So. I just listened to the President of our university speak to us about the budget crisis.

Here are the most important points:

1. The state of IL sucks dick and has done so for the past 10 years at least.

2. Our university is the cheapest to attend in the state.

3. Enrollments at respectable universities are plummeting. This happens because crowds of people prefer to pay a lot more to shady online schools for colored pieces of toilet paper than enroll in actual universities, do real work, and get valuable diplomas. (My analysis: This is the result of raising an entire generation of pill-popping, instant gratification people.)

4. One of the greatest challenges our university faces is a growing monitoring and interference with every aspect of what we do by state abd federal governments. This has been happening for the last 10 years. Please re-read the last sentence before commenting on this point.

5. What I discovered: Professors have the same tendency as students to share boring disquisitions on how they feel instead of asking concrete questions.

6. This current budget scare is just one in a row of many. Everything will probably work out just fine in the end.

7. Nobody will be able to avoid offering some percentage of their courses online. I’m perfectly fine with that because I dig working from home. A mix of in-person and online courses works great for me. So if you hate the words “online teaching”, make sure you have a colleague like me who is willing to develop online courses. Pretending that this trend will not become huge, however, and bemoaning it is as useful as arguing that candle-light is better for the environment than electricity.

On the one hand, we al give lip-service to accepting and even “celebrating” cultural differences. On the other hand, the recognition that said cultural difference don’t only manifest themselves in regional cuisines and quirky traditions people observe at home but also color every aspect of people’s behavior is just not there.

“A Hispanic woman in her 50s”, “a Russian man in his 30s”, etc. are not simply comforting statistics that will look nice and diverse on your personnel reports. They are, rather, actual universes that are governed by laws you might not even be able to imagine.

When I was learning Spanish and spending all of my time with Hispanic people, I had to learn not just the language but also the shared way of being of the people around me. And it was hard. It felt like breaking my own identity into small pieces and reassembling it anew. The process ultimately enriched me profoundly but it was very difficult and often painful.

After this experience, I never assume that people from other cultures are a sort of a version of me with a different accent. We all share a basic humanity but the ways that humanity manifests itself are profoundly disparate.

This is why “multi-culturalism” is not a happy-happy-joy-joy phenomenon but, instead, something that requires very hard work on the part of everybody. And this hard work is something that many people might simply not feel like engaging in.

So instead of saying honestly, “This is too hard, I have too much on my plate as it is, screw multi-culturalism”, people wimp out and pretend that cultural differences are simply cosmetic.

And what bugs me out of my head is seeing people who have dedicated their lives to foreign languages and literature make this mistake.

Last week when I was in a cafe waiting for my mediumskimicedmocha, I overhead one student say to another, “Of course it’s true that professors grade easier than TAs”, and the other student agreed with that statement.

Of course! I rather liked this indication that we professors might actually become nicer with time, as opposed to more cranky and mean.

But do you agree with these students?

Yes. In my experience, beginning academics definitely feel the need to make themselves feel more important by being super strict with students. Normally, they get over it pretty fast.

There is nothing cuter than a young academic announcing in a trembling voice filled with profound insecurity, “I never give As in my courses because nobody can know this material well enough to deserve an A!” A few years later, academics look back on such memories and laugh.