Every single time, these email discussions with colleagues end with me wailing, “Never again!” and throwing shoes at the computer screen. 

Most of the colleagues are wonderful people who write great comments. But there are always one or two congenitally aggravating individuals who say things like, “You can’t expect the administration to hand out gifts to you in exchange for nothing.” Because cost-of-living increases after 4 years of no raises are somehow a gift. From the administration. In exchange for nothing. I’m sitting on my ass doing nothing and expecting strangers to make me gifts of their own money. That’s exactly what is happening, totally. Made complete sense to get a PhD to come up with this particular gem of logical thinking.

I do not suffer idiocy gladly.  

Believe me, folks, I hate being an obsessive, one-issue person. And I never participate in the reductive “administration is evil by default” rhetoric. I loved both the Chancellor and the Provost who worked here when I was first hired. The Chancellor was a bit too in love with promoting athletics and doing marketing for my liking. But he honestly tried to do right by the faculty, and he was largely successful. The Provost was a very professional, inspiring person.

Right now, I’m very pleased with our Dean and several (if not all) people in his office. I’m Eastern European, so I respond well to hierarchical structures and authority. I have a military mentality and like clearly outlined ranks of authority. I like both giving and following orders. 

But for those very reasons, I detest it when people overstep their mandate and try to exercise power they aren’t entitled to. I get very very angry when somebody begins to act like a petty tyrant because guess what? I’m Eastern European. I can smell this kind of rank shit from a hundred miles away.

Even if we were to accept that an argument about whether Chairs are faculty is somehow relevant to cost-of-living increases, why exactly wouldn’t they count as faculty? 

Chairs are elected by faculty members from among themselves for a 3-year term. They can repeat the term once. After that, somebody else is elected. While they perform their Chair duties, they still do both teaching and service and are evaluated according to the same teaching \ research \ service criteria as all of the other faculty members of the department. 

It’s a deranged argument to have because if we start down the road of saying that performing administrative duties excludes you from the rank of faculty, we’ll arrive at a conclusion that there are no faculty members at this school at all. Because all of us have some administrative duties. It’s called academic self-government, and it’s something we all are contractually obligated to do. ​

The administration is now saying that we will not get cost-of-living increases unless we recognize that departmental Chairs are not faculty members. This is deranged because they clearly are but that’s not even the point. If we do agree they aren’t faculty, the next thing he will want is that we agree on the meaning of life, the importance of space travel, and minutiae of religious doctrine before getting those puny little salary increases. It’s all a ruse.

But the worst part is that there are already some colleagues who are buying into it and saying, “Well, maybe it is our fault. Maybe we somehow caused the Chancellor trying to give a raise to himself and denying one to us.” 

So here’s the issue right now. Colleges see more and more students who don’t need or want to be there because there’s supposedly no life without a college diploma these days. Yet many entry level positions stand unfilled. Mention the word “receptionist” to any small business owner and you will plunge then into a bout of dejection. They either can’t find anybody or find people who make them lose faith in humanity.

Example. People come to work and discover that the email doesn’t work. The server is down. So what does the receptionist do? She sends an email to everybody at the company, informing them that the email doesn’t work. This is a company with six employees who are all sitting right there, 15 feet away from her. 

You’ll say well, this can happen to anybody, it’s not that big of a deal. But what if it’s a daily occurrence? Literally every day something like this happens. You’ll say hire somebody else. But what if it’s receptionist number 6, and it’s the exact same story every time?

It’s a very widespread issue that is the same independent of region or type of business in question. These are low-paid jobs that don’t really lead anywhere. So the workers are not motivated to take them seriously. There is no culturally approved narrative for them to integrate this kind of professional life into their worldview.

After talking to the Marxists yesterday, I imagined how great it would be not to have to teach everything from the start, not to have to begin with “Spain is a country in Europe” every time.

The best way to approach teaching first-year students is to assume they know nothing at all about anything. Then you’ll only ever get nice surprises if you discover that one or two have heard about the Cold War, know their continents, and have heard the word “adverb.”

So I went down to the cafeteria to buy milk for Klara and coffee for me and what did I see but a table with a sign saying, “Marxist Student Organization”? I was super psyched because I’m happy when students read any theory, let alone something this complex. 

So of course I had to approach and start talking to them. Or more like quizzing them because I’m in teacher mode. And gosh, the joy, the happiness. They are very knowledgeable even about something like the Spanish Civil War. It was so great to meet students who know all this stuff. 

I’m a very happy camper right now.

The complete moral bankruptcy of the Republican party predates Trump by a long, long period of time. It has not been capable of offering anything but tax cuts for the very rich for decades. Trump is a reaction to this moral bankruptcy. 

But you know what the problem is? History shows that a reaction to moral bankruptcy is never anything more elevated. It’s always about plunging into even deeper abysses of depravity. 

Oy. 766 pages of post-civil war misery interspersed with people having tons of sex in the craziest of circumstances. This novel took a while to read. 

Hey, don’t get me wrong, it’s the best in the series so far. Problem is, I just happen to be very familiar with the sources the novelist used for the novel because I read them for my research. Even those who are unfamiliar with the historical basis of the novel might find about 200 of the 766 pages redundant. 

However, it’s not a bad novel at all. There are 6 pages in the end that list all the characters, so you can imagine the complexity. Yet I, a person who’s notoriously bad with names, didn’t have to consult the list even once. This means that the author manages to make all the Pacos, Pepes and Pepas (yeah, no shit) stand out enough to stick with you. 

The political vision is still extremely one-dimensional, the female characters are still sex-obsessed to a tedious degree, the good guys are still angelic and the bad ones are still diabolic. That’s Grandes for you. And still I liked it, even with all these flaws. 

I’ll get the new novel in the series on Tuesday, and it looks like it will also be a million pages long. I love my job.