Our university is trying to terminate its contract with Chick-Fil-A (which it is allowed to do by the initial contract agreement) and the nasty grease-joint is refusing on the grounds that this somehow violates its Freedom of Speech. Although – once again for the especially attentive – they had signed an agreement with us years ago giving both the chain and the university the right to not renew the contract without cause. Apparently, their freedom of speech should somehow make them force their vile, cancerogenous garbage onto the campus against our will.

There is a long (and in my opinion, completely idiotic) debate about freedom of speech and anti-gay donations of Chick-Fil-A raging on my campus. What I think we should be debating in this case, however, is why it is even possible for an oasis of intellect and knowledge to allow that this vicious poison be offered to us in lieu of food. We should be organizing to push all of these Pizza Huts, Baskin Robbinses and other similar garbage out of our cafeteria.

I am convinced that Chick-Fil-A is going to declare bankruptcy soon enough because they are not motivated by business interests in trying to remain on our campus. Whenever I go to the cafeteria, there is nobody there at their stand. Their stuff is not popular on campus. However, they occupy valuable space while the high-demand fresh salad stand that has people queuing up to it all the time has to scramble for space. Chick-Fil-A has abandoned business for the sake of ideology. Coupled with really horrible, disgusting rubbish that they serve up, this makes them sore losers who can’t quite while they are still not completely in the toilet.

Our university has been making significant efforts to improve the quality of food on campus. In the 3,5 years I have worked here, the deep-frying has been cut at least in half, a fresh fruit stand has appeared, and so has a stand with freshly tossed salads. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that our decision to terminate Chick-Fil-A has anything to do with their anti-gay disease rather than with a general effort to make our food more healthy. An effort, let me add, that started ling before the Chick-Fil-A gay-bashing scandal.

I believe that a company should be able to donate to whatever legal enterprise it wishes to support without being punished by the government for that. However, a university should also be able to choose not to peddle poison if it does so in accordance with a contract.

Yes, I also hate it when the word “Medieval” is used as a derogatory term, but this email just begs for that:

—————————- Original Message —————————-
Subject: call for papers
From:    [name and email redacted to protect the less innocent]
Date:    Wed, January 2, 2013 20:56
————————————————————————–

Gentlemen,

in december will be organized at the University of Urbino an international
conference about medieval filologies, in attachment you will find the call
for papers.

Yours sincerely.

This was probably translated from Italian in a really careless way. It might even be the work of our old friend GT. 🙂

Italian academics have a worse reputation for machismo than even their Spanish colleagues.

An interview appeared in Inside Higher Ed where a prof defends making students’ grades public. :

Yes, I think students’ grades should be posted. By thinking of our students as teacup-fragile, we have probably made them teacup-fragile. I don’t see how this is a service to them. I’ve taught kids in Cambodia and China, and my own son is half-Chinese and started school in Shanghai. Kids are definitely tougher in Asia – they have to face their failures regularly, but their self-esteem is not crushed by it and they tend to excel at whatever they put their minds to. Resilience and the ability to accept occasional defeat, or humbly enjoy the accolades of success, are good for character.

I don’t give all my students the same grade out of some duty to egalitarianism. So why should I hide the true hierarchy from the students? In the West, we stress the idea that our worth and value is a private inner condition of the individual, but in face-cultures like China one’s value is also public. So, public shame and success are considered great motivators. Are there abuses of this? Yes, of course, but most students thrive and excel in this non-egalitarian context too.

I’m bothered by these Orientalist statements and Professor Asma’s belief that meeting a few kids in Cambodia and China entitles him to draw conclusions about everybody in Asia. Asia is not a tiny village. It is an enormously huge and diverse region that should never be dismissed with these facile generalizations just because it is convenient for an American educator to do so to advance an argument.

I agree that students are not fragile and should not be treated as infants. At the same time, I see no evidence that posting the grades has any influence on how well students absorb knowledge. I come from a country where grades are always made public. We are a culture where personal space is never respected and people’s lives are seen as more of a communal property than individuals’ own inalienable belonging. People get used to being shamed publicly not only for their grades but for a variety of other things. For instance, when a medical exam revealed that a classmate at the university back in Kharkov had an STD, this information was announced in front of everybody and shared as widely as possible in order to shame this student.

None of this, however, salvaged our horribly rotten system of education. I would be an idiot if I claimed, as prof. Asma does, that as a result of these practices all FSU people “tend to excel at whatever they put their minds to.” I don’t think that making the grades private would achieve that goal either, of course. Human beings are not machines, and you cannot find a magic button you can press to make them all excel at everything at the same time.

This is the second day in a row where I encounter articles by educated, seemingly intelligent people who don’t have any grasp of what causation is about. They keep advancing arguments of the “The phone called and then it started to rain, ergo phone calls cause rain” variety and don’t notice how silly they sound.

During the tenure workshop I attended, the Associate Dean told us, “Do you see these enormous binders that contain the applicants’ tenure dossiers? Sometimes, you have to pore over every piece of paper they contain to see whether the applicant really deserves tenure. On other occasions, however, you open the binder, look at the first page of the research narrative, see a staggering number of publications, and realize that you don’t really need to read anything else in that dossier.”

I really want to be that applicant whose research narrative makes people go, “Ah, well, obviously. . . I mean, how the hell did she do that?”

In 2010, I had an article accepted by a scholarly journal outside of my immediate discipline. (I had reasons to want to publish there that I won’t go into in this post.)

The article was accepted but because of the financial constraints many universities are experiencing, the publication of the journal’s new issues kept getting delayed. Articles that are accepted for publication don’t count for tenure. Only the articles that have actually appeared in print do. This makes sense because nowadays a journal can easily go out of business before it manages to publish its last accepted pieces.

Only yesterday did I get the news that this article had finally been published and I will soon receive the print copy of the journal. The actual printing of articles (at least in the Humanities) can get delayed for any amount of time these days. This is why I’m extremely happy that I have fulfilled my tenure requirements in what concerns publications 1,5 years before I have to submit my portfolio. Now I can work on my research without worrying that articles wouldn’t appear in time.

If you are just beginning a tenure-track career, please don’t let the false security of having six years ahead of you lull you into a dangerous sense of complacency. The time you have is a lot more limited than you think now.

I just read something funny in this great novel by Benjamin Prado that I want to use for my new article:

Sometimes, the only difference between a blackboard and a coffin is that, in the case of the blackboard, the dead man is located outside.

That’s how I felt yesterday during the first lectures of the semester. Students find it very hard to return to class after Christmas celebrations. I don’t blame them. January 7 is way too early to end the winter festivities.

I don’t know why people waste so much time making idiotic arguments. Consider this one:

Consider healthcare. We all of us—libertarians, conservatives and liberals—want a growing economy. And we all agree that a growing economy requires entrepreneurial dynamism.

So ask yourself this: In a country in which health insurance isn’t guaranteed, how many millions of Americans with great ideas find it impossible to become entrepreneurs because they’re terrified to leave their job, because then they would lose their health insurance and ruin their lives if they get sick?

Of course, one can waste a lifetime asking silly questions. Or one could just see for oneself. For whatever mysterious reason, the variety of goods and services in the US – where healthcare is not guaranteed – is much MUCH greater than in Canada where it is. Mind you, I’m not claiming that there is any sort of a causal link here. Post hoc doesn’t translate into propter hoc, as we all know. But there is a simple, easily verifiable reality that the author of the linked piece chooses to disregard.

You cannot expect to be taken seriously if you make these childish arguments that only make your political movement sound like it’s overrun by a bunch of idiots. I passionately support universal free healthcare but this is not a way to defend it.

P.S. The article also is very sexist in that it claims that Liberals “gave women the vote.” This just goes to show that there are sexist fools both among Liberals and Conservatives.

I feel very misunderstood whenever I talk about religious fanatics. Religious fanatics are not the same as religious people. They are the opposite of religious people.

A fanatic’s only allegiance is to her or his own interests. A fanatic’s only God is his or her own self. There would be nothing bad about it if only fanatics admitted that honestly and didn’t try to pass of their self-interest for something that is supposed to benefit all humanity. Why do you think the Soviet Communism soon acquired extremely religious overtones? That was because the Soviet Communism shared with religious fanaticism the crucial quality of complete self-righteousness that knew no moral barriers and experienced no qualms.

A religious fanatic is a sociopath who finds blabbering about God very convenient to dupe the simple-minded into putting up with the fanatic’s exploitation and nastiness.

Religious people worship God. Religious fanatics believe they are God.

If I gave a student two Fs for using Google Translate, what would possess them to send me an email asking for a letter of recommendation translated with Google Translate?

I mean, I think he is asking for a recommendation. The email is so grabled that I have trouble figuring it out.

Is this a new kind of addiction? Are people getting addicted to Google Translate because it promises them an easy fix for the necessity to learn languages? Is the lure of an easy ride so powerful that it blinds them to the painfully obvious realization that this doesn’t work?

Seriously, it’s like some people can’t help themselves.

What makes religious fanatics particularly scary is their delusional belief in their own infallibility. See this billboard that was put up in Maryland:

 

Imagine how lacking in self-awareness one has to be to put words into Jesus’s mouth. I believe that religious fanaticism (irrespective of the religion fanatics claim to uphold) is a refuge for sociopaths. It allows them to do all kinds of horrible things and excuse their actions by claiming that they do the will of God.

The first time I met such a person (or such a person in the making) was at school. We didn’t have many religious people back in the Soviet Union and the ones who existed were considered freaky. In 6th grade, I met the only kid from a religious family a had ever met. Her name was Dasha. I believe that Dasha’s parents were extremely irresponsible in raising her in an ultra-religious environment in a country where that would most certainly make her an outcast. Adults can bear the burden of their choices but imposing that hardship on children is unfair. My deeply anti-Soviet father, for example, made sure I never had any doubts about the veracity of the propaganda I was fed at school. As a result, I was a much happier child than I would have been had he shared his anti-Communist resentments with me on a regular basis.

Dasha, however, soon learned to use religion to her advantage. She realized that fake pseudo-Christian contrition was a great way to manipulate people. Dasha’s “Christian” parents were extremely poor (even by Soviet standards) because they were opposed to contraception and chose to have as many kids as God would give them even when there was nothing to feed the kids. As a result, Dasha was mortally jealous of kids whose families were better off (which would be everybody.)

Once, Dasha’s best friend Anya came to class wearing ear-rings. Those were tiny little ear-rings that were really nothing special. But you know how much it means to 12-year-old girls to be able to look like adult women. Anya was super proud of her ear-rings.

Her happiness lasted for a very short time, though, because Dasha went to the principal and ratted Anya out. The principal marched down to our classroom, lifted Anya’s heavy curls, and discovered the offending pieces of jewelry. Then she dragged Anya away to yell at her for being a “whore in the making.”

After a while, Anya came back to class, shaking and looking terrified. She tried to put a brave face on it and sat quietly down at her desk. We all gathered around, trying to comfort her.

Dasha realized that her scheme was misfiring. Anya was now getting even more attention than before.

“Oh God, oh God,” Dasha suddenly started to vociferate. “What have I done? I am a horrible sinner and there will be no forgiveness for me!”

Of course, everybody abandoned the quiet Anya and rushed to Dasha who was yelping hysterically.

“Why are you crying?” we asked her.

“I betrayed my friend,” Dasha kept wailing. “I have sinned and now I am lost forever!” For the next half-hour, we all comforted Dasha and tried to convince her she was not a horrible sinner, whatever that was.

This was, of course, only one of many stories protagonized by little Dasha who learned to use her fake Christian contrition to manipulate others to perfection. I remember her as the most judgmental, nasty, and self-involved kid I ever met. The scariest kind of evil is the one that is deeply convinced of its divine nature.