I don’t get this argument as to how Bates College probably has an internal candidate for its 3-year lectureship in German and Russian, so it’s OK for them to put up such a job ad.

No, people, it is still not OK.

Let’s say Bates College has an internal candidate who agrees to be spit and defecated on as part of this lectureship. Let’s say this poor loser agrees to such work conditions of his own free will. Is it OK for Bates to advertise this kind of a position?

And if you see a difference between being spit and defecated on and a 3-year lectureship in German and Russian at Bates, then there is something wrong with your vision. Bates College is shitting on all of us right now. It deserves a shitstorm to hit it right back.

I have no idea what Bates College is but I have just discovered that it is filled with vicious, nasty, stupid creatures and deserves to be shamed, denounced, and denigrated from here to eternity. This stupid place is advertising a 3-year lectureship in German and Russian.

Can you believe the incredible cheapness and gall of these losers? They want to get two specialists for the price of one and don’t even have the decency to make it a tenure-track position. And the most ridiculous thing is that these freakazoids don’t even realize that Russian and German are not similar languages. They don’t belong to the same group of languages, they don’t even share an alphabet. Save for a few words that Russian borrowed from German, there is no significant affinity between them.

When a college offers a tenure-track in Spanish and French, I cringe at the cheapness, but at least the languages are related and it’s a permanent position that can make somebody happy. But a lectureship in German and Russian? Come on!

What’s next, people? A 3-year non-renewable lectureship in French and Quantum Physics? Or Comparative Literature and Geography?

Places like Bates College should be stopped before this practice becomes wide-spread. When an Internet campaign was unleashed against an administrator who wanted to extort faculty members, it took less than 48 hours of online shaming to bring her to apologize and choke on all of her vicious plans. If you weren’t following this blog at that time, here is how the campaign started. My post was #2 search on Google when looking for this administrator’s name. No wonder she crumbled under this sort of pressure.

Now I am beginning a campaign of shaming Bates College. I will persecute it until the first Google searches with its name reveal these disgusting facts about it. This is a strategy that works, and quite a few atrocities have been prevented through online awareness campaigns.

I have noticed that everybody likes to write at length about how much academia sucks but when it comes to something that can actually be done to improve things, nobody wants to participate except people in Australia and maybe one or two academics in North America. Rebecca Schuman is regularly posting detailed articles about appalling job ads like the one from Bates College. Where are similar posts from other people? Where are the specific lists of specific places that mistreat their faculty members? I can find a gazillion and three posts about tenure dying but nobody (except Schuman) is actually naming the killers.

Every college that has the gall to offer non-renewable, exploitative lectureship in non-existing fields should know that the academic community will fall on it like a ton of scholarly volumes from a dusty library shelf. Let’s start with Bates.

Bates College, you suck. Prospective students, don’t go to Bates. It is filled with people who don’t know the difference between Russian and German. This college is a joke, so stay away from it.

Yesterday we got an invitation to a conference that says the following:

The bi-state St Louis region is a great place to live, work and build a business.  We have incredible assets, especially our people.  But our region has not grown as fast as other similar communities.  One reason is that, unlike other places, not as many New Americans have moved here.  Growing our immigrant population can raise wages, lower unemployment, increase new business starts, and boost real estate values.

This is something that I said the moment I moved to this area four years ago. (Here is proof. Here is more proof.)  There is a desperate need for more immigrants in this area. And finally, somebody else is clocking onto this obvious fact.

We were talking a walk and met over a dozen honking cars. What’s happening? Has a war started? Or have the Cardinals won something at the sport they play which I’m guessing is baseball?

Or is something else going on?

I never got a grade lower than a B- on any assignment in any course ever in my entire life. So this is a very new experience.

And this is a new theme song I’m suggesting that N. should adopt:

Please remember this: the best thing you can do as a contingent faculty member is join a union. Our part-timers are unionized, and none of the horror stories we hear about the mistreatment of instructors and lecturers can happen to them. The moment an administrator tries to treat them as disposable, the union steps in, and the administrator has to choke on these wrong-headed decisions.

If there is no union on campus, contact any existing union that has organizers nearby and ask them to send organizers.

Brainbench is a place that certifies people in all kinds of programming languages / software management, etc. Here is the most recent list of the people who got the highest individual scores in the most recent competition:

 

Of course, the winner’s last name makes it obvious he is not from the UK. I really dig seeing all these last names that sound very much like mine in a context that has nothing to do with prostitution or gang activities.

And here are the lists of countries that have the greatest number of programming nerds:

 

Look at the right-hand column. Ukraine did better than India! Can you imagine how hard it is to beat India at programming?

I just talked to a colleague who used to be a high school teacher and is now teaching college for the first time. I asked her what was the most unexpected thing about college teaching that she encountered.

“I didn’t expect college students to be exactly the same as high school kids,” she said. “There are students who don’t even try to make an effort, who abandon the course for no particular reason after it’s too late to withdraw officially, who come in late, who listen to music in the classroom, who resist learning with everything they’ve got.”

“Aren’t you used to that?” I asked.

“Yes, but that is what’s so shocking. These students have to pay to be in college. Don’t they see that they are wasting this money – money they often don’t even have – by refusing to be educated?”

I also find this behavior to be completely bizarre. We don’t have any rich students who know their parents will easily cover the costs and not even notice it. I’ve seen many students with their parents at a variety of events our school organizes. These are all very modest families who are making an effort to send their kids to college. It’s one thing when a student comes from a crappy high school, falls behind, and has to drop out. What I don’t get, though, is what makes students who are doing quite well just give up for no discernible reason.

You’ll say this is high-school mentality that these students haven’t been able to shed just yet, that they are young and immature. You know what I’m noticing, though? You encounter this defeatist mentality and this profound indifference among the age group of 25-45 more often than in any other age group. (We have quite a few older students.) The best, most responsible, most engaged, passionate, energetic, and intelligent students are those between the ages of 45 and 75 (I haven’t had anybody older.) The youngsters in the age group of 18-25 fall somewhere in the middle between the 45-75 and 25-45 group.

Of course, this is anecdotal evidence based on my quite limited experience.

I just received a plaque commemorating the award I got for my monograph. It’s big, shiny, and really pretty. And it’s in Spanish. And my last name is even spelled correctly. It would look amazing on the walls of my office where students could see it.

But I can’t put it up for the same reason why I haven’t been able to put up my diplomas: the walls of my office are covered with stupid sheet metal. I’m sitting here, feeling like I’m hiding in a bunker. I have been able to put up some postcards because they can be held up with magnets. But framed diplomas and this expensive plaque are heavy and I haven’t found a magnet capable of holding them.

Students often say, “Oh, so YOU have a PhD?? Really?” I’d much rather they saw the diplomas the moment they walked into my office and were suitably intimidated. And if there were a plaque next to the diplomas. . . well, you can imagine.

Of course, I can always hang the plaque at home, but who is there to be intimidated by it? And what is the point of a plaque if not to scare people into complete submission to your intellectual powers?

Irreflexive sexists are the worst. It’s not like they actually set out to harm or undermine their female colleagues and employees. No, they like women and really want them to succeed. It just so happens that Helen and Keisha are always asked to clean up after a departmental party while Josh and Peter always end up managing new and exciting projects. This isn’t in the least because of their gender. It’s just that “the girls” are so careful and meticulous. It’s a valuable skill that they should be proud of. And “the boys” are simply better at leading people and taking risks. Not all girls and boys, mind you, because that would be sexist. Just these specific ones. An irreflexive sexist is always more than willing to accept feminist ideas just as long as they are put in practice somewhere else.

An irreflexive sexist gets incensed when anybody suggests that there seems to be a disturbing pattern in how people are treated in the office on the basis of their gender. Sexists of this type often see themselves as open-minded and progressive. Many even claim to be feminists. They don’t accept even the slightest possibility that there is anything but pure chance behind their denial of promotion to their female employees.

Paradoxically, it is much easier to deal with a sexist who is conscious of being one. You can at least try to enter into a dialogue and offer counterarguments. An irreflexive sexist, however, spouts all the right verbiage about women’s rights and gender discrimination, so there is nothing to argue about.