Several times this year I have heard about people who got good tenure-track jobs after being on the market 4+ years. Today I heard one more such story about somebody I know.

The suggestion that people who have been on the job market for several years after getting their PhDs cannot get TT jobs seems to have been nothing but a myth.

It makes me very, very happy to see people who didn’t believe all the fear-mongering fairy tales about the doom and gloom that supposedly awaited them and who got great jobs as a result. The people I’m talking about are great teachers and promising scholars who will do credit to their field.

Nova Scotia is a province in Canada that is plagued by very serious problems. The economy is barely functioning, and the standard of living is nothing like what you see in Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia. The formerly great universities of the province are in decline, and the young people find that fleeing Nova Scotia for less problematic areas of Canada or the US makes a lot of sense. I have relatives living there, so I’m very familiar with the challenges the province is facing.

Of course, whenever a region starts to suffer economically, academically, culturally, and politically, its authorities begin to take measures to prevent people from noticing that the region sucks. This is precisely what is happening in Nova Scotia. The province has introduced a new bill aimed at fighting cyber-bullying that is worded in a way which makes anybody who ever wrote absolutely anything online a potential criminal:

The definition of cyberbullying, in this particular bill, includes “any electronic communication” that ”ought reasonably be expected” to “humiliate” another person, or harm their “emotional well-being, self-esteem or reputation.”

So many people feel abused and traumatized by people having opinions that differ from theirs that nobody will be immune from such accusations by those who troll the Internet looking for reasons to feel aggravated.

As the article’s author points out, the bill is doomed from the start:

Nova Scotia’s Cyber Safety Act is in clear conflict with our Charter rights to free expression, and I can’t imagine it withstanding a legal challenge on those grounds.

In the meanwhile, however, it will do what it was supposed to do from the start: distract everybody from the real issues that the province is facing.

Thank you, Titfortat, for bringing here this link.

The Film Series for Promotion of Diversity at our university has been criticized for not being diverse enough. Some people have expressed resentment that the film series does not reflect the discrimination WASP men are experiencing in the US and instead concentrates on blacks and Hispanics.

Here is a fresh example of why superficial comparisons between different countries conducted by people who have no understanding of the cultural realities they are discussing are useless.

“Is it true that the maternity leave in your country is 3 years? Wow, that is so enlightened! Why can’t we be as civilized in this country?” a colleague exclaimed.

So I had to explain that our “enlightened and civilized” maternity leave was only paid for 1/2 of its duration and the payments were so tiny that nobody could really live on them. Let alone live on them with dignity. Anybody in the US can easily have this kind of maternity leave. All you need to do is quit your job and go on food stamps.

In the course evaluations, two out of 13 students complained that instead of multiple choice tests I assign essays. The self-defeating stupidity of such complaints literally nauseates me.

I am absolutely convinced that an instructor who assigns multiple choice in limited-enrollment seminars in the Humanities is defrauding the students. The only benefit of such assignments is that they are super-easy to grade. Other than that, they accomplish absolutely nothing and have no pedagogical or educational value.

Multiple choice doesn’t teach any marketable skill, doesn’t prepare for the workplace, does not promote thinking and analysis. They are based on stupid, mechanical memorization at best and guesswork at worst.

Instead of this fraudulent practice, I offer students an opportunity to work with me in a one-on-one format to improve their writing and their logical reasoning skills. I give very extensive comments on each essay that are individually tailored to each student. While multiple choice assignments can be graded by a five-year-old and offer zero useful feedback (unless you believe that “16 out of 20” us very useful), my assignments show that I invest a lot of my own time and effort into helping students learn.

Still, in every group there is a couple of students who prefer to be dismissed with an MC assignment. It boggles the mind that anybody could be so into instant gratification that they prefer to get some meaningless grade (that will in no way affect their chances of employment) than acquire useful knowledge.

We keep feeling sorry for the students who have to take out loans to get higher education. But I can’t find a whole lot of compassion in me for people who get into debt and then piss away the very opportunity they are mortgaging their future to get. I was a student in dire financial straits, too, when I was their age. Thankfully, none of my professors ever dismissed me with some stupid MC assignment. If they had, however, that is what I would be complaining about. It would have never occurred to me to complain about people who actually engaged with me and tried to help me learn.