other issues.

At this point, however, we have been led to believe that we don’t have money for either of these things and that cuts need to be made to one of them to salvage some remnants of the other. And that’s just wrong.

Look at what’s happening in California, for example:

The Regents of the University of California are meeting to discuss a multiyear funding proposal that will increase tuition by a cumulative 81% in the next four years, if the state does not increase funding. As a point of reference, UC tuition has already gone up 330% since the year 2000. And as Bob Samuels points out, if past experience is any guide, it’s much more likely that the state will actually decrease public funding in the next four years, and that tuition will rise even higher and faster than that.

In short, while UC students paid around $4,000 a year in tuition in 2000, their successors will pay over $22,000 a year in 2015.

Just multiply 22,000 by four and you will see who is going to be able to afford higher education in this country.

All these people who don’t believe that healthcare and education should be free for all, who are they and how do they justify this to themselves? They’ve got to be telling themselves something to explain how all of this is right. So what is it? What’s going on in their very very empty heads, I wonder.

I often find that charitable organizations display really horrible taste in how they go about doing their business. Look at this one, for example:

Dining for Women is a dinner giving circle. We “dine in” together once a month, each bringing a dish to share, and our “dining out” dollars (what we would have spent if we had eaten at a restaurant) are sent to programs empowering women worldwide. We then combine all donations from hundreds of chapters to support one carefully selected international program a month.

This just sounds so incredibly spoiled and condescending that I can’t help but be bothered by it. “Oh, I’m such a good person for sacrificing a restaurant outing once a month. I just ate dinner to empower other women.” Of course, the women worldwide who need to be “empowered” by these charitable ladies’ dining efforts face daily the kind of struggles where sacrificing a restaurant outing once a month does not sound all that tragic. And then the spoiled rich American women get together and chew their cud to “empower” such women? Who even came up with such an idea?

You’ll say I’m biased against “ladies’ charities” and yes, I am. I met people who work for such charities (not the one I discuss in this post, these are other charities I’m talking about) and discovered that they are paid anywhere upwards of $250,000 per year for their charity-organizing services. I also discovered what percentage their salaries make out of the entire amount gathered. Since then, I’d rather contribute to a Ponzi scheme than to this kind of charities.

My Freshman students were born in 1993. The Internet was already around. Personal computers had been around for a while.

Yesterday, I was explaining the essay format to them.

“The essays should be in Times New Roman 12-point font, double-spaced, one-inch margins on all sides,” I announce and notice the stunned faces of my students.

“Did anybody understand what I just said?” I ask.

“Noooo,” is the answer.

I open a Word document and show them. I also insert page numbers.

“OMG!” a student exclaims. “This is SO cool! I always write page numbers by hand but this is so much more convenient!”

Well, at least I don’t have to try hard to impress them. You know how professors sometimes fear their younger students will not find them sufficiently savvy about technology? I don’t think there is any danger of that.

Maybe the next time I’ll introduce them to the miracle of a light-bulb.

I just discovered the best piece of news ever from Jonathan’s blog: now there is Amazon in Spain.

And their address is very simple:

http://www.amazon.es/

This makes me more happy than words can tell. Of course, my bank account is weeping quietly in the background. But who cares if just today I spent two hours scouring our continent for a book I really wanted to get and now I bought it within exactly 20 seconds on Spanish Amazon! And it was their only copy, too. 🙂

I’m having heart palpitations right now because I’m so happy. I need to have some tea to calm down. This is just really huge for me.

P.S. And they offer gift certificates. Family members, are you there? Do you hear this? Gift certificates. Your problem of what to give me as a gift has been solved forever. Please remember that a girl can never have enough books in Spanish.

Z, a fellow Hispanist, has been churning out great posts one after another. Her most recent post has inspired me to make a new academic year’s resolution.

When I was starting out my career in academia as an advanced undergrad and a beginning grad student, I believed that academia was amazing, research was the most fun thing you could ever imagine yourself doing, and publishing was easy. And it was. All those things were true for me at that time. Publications rolled in, research progressed, and I wanted to dance around in the library all day long.

Then, I gradually got convinced that life was hard and academic life was even harder, research was painful, and publishing was impossible. And when I started to believe it, it all came true. The research, the publications, and the enjoyment all dried up.

So today I have decided: no more of that. I don’t want to participate in any more “Our lives are so miserable” conversations. Just being around when they occur gradually infects you with this attitude. I remember when I was at the MLA, interviewing for jobs, I absolutely loved the experience. Both times. It was pure, unadulterated enjoyment for me. But everybody kept saying it was so horrible and stressful, so I started feeling like it should be horrible and stressful. I started pasting the miserable expression I observed on others onto my face to avoid standing out.

And what do you think the end result was? I became completely stressed out and fell very ill. Gradually, of course, the long-suffering, tortured expression stops being a mask and becomes your only true face.

Here is more brilliance from Z on this subject:

Must we talk about struggle and suffering every day? Did you not get involved in this because it was interesting? I did, and  I think I deserve to remember that as much as anyone. I know a lot of people admire the straining academic persona but is that who you gravitate toward? Why not be strong and confident and competent if you can?

So this is the state of mind I am planning to recover from now on:

In this liberation front writing is fun, publishing is easy, teaching is a pleasant social and artistic experience, and administration is creative. These things are said in a bad situation, that we recognize as such. I recognize your bad situation as well. I am not willing, however, to perform difficulty at this time. I am interested in performing ease.

I really really like this. The entire post this is taken from has been printed out and is now on the walls of my office at work and my home office.

Oh, this feels good.

I’m reading a letter signed by several university presidents who are lobbying the Congress not to implement any further cuts to education. This is, of course, a noble goal.

However, what they propose to cut instead are “entitlement programs” which are named in this letter as the main source of the federal deficit. Unless by entitlement programs they mean the military budget, I think there is something fishy here.

I still find the vocabulary of the US economy confusing. Can anybody help? What are these “entitlement programs” that university leaders are proposing to cut to save our universities?