I’m pretty conservative politically and especially in what concerns the economy but whenever I find myself among a group of colleagues from my university I feel like the most subversive commie pinko radical anybody can be.
For instance, during the book club meeting, I happened to be wearing my ring with Che Guevara’s portrait (because I had been teaching my class on Cuba on that day and wanted to show the ring to my students) and I also ended up saying that the author of the book we are reading is a tenured professor at Harvard which means that she has high personal stakes in proving that the system works. To me, that’s the most boring platitude anybody can say, but in the book club this was like I’d dropped a bomb. People were fascinated with the idea but terrified of it. They started declaiming loudly and insistently that, “What if she has tenure at Harvard, she is still one of us.”
This, of course, awakened the contrarian in me, and things became quite heated.
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They started declaiming loudly and insistently that, “What if she has tenure at Harvard, she is still one of us.”
Who do they perceive “us” to be?
And what book was that?
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The book is this.
I started finding it hilarious the moment I read at the beginning the author sighing over how she has always felt like an outsider in American academia because she is French. Yes, French people are so exploited and marginalized, poor her.
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“Who do they perceive “us” to be?”
– I’m guessing “us” meant people in the discussion club, academics.
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Ooo… that book sounds interesting. From the Amazon blurb it sounds like she is being critical of the system, so it would be interesting to see if she does defend it in the end. I’ll add it to my queue!
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“How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment”
Is the topic of this book something that any real live person is actually supposed to care about?
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Normal people don’t let anybody tell them what to care about. Grow up already. This childishness is not cute.
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The game of “you’re a bad communicator because you can’t get through to me” is a common political tactic of people who have learned they can often get their way by being passive-aggressive.
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