People really have nothing to do with their lives if they waste them on the following kind of silly riddles:

The Basketweaving department has a few long-serving full-time faculty, and a host of adjuncts.  One of the adjuncts has been there longer than most, and has been conspicuous in going above and beyond to help the department.  Let’s call her SuperAdjunct.

The department has a retirement, and gets the opportunity to hire a full-time replacement.  It drafts a job description, assembles a search committee, and starts the process.  But the chair openly refers to the position as rightfully SuperAdjunct’s, and seems to resent even having to go through a process when it’s clear what the outcome should be.  Meanwhile, HR is pushing for the full, open process, on the grounds that anything less is discriminatory.

Now, let’s add a wrinkle, just to make things interesting.  SuperAdjunct is white.  The college has an affirmative action policy, and it has identified diversifying its faculty as a goal.  In these circumstances, do you side with the chair, or with HR?

Nobody in their right mind will “side” with anybody in this group of arrant idiots. Both the Chair and the HR Department are usurping the academic freedom of the faculty members who are the only ones entitled to make this decision. The Chair and the HR have to facilitate the bureaucratic aspects of the hiring but it is egregiously wrong for them to try to influence the selection process.

In this kind of a situation, members of the search committee should refuse to participate in the process that has been vitiated from the start. Tenured faculty members should also start a grievance procedure and make this assault on academic freedom public.

I’m sick to death of people who keep whining about injustice in academia but always chicken out when it comes to naming names and putting to shame corrupt and vicious administrators.

“You can’t retain your pride if you are demoralized, which is why terrified people so easily believe that they deserve the punishment they are getting.”

– Benjamin Prado.

I see way too many people who act as if they were terrified even though there is no observable reason for them to be that way.

Another thing I don’t get is why people use the pre-fabricated tests from the online version of the textbook. I mean, what can be more fun than creating your own tests for the courses your teach?

I always create 2 versions of each test: a practice run and the actual test. And I have great fun doing it. Why would I let an online textbook usurp this activity?

Nothing has impacted my teaching more in the past few years than the rise of Google. I’m shocked that many of my colleagues still live as if Google didn’t exist, assigning oral presentations and at-home compositions. I have had to get rid of all the activities where Google might be used because they are a complete waste of time.

When I was doing my BA, it still made sense for a professor to assign a presentation on Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo (that was the very first presentation I ever did in the one and only Spanish language class I ever took) or Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz (and this was the very first presentation I did in the very first literature course I ever took.) Back in those days, students would still have to go to the library to research the topic. Even if their presentation was nothing but a compilation of material gleaned from sources they found at the library, one could still be reasonably sure that they had engaged with those sources intellectually.

These days, however, this kind of assignments is dead. Students just copy-paste vaguely related paragraphs from websites Google suggests to them, and that’s it. In my courses, they also put the resulting jumble of data through Google Translate. The result is, of course, a completely meaningless collection of words that students don’t even try to comprehend.

I have now come back to teach the courses where I had been substituted by other people during my sick leave and I have to grade a mountain of Google-translated compositions and several Google-generated presentations that students read in mechanical voices from their PowerPoints. This is all a massive waste of time both for me and for the students.

We need to remember that the second we get distracted a new student, called Google, will sneak into the classroom and steal the course away from us.

At some public universities, where funding is eroding, humanities are being pared. In September, for example, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania announced that it was closing its sparsely populated degree programs in German, philosophy, and world languages and culture.

I would cut “world languages and culture”, too, because it sounds freakish and stupid. I’m still very upset that my colleagues voted to change the name of our department from the beautiful Foreign Languages and Literature to the idiotic World Languages and Culture.

The good news is that the name change has stalled because the Department of Anthropology took exception to our attempt to claim the word “Culture.” They insist that nobody but anthropologists are qualified to teach culture. I find this argument to be very silly. Still, it is less silly that the proposed name change. This is why I expressed agreement with the anthropologists and suggested we overcome our unhealthy terror of the word “literature” and bring it back.

I’m not optimistic.

My aunt works at a fish factory in Nova Scotia. As she stands there, cleaning fish, she listens to a books-on-tapes version of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

Well, it isn’t really an invention, but it’s a very funny contest:

Any job marketer who can provide documented proof that s/he sent a scan of his/her butt as “evidence of teaching excellence” will receive $100 via PayPal, from me.

I’m hearing that there are quite a few job ads this year that truly deserve this. And worse.

Jokes aside, I believe that the time has come for us to realize that there are completely unacceptable things that are happening on the academic job market. We should stop justifying them and start creating an intolerable environment for those of our colleagues who think it’s OK to use people’s desperation to exploit and humiliate them.

I just saw this brilliant new invention at a store: it’s a package containing Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum and a 2-liter bottle of Coke. Rum and Coke was the only alcohol that I ever liked, and I wish this item had been on sale before I lost all interest in alcohol.

I now even kind of wish I were still at least somewhat interested in alcohol.

I’m going back to work and I know it will be hard. For weeks, I have dreaded facing the students who saw me in the hopeful last weeks of my pregnancy. I know that once I teach the first class to all 3 of my groups, I will be fine. It’s getting through that first encounter that scares me.

So here is this neat psychological trick I’m using to avoid obsessing about meeting the students tomorrow and feeling anxious and stressed about that: I’m making this day about something different. Tomorrow, I will try to fit in a visit to the gym between this first class and a session with my analyst.

I’m still not used to going to this gym. I haven’t fully figured out how to get there and back, which things I need to take, and how to coordinate this visit with the bus schedule. This visit to the gym consists of many different stages (changing room! fitness room! changing room again! shower! swimming pool! shower again! changing!) and many tasks that befuddle me (which bus should I take? when should I leave to be in time for the bus? what do I use to remove the makeup? which of the two towels should I take into the fitness room with me? do I need the goggles or do they just get in the way?).

As I try to figure out the logistics of the gym visit, I forget to worry about the class. It turns into a short interlude between the taxing effort to pack for the gym and the feat of actually getting to the gym and back.

The golden rule of getting through a difficult day is to make it even more difficult but to do so by adding a different kind of hardship to the one you are dreading. If an emotionally difficult moment awaits you, schedule something physically, intellectually, or, as in my case, logistically complex. And this is important: time-wise, the added hardship should be scheduled AFTER the painful moment you fear.

I’m now not even freaking out about tomorrow’s class, and this is a big victory already.

After the recent debacle provoked by a photo of a cigar store I posted, I wonder what sinister motives will be imputed to my publication of the following photo:

This is the house if a neighbor who really likes golf, and I thought the photo was too cute not to be posted.

On weekends , N and I take very long walks, and I like to photograph what we see on the way. Please rest assured that I have nothing against golf or neighbors, so there is no need to get very agitated in response to this photo.