Imagine a person who has a suppurating sore on her forearm but refuses to get it treated because she “doesn’t believe” in modern medicine. Can people who come into casual contact with her – co-workers, neighbors, passers-by – be expected to remember where her sore is located and make efforts not to brush against it by accident to avoid causing her pain? Or is it her responsibility to manage her own body and its ailments? I think everybody will agree that people who refuse to treat their broken feet, suppurating sores, and pus oozing out of their eyes shouldn’t expect others to arrange their lives around these untreated ailments.

Why should it be any different for the suppurating sores of the psyche, then?

See the following example:

A good friend once wrote about a traumatic experience involving her former partner’s death and how that trauma still impacts her to this day. Thus, when a professor in her grad program said something about how students would probably “rather slit your throat than do this assignment,” it literally triggered a horrifying response in her. She was violently ill, riddled with crippling anxiety and unable to function.

The “good friend” in question seems to believe that it is the responsibility of others to manage her illness and crippledom. She chooses to keep her suppurating sores untreated and farms out the costs of treating them onto complete strangers. She must expect people to walk around with lists of traumas every casual contact of theirs might have experienced.

Jack, the janitor at work. Parents had a messy divorce. Don’t mention parents, divorce, or color orange (don’t rememebr why) around him.

Lisa, the neighbor from across the street, 4 houses down. Don’t bring up broccoli or aunts because her favorite aunt choked on a piece of broccoli and died when Lisa was 5.

Aaron, the co-worker in the cubicle across the room. Don’t mention parrots, the name Lisa, and broccoli because Lisa the neighbor killed his favorite parrot when he accidentally mentioned broccoli and reminded her of the horrible trauma of her aunt’s death.

Clearly, nobody can live this way. Maybe instead of expecting strangers to keep lists of our ailments and treat them even though they have no idea how to do that, we can take responsibility for our own bodies, at least, and seek medical help for our violent illnesses and excruciating martyrdoms.

Historically, university education was limited to the elites. There were exceptions but mostly students came from schools where they studied Latin and Ancient Greek and developed an affinity for Shakespeare by the age of 17. There weren’t that many of them, and consequently, they didn’t need that many professors to teach them. 

A professor who could teach such students was an erudite, a pretty exceptional person. He existed in a leisurely universe of reading, thinking, and teaching an occasional course or two. 

Gradually, higher education stopped being an elite pursuit. Women, African Americans, children of regular people started seeking college degrees. (And anybody who is getting ready to point out that there were always some women and black folks in higher ed should go directly to the Facebook page where people are discussing that the Obama presidency equals a post racial society.)

These students needed a lot of what we call “remediation.” They needed Intro, Beginners, and Basic courses because nobody could any longer expect them to know any Latin or recognize the names of Chaucer and Thackeray. As the time progressed, more and more “non-traditional students” came to campuses. They needed more and more remediation to the degree that one could barely fit anything but remediation into their programs. 

For a while, an aberrant situation surfaced where the faculty catering to these students still could live the leisurely lifestyle of erstwhile erudite professors while teaching very basic courses that required no lengthy sessions at the library to be prepared and delivered. 

It was a pretty cool gig and the lucky participants of the scheme forgot that it was an aberration. They decided it would go on forever. They thought they could live like the pampered erudite profs of the past but with nothing like their erudition. Hey, forget erudition. I met a tenured German lit prof a short while ago who told me she hadn’t read a book in at least 2 years. That answered my question about the reasons why the field of Germanic Studies was dying once and for all. 

The agony of the aberrant model is painful and boring to watch like any agony. The sooner it dies and gives place to a new way of doing higher ed the better. 

It turns out that people still sincerely believe it’s possible to preserve the model of academic life where you teach your Intro, Beginners, and Survey courses with an occasional poorly attended upper-level seminar, publish an article or a book review every 3 years, go to endless unending dead-end conferences, veg out on committees, and collect tenure, promotions, and $60-90,000 salaries for all this inhuman effort. 

It’s like it’s still 1989 in their minds. Scary.

Reader el left a link to a great article in Russian whose author observes that even though the US is clearly to the right of Western Europe politically, neo-fascist parties are a lot likely to win in Europe than in the US. And he’s right, far-right parties are pretty much guaranteed to come to power in the Netherlands and France. Germany runs that risk, too.

My explanation is that the Western European left is so impotent, so incapable of addressing any of what normal people normally care about in their normal lives that it’s easier for the far right to make itself sound kind of relevant. (In spite of being manufactured and run by crazy Putin.)  Here in the US, however, there is an alternative to the craziness, and it’s an actual working alternative. Hopefully, we will not let it wither away and die under the influence of wide-eyed freaks. 

Why is there an ad with Trump raising his hand in a Nazi salute on my blog?

The daycare has a faculty improvement day next Friday. This means the school will be closed. I don’t have to be anywhere on Friday, so it’s fine by me. But what do other parents do? Fridays are usually quite a busy time at school.

I have heard of these faculty days before but I never wondered what parents do in these situations. I mean, if they had an alternative, they wouldn’t be using the daycare to begin with.

In case you think, my productivity is something special, I have a colleague who publishes about 5 articles a year in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals. Next to that, I’m the lazybones of the century.

By the way, the Spanish 101 class is going great. None of my fears came true. The students are great, very enthusiastic, engaged. I’m thinking that it had this fear of the class because the only time I taught it at this school was at the worst time of my life, and maybe those memories got attached to the class for me. In reality, though, the class is good. 

There is a girl at Klara’s daycare who is terrified of me. She is 13 months old, I believe, and she starts screaming and trying to run away whenever she sees me. I like to stay for a bit after I arrive and help out the teachers because other kids dig me and the teachers seem to like me a lot, too. But now I can’t because I don’t want to traumatize this poor child. 

It’s upsetting because I don’t want to see myself as scary to small children.

Otto Pohl is in Kurdistan, and here are his impressions of his new home. I hope Otto enjoys this new part of his exceptionally exciting life journey. 

Another of the blog’s readers also has news: Vic Crain’s wife Lyn published a book of poetry. Let’s support and congratulate her!

The university of Chicago stands up to snowflakery. Immediately, snowflake sympathizers began to moan that snowflake feelings have been hurt but I won’t be linking to these freaks.

It is absolutely ridiculous that a bunch of unsuccessful prostitutes would dare to cry rape and have people support them. What a bunch of shameless, horrible people. 

And talking about prostitutes, there’s been an unsurprising revelation that Melania Trump worked as one. And everybody died of boredom because it was clear as day from the start. 

And still talking about dirty whores, finally people began to notice that the number of Russian hacks into US everything have skyrocketed when Snowden defected. 

In Russian but so true. I was stunned by the same thing in Cuba. People sit in the midst of the dirtiest street ever, on the dirtiest porch imaginable. They sit for hours every day but never get up to pick up the garbage. 

Want to add 2 years to your life? Here is what you should do. I’ll probably live forever, it seems.