I don’t know why everybody says that blogging is dying. My readership grows every year even though I stopped promoting my blog anywhere and almost never comment on other people’s blogs. (There is simply no time for that any longer). Really amazing new readers have joined the blog in 2013.

The greatest change that has taken place on my blog is that the readership has consolidated, retaining only the people of exceptional intellectual caliber whose every comment is valuable. It took a few years (and some banning) but we now don’t have anybody here who is not on our shared wavelength. We disagree but in a way that enriches us all and creates priceless discussion threads.

Quite a few people visit this blog not so much to read my posts as to follow the comments of their favorite commenters. I don’t mind that in the least even if it takes the form of “OMG, that scarily smart woman from Zimbabwe / the funny American guy in Poland / the brilliant English prof / the talented Canadian physicist / the hilarious British lady / that cool dude from South Africa, etc. is THE BEST THING ABOUT YOUR BLOG!”

I honestly have never come across a blog with such uniformly great readers. When I first started blogging, I was sure nobody would want to read this blog, so I’m obviously happy about how things developed. Altogether, there have been about 2,000,000 hits on the blog since it was founded on April 1, 2009.

Here is a report WordPress prepared for us (disregard the number of comments by individual readers. WordPress always attributes anonymous comments to random people it happens to like):

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 650,000 times in 2013. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 28 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

If there are things you believe we need to discuss on the blog, do leave your suggestions in the comment thread. I’m taking questions and requests.

Have you heard about the scandal with the phantom African & Afro-American Studies Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill? The linked article starts with an extremely offensive suggestion that “child-rape” shouldn’t merit much attention from anybody and we should investigate academic fraud instead. I have no idea what the brainless journalist was thinking when making this enormously insulting claim at the beginning of what could be a very important article. I barely managed to get through the piece because I was so insulted by the article’s dismissal of pedophilia as a serious problem.

Here is what happened at Chapel Hill:

Last month a grand jury in Orange County, N.C., indicted Julius Nyang’oro for defrauding UNC by accepting payment for teaching a no-show course on “blacks in North Carolina.” The 19 students in AFAM 280 were current or former members of the Tar Heels football team, allegedly steered to the phantom class by academic advisers who sought to help elite athletes maintain high enough grades to remain eligible for competition. AFAM 280 was one of dozens of courses offered by North Carolina’s African & Afro-American Studies Department, formerly chaired by Nyang’oro, that never actually met.

Of course, now Nyang’oro will be stuck bearing full responsibility for what is obviously a huge fail on the part of the school’s entire administration. It’s scary to imagine a future where most universities will become phantom entities whose only goal will be to make football teams look legitimate.

I always forget books I classify as “not real literature, just entertainment” completely two minutes after I finish them. As a result, I have a ready supply of what to me are entirely unfamiliar books I read several years ago. It works especially well with mystery novels: I can re-read them five, six times, discovering anew who the killer is and feeling fresh shock every time.

This saves quite a bit of money.

Books that I classify as “real literature”, however, stay with me forever and I can reproduce quotes from them many years after reading them.

I was working on my research when the phone rang.

“Where are you?” N asked when I picked up.

“At home,” I said. “Where are you?”

“I’m downstairs.”

“Downstairs where?” I asked.

“Downstairs at home,” N explained.

“Whose home?” I wondered.

“Our home. Where are you?”

“I’m upstairs.”

“Upstairs where?”

After that, I finally went downstairs and we met.

 

I really don’t get it when people begin to complain that their graduate advisors and professors tell them, “Of course, you are going to find a job, you are amazing, you will get snapped up in no time“, etc.

What is it that advisors are supposed to say instead? “I don’t think you are very likely to get a job, you are not very well-read, your research is boring, your writing is clunky, your reasoning is pedestrian. Even good scholars can’t find a job these days, so who’ll hire you?”?

Who is capable of saying such things to their students? (Except my thesis advisor, I mean.)

Not only is this kind of honesty hurtful, it is also quite unproductive. Can you imagine a person who’d hear this and say, “Yes, this is so true. I need to go explore non-academic job options”?

When I was told these (and much, much worse, albeit completely honest and well-deserved ) things, I did not take them well. I still don’t.

Evelina Anville posted this beautiful statement in one of our discussions:

Personally, I am getting so tired of attacks on faculty and on the profession in general. Students SHOULD attend graduate school if they desire. People SHOULD be excited to enter this profession. It’s not for everybody of course but this is a wonderful and amazing profession that actually makes our country a better place. But we need tenure to maintain the profession. And I just wish more people talked about the beauty of the profession, about the need for tenure, and about the evils of administrative bloat.

This is very true. We need to spend more time celebrating the best profession in the world on this blog.

When I was an undergrad, I was friends with a woman who had spent 18 years working for Canada’s Customs and Immigration before going back to school for a BA in Political Science. She told me that what never failed to surprise her was how passionately recent immigrants always insisted that the borders should be closed and no more immigrants should be allowed into the country after them.

I’m always reminded of these conversations with my friend whenever I see recent PhDs clamoring that grad schools should stop admitting any more students.

 

Here is a comment Dr. Ella left:

About European PhDs: they apply for funding with their dissertation proposal, or tag along with an existing funded research program. Teaching responsibilities are often very limited, if there are any at all. In contrast, many US PhD programs require up to 2.5 years of coursework, comprehensive exams that take a semester or a year to prepare, and only then you can start on your actual dissertation research.

For those who are not very familiar with the US system of higher ed, here is why a PhD includes at least 2 years of coursework*: almost nobody does an MA before coming to a PhD program. BAs are very watered down precisely because, as I keep saying, so much remedial learning needs to take place. There were people in my grad program at Yale who’d come to the PhD after taking 5-7 courses in our discipline. Everything else they took was part of the General Education requirement, a second Major or 1-2 Minors, electives, etc. In contrast, after a Canadian BA and MA, I had 36 courses in our discipline (plus a dissertation) under my belt.

I an profoundly convinced that nobody can or should approach doctoral research after 5, 7, or even 10 courses in one’s discipline. Such a person will have such enormous lacunae in his or her knowledge that there is practically zero possibility he or she will manage to become a research scholar. Yes, they can manage to squeeze out a dissertation in their extremely narrow specialization but they end up having a very limited understanding of the field as a whole.

This is why my proposal for the reform of American higher education is: there should be no acceptance into a PhD program without an MA. The practice of admitting people into doctoral programs fresh from their undergrad studies is a profoundly pernicious one. Master’s degrees would also allow people to reconsider whether they need or want a PhD at all.

What do you think about this idea?

* I’m only familiar with how things work in the Humanities. Maybe this differs in STEM, I just don’t know.

It makes me feel really old when I see that people’s New Year’s resolutions include

1. Try my absolute god-damndest to “block” and not fight on Twitter.

I don’t even know how people go about fighting on Twitter. Of course, I will discover this pastime and totally love it just when everybody else will get over it and move on to something else. Story of my life.

I normally really enjoy Karen K’s posts at Professor Is In. There is very little hand-wringing and drama in them, which is something one can rarely find in academic blogging. Her writing is original and hence refreshing.

Today, she disappointed me by publishing an endless and rambling post whose every other word is “privilege.” It’s OK, everybody is a little off after intense New Year’s celebrations, and even a good blogger can do some bad writing. What I find interesting in the post is that Karen makes suggestions as to what tenured professors can do to counteract the adjunct crisis. We are all dying to hear at least one intelligent, useful suggestion in this area but Karen’s ideas are profoundly disappointing. I will spare you the reading of this really poorly written post and give you the list of suggestions she makes:

Slash or halt graduate admissions.

This is a highly problematic suggestion. We are supposed to exclude qualified people from graduate studies simply because we have decided – without even looking them in the face – that they will not find jobs after graduating? How is that not the ultimate in hubris?

When I was 23, a professor tried to ban me from entering the profession. She told me she was acting in my best interest, that the idea of getting a PhD in Spanish literature with absolutely no Spanish and zero knowledge of the literature in question was hopeless, that I was too old to start something completely new, that I was wasting my and her time and my money. It has been 14 years, and I still feel nothing but intense resentment towards this hateful busybody who humiliated me by trying to manage my life. Now she tries to suck up to me at conferences because I have already made a greater contribution to the field than she ever will, and I still seethe every time I see her. This well-meaning idiot could have stolen the only career and the only life-style that can possibly make me happy. How can I now become such a meddler in somebody else’s life?

Make job market training (both academic and non-academic) central to the curriculum

This bothers me, too. We already have to justify everything we do in the classroom by how marketable the imparted skills are. We are already persecuted by administrators for not being very efficient in sales and not doing enough marketing. How much farther are we willing to take the fixation on the job market? I’m not denying that job market training is useful but making it central to a graduate degree is really bizarre.

Reduce time-to-degree of graduate programs

This suggestion betrays a profound misunderstanding of what is going on in grad schools. At my grad school, students organized a union whose central goal is to resist any attempts by the administration to shorten time-to-degree. If you ask grad students to graduate in 6 years, you will have a massive strike on your hands. Please don’t argue with me about this because the intense badgering from the believers in 10-year-long doctorates is one of the most traumatic  memories of my grad school experience.

See and include adjuncts in the running of the department-both formally and informally

Again, this is a very childish comment made by somebody who preaches without ever trying to practice. Before making these inane suggestions, one should just try to ask an adjunct to perform service obligations for free. Please be warned that a person who is paid between $900 and $3,500 per course with zero benefits and no contract is likely to spit in your face if you try to force them to take on any extra work for no extra compensation. I, for one, would not judge them badly for doing that.

Tell the truth about the corporatized funding models in their universities that sustain their salaries and research funds by cutting other labor costs through the exploitation of adjuncts.

Sounds good but kind of pointless. Tell the truth to whom? Who is the intended audience here? I also dislike the idea that exploitation of adjuncts and research funds are somehow linked. There is money both for acceptable, decent salaries for all educators and for research. Let’s fire the football coach plus two thirds of administrators and paper pushers, and the problem will be solved. It isn’t my salary and my subscription to Romance Quarterly that the exploitation of adjuncts is paying for. It pays for the yachts and country-houses of the useless administrators and sports coaches.

Karen’s post is obviously motivated by good, admirable feelings but it is as free of substance as anything else I have seen on the subject.

Do you have any ideas about how the adjunct crisis could be solved? I honestly don’t see any workable solutions that are not based on a dramatic improvement of the secondary education system, as I explained here.

P.S. I hope this will not become a thread on how everybody hates Karen K. I want to talk about issues here, not personal dislikes of specific people. Maybe I should start a thread where we can all dump on people we dislike.