When I teach only in Spanish (like last semester, for example), get a very noticeable accent in English. But when I teach only in English (like right now), my English becomes perfect and the accent is nearly imperceptible.

What makes this curious is that I teach online this semester. This means I don’t actually get to speak English. I only write. I speak a lot less English now than last semester because I’m mostly at home alone or with N. Yet, my English pronunciation gets better.

Why do people keep insisting that online courses save money? I’m finishing my very first online course, and I can’t figure out how anybody’s money has been saved. All I can think of is that there has been less wear and tear on chairs and floors in a classroom. Nothing else comes to mind. Not even electricity has been saved since on our campus electricity blasts on all summer long whether there are any people present or not. My office, for example, is illuminated like a Christmas tree during the 4 months I’m out of it, and I have no control over that.

So where are the savings that an occasional online course is supposed to produce?

This is what the people at the University of Virginia should have been protesting this entire time:

First let me outline a startling absence in the career backgrounds of the 16 members of the Board of Visitors at UVA.  Not one board member is employed, or has ever been employed, in the higher education sector. . .

The Rector, Helen Dragas, appointed buy Kaine in 2008, is a realter and Virginia Beach developer.  She comes from a family of successful real estate developers and is CEO of a successful Virginia Beach development company founded by her father. So she does not even earn the kudos of establishing her own company.  However, she surely has plenty of dollars to throw around on gubernatorial elections. . .

The remainder of the board, evidently, are spineless creatures – elsewise they would never have tolerated such a campaign of secrecy, without opening up board deliberations to the public arena. Their backgrounds are far removed from academia. . .

Not a single member of the board holds a doctoral degree in any discipline.

What a disgrace. And this is a well-known, prestigious university. Just think about it. A university is governed by people who have no inside knowledge of academia and who don’t even have a PhD. We, the academics, only have ourselves to blame if we allow this.

I was asked by a reader to comment on the article that starts as follows:

When the government gathers or analyzes personal information, many people say they’re not worried. “I’ve got nothing to hide,” they declare. “Only if you’re doing something wrong should you worry, and then you don’t deserve to keep it private.”

I have a very protective attitude towards my privacy. It matters so much to me that I guard it like a rabid dog. When people ask me where I’ve been and what I’ve done, I sometimes lie. Not because I’ve done anything I’m ashamed of, but simply because I don’t feel like sharing this information about myself. As much as I love my husband, if he went through my pockets, rummaged in my papers or read my emails, I would end the relationship immediately, no questions asked. The same goes for all of my friends, relatives and colleagues. Invade my privacy, and we are done for good. And it isn’t because I have anything to hide from my husband or anybody else. It’s because if people invade my private space, this means they disrespect me completely as a human being.

At the same time, in spite of this exaggerated need to protect my privacy, I have absolutely no problem with having a gazillion surveillance cameras record what I do or satellites observing me inside my house (I have no idea if that’s done or possible, mind you). It matters absolutely nothing to me if all my purchases are listed and stored in some database and some governmental officials or corporate employees have a record of every drink of alcohol I ever had and every condom I ever purchased.  I don’t even care if some governmental official records every session with my analyst and listens to it at leisure.

The reason why I guard my privacy so fiercely from people I know and don’t care in the least about what some strangers know about me is that I have no relationship with strangers. They can’t disrespect me as a human being because they don’t know me as a human being. To them, I’m just a number among millions. They don’t know what I eat, drink or read. They know what number 73625268V03030L3-3-7 eats, drinks and reads.

It’s a little like what happens in a hospital. Many women would have a problem with spreading their legs and demonstrating their vaginas to a group of coworkers and friends, right? However, women who give birth at a hospital do just that, even if they are giving birth though an elective C-section, and suffer no emotional trauma as a result. Many people would never walk naked in front of their neighbors and friends, yet those same people do that very easily at a hospital. Medical personnel has no relationship with me as a human being, so there is no shame or reticence between us. This is precisely the reason why people so often share secrets with  strangers they meet on a bus or anonymous online interlocutors.

Privacy as a concept only makes sense when you are interacting with somebody as a private individual. My personal space can only be invaded by a person who knows me as a person.

The belief that somebody somewhere cares enough about you to collect and analyze every bit of data about you and that somebody constantly pays attention to every aspect of your existence is an effective cure for loneliness. It’s easy to feel lost and insignificant in an enormous universe and these paranoid fantasies of how somebody will analyze your purchases and notice that you are sick (one of the examples from the quoted article) must be comforting. “Somebody has got to be paying attention to what I read, eat, drink and worry about,” people like the author of the article seem to say. “There’s got to be somebody out there who actually gives a fuck.”

As we all know, life only has meaning if there are witnesses to it. How do we even know if we exist when nobody pays any attention to us? In the absence of actual human beings who are interested in our reading choices, purchases and the state of our health, we might generate fantasies about the “Big Brother” who actually does care.

What I do find curious is how easy some people find it to sell their “life is so scaaaaaary” worldview of abandoned, terrified little kids.