Can anybody tell her that this business idea isn’t new? And that it’s considered the oldest profession in human history?
Author: Clarissa
A Crazy Day
I had two public appearances today, in different parts of town. The second one was scheduled back to back with a stupid meeting on campus and involved me bringing several heavy props to illustrate my performance. The pay is excellent and I love the audience, so I couldn’t say no.
In the midst of all this and it being the first week of class, one thing I didn’t do was prepare for the stupid meeting. The degree to which I didn’t prepare was at the level of an F minus student. I run in 15 minutes late and everybody is in the midst of flinging the most egregious accusations at each other.
“Your tenure isn’t even real! Your department rejected your tenure case. The Dean had to ram it through because everybody knows you are litigious!”
“Yeah? Like we don’t know that you have fewer publications than your own graduate student!”
“At least, I have a graduate student!”
At this point, everybody turns to me, who is the chair of the bloody subcommittee and somebody says, “Professor, what do you think about policy 1RtGH-33/2? We need your take because we are getting very bogged down in these personal accusations.”
Of course, I never heard of this policy and had not the slightest idea it even existed. I tried to wing it which went pathetically badly. People stared at me in shock but then the fake tenure guy started screaming insults again so that was a good distraction.
Tomorrow is looking equally crazy. We have a department party. And I have two farewell parties, all on one day. And I’m teaching. So yeah, fun.
Friends
In the years I’ve lived in this town (since 2009), I’ve made 5 friends. Is that too few? Is it an abnormally low number at my age? I don’t mean acquaintances. I have many of those. I mean actual friends. People who’ve seen me cry. People who call me to drive them to the doctor’s for a bad diagnosis. Real friends. People who call to ask how my mom’s second round of immunotherapy that she started yesterday went or to share that they had a fight with the husband or a falling out with a sister.
Out of those five, two moved out of state. One more told me yesterday she’s also moving out of state. And I don’t mean across the river to Missouri kind of out of state. I mean, New Jersey, Florida, and Baltimore.
One more friend became politically radicalized and doesn’t want to be friends anymore.
So what I’m saying is that you, people, are my friends. Nobody knows me as well as you do aside from my husband, sister and one remaining friend.
Beautiful Writing
One thing these conservative thinkers I’m reading have in common is that they write beautifully. I love Zygmunt Bauman but his writing is not enjoyable. In contrast, it took me a week to get through a 13-page article by Oakeshott because it was so well-written that I wanted to stop and savor it.
About Foucault
This allegation was invented by a dude called Guy Sorman. He later took it back when presented with evidence that this was a rumor entirely of his making.
I suggest people Google Sorman before repeating his completely unverified claims. He’s a globalist fanatic who despised Foucault’s early opposition to neoliberalism.
Foucault was absolutely promiscuous with young Tunisian guys but this whole thing about him having sex in cemeteries with 8-year-olds came from one envious competitor.
Ethnic Foods and Rules of Conduct
This is a great illustration to Oakeshott’s point about general rules of conduct:
I could have made everybody’s life at work less pleasant by heating borscht in a shared microwave and eating pickled cabbage in the office. But I don’t do it, much as I love these foods.
It’s not about people not eating ethnic foods. Eat them, of course. We all love our ethnic foods. I’m positively crazy about mine. But we are all happier if we keep the particularly ethnic components away from shared spaces.
More on Conservative Disposition from Michael Oakeshott
Friendship, says Oakeshott, can only exist in the absence of any desire to improve or change the friend. The tie between friends is that of familiarity, not usefulness. You are not going to drop a friend of 20 years and go chasing after a fresh, new one because the old friend is outdated. Or I hope you won’t. We all have a conservative disposition in friendship, says Oakeshott.
Another aspect of life in which we are all conservatively disposed are our tools. A surgeon doesn’t stop in the midst of surgery to design a new scalpel. His value (or mine, or yours) in the professional field is our permanence. Spending a long time doing the same thing makes you good at this thing. In parenting, it’s the same. Being there is what counts. It doesn’t matter what, how or if you play with a child. What matters is that you are around, available, interested, continuously present. In marriage, it’s not the special occasions or great birthday gifts but being present and interested every day that makes a marriage.
This is all obvious, of course, but here Oakeshott brings up an important point. One tool in common use, he reminds us, are general rules of conduct. Isn’t it easier to function in a collectivity, big or small, where everybody knows the rules and understands why they should be practiced?
Oakeshott believes that being conservative in politics isn’t about holding specific beliefs about the nature of existence or practicing any particular religion. He says that conservative politics is about one thing: maintaining our existing way of life by upholding the same general rules of conduct. We are, Oakeshott explains, a civilization of people that embraced as its guiding principle that everybody is an individual who holds all sorts of beliefs and pursues any kind of individually chosen goals. We tolerate monomaniacs, he says, and put in structures of government that
protect us against the nuisance of those who spend their energy and their wealth in service of some pet indignation.. by setting a limit to the amount of noise anyone might emit.
I believe this is beautifully put and can be applied to many of the things going on presently.
Pet indignation is such a great expression and can be used often.
Anti-corporate University
People keep talking about the corporate university that is run like a business. But they are talking out of their ever-loving asses. It is a distant, impossible dream that my university would become corporate. We are the exact opposite, and that sucks.
The Dean no longer has a secretary or a receptionist. He’s paid the Dean’s salary to do extremely overpaid secretarial work. He’s sitting in his office preparing JCRs and answering the perennial question from a stream of students about where the room 3211 is located. He used to have a receptionist who’d answer the question but now it’s just him. While he’s spending his highly compensated time on explaining about room 3211, he’s not doing any of the actual Dean work. He has 22 departments in his college, most of which also don’t have a secretary. As a result, we are a bunch of mega overqualified and overpaid people doing low-skill work “to save money.” Which obviously saves no money.
It gets worse. A colleague’s class was cancelled because he was 2 students short of enrollment minimum. But he’s still paid the same. We just had to find a justification for the portion of the salary that was supposed to be paid for him teaching this class. He really wanted to teach it. But if he gets paid the same for doing nothing, then OK. He’s not going to say no. The class would still be very profitable with 2 students below minimum. But we threw out that tuition money to follow a very random rule.
I’m going to miss the meeting of the curriculum council next week because I’ll have to help students with the proficiency testing in the absence of a secretary. I’m fine with doing it. It’s extremely easy. But the curricular changes that only I can authorize won’t go through because I won’t be there. The Provost must be livid. But she can’t schedule a meeting to tell me about her annoyance because she doesn’t have a secretary either.
The Dean hasn’t done Chairs evaluation in a year. He hasn’t done the paperwork on my ASL minor, and we are losing tons of money because the program is in high demand and our students are getting poached by a neighboring college. But we saved money on the receptionist salary, so yay. Dude literally sits there alone, doing the JCRs which any office support person with a $48,000 salary could do. We have all turned into extremely overpaid secretaries and janitors. Because we also now have to empty our own trash cans. Which again, I don’t mind. It’s exercise. And it’s definitely a lot less demanding than poring over the curricular proposals. But is that great use of taxpayer money? Obviously, not.
This is not smart management. It’s not business-like. It’s wasteful and stupid, is what it is.
Class War
Oh, and I forgot. Klara’s current BFF is one of 8 children in her family. Parents are middle management and accounting.
The other friend is one of three. These are very wealthy people. Corporate, both have MBAs. The mom is the most career-loving person I’ve ever met. These people all have great marriages, very loving.
There’s a class war going on, and the losers are being phased out of existence without even noticing it.
Class Privilege
The longest, most-stable marriages with the largest number of children are found among women with postgraduate degrees. The woman who was department Chair before me has four. The one that will be Chair after me has three. The woman who supervises our operations in IT has four. The secretary, on the other hand, is unmarried and childless. The secretary before her was divorced with one child. The one before was unmarried and childless. This is anecdotal but it’s supported by large-scale data.
Stable marriages and many children are becoming a class privilege. All of this dumb blethering over extremely marriageable waitresses sounds like a joke. I don’t care that the tweet is AI-generated because there’s not nearly enough conversation about how the low fertility rates in the West that justify mass migration actually came to be and who it is that’s pushed out of procreation.
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