People are making some great New Academic Year resolutions, and I want some, too. So I came up with some:

1. I have 2 hours in the evenings between the time Klara falls asleep and N finishes cleaning the kitchen and sending his emails. I resolve not to do a lick of work in these two hours and dedicate them to reading novels and playing my Happy Farm. I can actually do both at the same time. 

2. Hopefully, the weather starts to permit this soon: I resolve to go out for long walks with Klara at least 3 mornings out of 5 workdays.

3. I resolve to go back to doing my facial masks again because I’ve had no time for them for over a year. And I love my facial masks! 

4. I resolve to bring lunch to work from home because the stuff at the cafeteria makes me feel sleepy. And I resolve to make real coffee for myself instead of the instant kind that I always make because I feel like I have no time to brew.

5. I resolve to read at least one beauty magazine a month because they make me happy. 

Do you have any New Academic Year resolutions?

One argument against the union that several people have advanced is a statement I have not been able to decipher. Can anybody help? People are saying:

I’m a professional, so it’s wrong / impossible / unethical for me to be in a union. 

I don’t get what they are saying. Do they mean that they are more professional than those of us who want to unionize? Or that their work is qualitatively different from what school teachers and hospitality workers do? 

This whole diversity statement insanity totally reminds me of Trump’s “here is my African American!” 

People will soon be all, “Sure you’ve got an African American. But I have two transgenders and a gay Latino!”

Barfdom.

It seems that the academic job market might have gone totally to the dogs since I last took an interest in it:

Faculty job postings are increasingly asking for diversity statements, in addition to research and teaching statements. According to the University of California at San Diego website, “[t]he purpose of the [diversity] statement is to identify candidates who have professional skills, experience, and/or willingness to engage in activities that would enhance campus diversity and equity efforts [emphasis added].”

I sincerely hope this is not true and nobody as doing this crap other than the notoriously stupid administration of the UC. Because this is absolutely vomit-inducing and only tremendous desperation could force a miserable academic to participate in this travesty. 

Shit, I just ate and now the breakfast wants to come back up and meet this horrible news head-on. 

And. . .WordPress is back to paying like it used to after a strange low-paying hiatus. 

Weirdness.

Whoever said what I have can be a seasonal allergy might be right. I have tons of weird sensations occurring in my nose. Plus, I’m sneezing like crazy. This becomes especially scary when I’m driving on a highway. Can anybody here sneeze without closing their eyes? Because it turns out I can. And neither can I sneeze and then stop without repeating the exercise at least 6 times. 

Hillary Clinton has a plan to improve mental health services for college students. I’m all for it but there is something else we can do to help underrepresented students to avoid depression and anxiety. We need to make sure that tenure lines aren’t closed down and students are taught by full-time permanent scholars instead of part-time transient instructors.

An example. An enormous number of African American students who enter our science programs drop out within the first 2 years. Things are especially bad in pure sciences where there is maybe 1 black graduate in years and years. 

These students could be retained in the programs if they had access to mentors, i.e. academics who are available to guide them through the programs and help them navigate the areas where they might lack preparation. These are the students who need just a little bit of assistance from somebody who cares and has time and resources to assist them. And that assistance can’t be sporadic. 

Obviously, it isn’t helping students to avoid stress and sadness when they have to drop out because they feel that these fields of knowledge are not accessible to them. 

I’m reviewing the work of one such department, and it’s scary to see how the destruction of tenure lines always comes accompanied by the plummeting rates of graduation of underrepresented groups. 

The best thing is to address the causes and not just treat the symptoms. I’m not blaming any of this on Hillary, obviously. But it’s something to keep in mind as we talk about mental health on campus.