Last night we went to watch the first part of the last part in the Hunger Games series. Before the movie, we finally paid a visit to the new local gastropub.

“We have become so Americanized!” I told N. “We eat an enormous meal and then go watch Hunger Games.”

The gastropub served us some really disappointing pea soup because the chef believes that it’s OK to use canned peas to make pea soup. Today I will be making a real Canadian split pea soup to erase the bad taste of those canned peas from my mouth. The fish tacos, however, were sensational. And the scallops were not bad at all. There were some fans of mine among the patrons and they kept telling the waiter to say hi and send messages in Spanish. This made me feel glad that I’m no longer a drinking person.

The movie proved to be very good, so thank you, everybody who recommended. It is quite an achievement to make such a good, solid movie out of the weakest book in the trilogy. Of course, the movie would have benefited from reducing it by at least 30 minutes. There are several superfluous scenes like, for instance, the scene on the staircase. It introduces no new insights into the characters: yes, the mother is useless, the sister is a damsel in permanent distress, and the protagonist is a teenage drama queen, but we’ve known all this since the first scene of the first movie in the series. There are also way too many scenes where the camera zooms on the protagonist’s face, making the viewers privy to the actress’s hopeless struggle to convey emotion. As a result, she just looks severely constipated, and the viewers get bored.

Judging from the nearly empty theater – and that’s on a Saturday night! – the movie is doing much worse at the box office than the previous two parts of the series. This is not surprising, given that there are no Hunger Games in this part of the trilogy, and the Hunger Games were what made the series original and attracted viewers and readers. Another reason for the series’ downward trajectory is that the economic well-being of the viewers grows, the recession is receding into memory, and the viewers don’t identify with what they are seeing on the screen any longer. (Not that they ever had reason to identify, coming to the movies after enormous, delicious meals, but it isn’t like these things are ever reasonable.)

But here is something you probably didn’t know: in Russia, the ticket sales of Mockingjay, Part 1 are 15% higher than the ticket sales of Catching Fire (the second and the strongest film in the series so far.) Russia is at war, and its people need inspiration to keep up the military effort. I find it very interesting to trace how the audiences’ response to entertainment differs and why. 

In Germany, ticket sales are up as well. That was to be expected since most of the action in Mockingjay, Part 1 is set underground, and Germans could never resist subterranean imagery. They will watch anything as long as it happens in a tunnel or a shaft. 

In terms of acting skills, the generational chasm between the older, more seasoned actors and the younger, really vapid ones is very distracting. When Julianne Moore, Woody Harrelson or Stanley Tucci appear in the scenes next to the actors who play Katniss, Peeta or that other guy (Gale, or what is his name?), the younger actors disappear completely. The scene where Julianne Moore is talking to Jennifer Lawrence is extremely unfortunate since Lawrence is completely washed out by the striking and even somewhat artistically gifted Moore.

What’s great about the movie is the abundance of very expensive, very impressive special effects. They make the movie very entertaining and just a good way to spend a relaxing, escapist couple of hours.

I’m now considering going to see Interstellar in 4D because that has got to be even more escapist.

We are entering the Christmas season, so I promise not to freak people out until the second week of January with the heavy stuff and only post cute funny stories.

Here is one.

A very young cashier at Michael’s asks me, “Are you from Germany?”

“No,” I say. “Ukraine.”

“Oh,” she says. “Ukraine! I would have loved to be born in Ukraine. That is such a fun place to be born. I don’t know much about it but it sounds fun. Not like this town.”

The proverbial kindness of Midwesterners sometimes takes bizarre forms.

My colleagues exchanged hundreds of comments through the university’s mailing list on the subject of whether there should be clocks in the classrooms. They exchanged even more comments on the subject of the campus geese. On the topic of the IBHE director’s talk yesterday, however, they have not exchanged a single comment. Nobody cares.

On this blog, the interest to the IBHE post is not a whole lot greater than the interest to the (admittedly funny) story of how I fed my husband soap. The post hasn’t had a single refback. It has not gone on Facebook. The likelihood of it going viral is nil. Aside from the blog’s regular readers who are exceptionally intelligent and well-informed, nobody cares. 

Academics are online more than any other professional group I know. They produce miles upon miles of posts about students who looked sideways at them or colleagues who stepped on their big toe scarring them emotionally and physically for life. They are exceptionally well-equipped to participate in a discussion about the future of higher ed but the don’t. I guess, they just don’t care.

We had a deputy director of Illinois Board of Higher Education speak on campus today. He said the following:

In the nearest future, only rich people will get to go to real universities. Everybody else will get educated online. This is why mid-tier universities, such as ours, need to go online, period. This is what students want. This is what the state can afford.

Online education is as good as the real education because that’s what somebody said on some survey somewhere in the boondocks.  

If a state can keep at least one or two state universities in existence, that already will be a great achievement. Such universities will do no research because research prevents students from having access to professors [sic].

If academic programs don’t attract enough students to justify their existence, they should be eliminated.

We are losing our competitive edge on the world arena.

College degrees are no longer meaningful because people can get the same stuff for free online. Instead of a college degree, it makes more sense for students to present employers with a list of their marketable skills and a list of specific facts the student learned online.

What students know will become less important than what they can do.

Students need to access classes from their cell phones and in their cars because they come from diverse backgrounds. Classroom discussions, office hours with a professor, lectures, study groups, and papers will all be online.

Startup ventures can educate students better than colleges.

The bestest ever model of public university is Western Governors University. And besides, why should a credential from Microsoft University or the British Open University be less prestigious than one from a regional state college?

And if you don’t like this, you are an irrelevant outdated academic who will be forced out of the system.

The curtain.

P.S. No, I’m not punking you. I copy-pasted these statements from the PP delivered at the meeting, making cosmetic changes only, to save space.

P.P.S. I have only one question: why do you, Americans, hate yourselves so much? 

A colleague came to yell at me in my office today. She delivered a long and passionate rant that went something like the following:

What are you doing here? Are you crazy? You are wasting your life on this place. Your parents need to be telling you this but since they are not, I will speak as your mother: you need to leave. This university does not deserve you. We don’t deserve you. This stupid state doesn’t deserve you. You can have much broader horizons, you could be making a much greater impact, you could be making so much more money, you could be spending your life with really interesting, brilliant people, and not these idiots you meet around here.

Look, I’m going to be 70 soon. And as I look back on my life, I feel enormous regret. I have frittered my life away, I have wasted it on this place. As I’m getting older, I’m thinking about end-of-life issues, I’m thinking about death. Don’t make the same mistakes as I did. You are an intellectual of the first order, you are a high-powered research scholar, what are you doing here? What? You need to leave. I love having you here but you need to go. Go on the job market, leave this place that is in a permanent crisis mode. I’ve been here for a quarter of a century, and there has barely been a year when we were not on the brink of extinction. This shit is not getting better. It’s getting worse. 

If I had anything like your talent and potential, I would never make this enormous mistake of staying here. Leave!

I’m now quite shaken up by the whole thing.

I’m a horrible wife, people, and overall a sorry excuse for a human being.

Here is what happened. A colleague, let’s call her Liliana, left a gift in my mailbox with the following note (in Spanish):

Dear Clarissa, this is a small gift for you and N. This is handmade soap that I made from glycerin, olive oil, and some natural oils. I hope you enjoy it. Merry Christmas!

“It’s so nice of Liliana to give me this candy,” I thought. “But she is such an eccentric person. Why does she call candy “soap”? And who the hell uses glycerin to make candy?”

When N came home, I handed him Liliana’s gift and said, “Here is some candy from Liliana. It’s for you.” I genuinely believed it was candy because, for some unfathomable reason, I decided it had to be.

N opened his mouth and stuffed the entire (small) soap bar inside. And then suddenly started spitting and ran away to the bathroom.

I urgently need some rest. I’m becoming dangerous to myself and others.

 

“How the times have changed!” a woman sighs. “My mother still remembers the first time my father kissed her. And my sister doesn’t even remember her first husband’s name any longer.”

I seriously spent over half an hour last week trying to remember my first husband’s name. For some reason, it occurred to me that his name was Sergey, and I started berating myself for marrying somebody with such a horrible name. 

I’m just really bad with names.

The legislature of my state has reached the following conclusions:

1. Taxpayers pay professors to work.

2. Ergo, the research professors produce belongs to taxpayers.

3. Ergo, taxpayers should have access to the research professors produce.

4. Ergo, professors should be obligated by law to place all of their research* into an online open access database.

The problem with this line of reasoning is the following. Academic journals are struggling to stay in existence. It costs money (not a huge amount but still) to print a scholarly journal. Universities increasingly refuse to support academic journals financially. In order to remain in existence and keep publishing, journals have to sell subscriptions. If nobody buys subscriptions, the journal dies.

Is everybody with me so far? Because I’m getting suspicious that this is too complicated for most people.

Since journals need subscriptions to survive, they need a way to ensure that their content is unique enough. If you can find the journal’s materials for free online, would you buy a subscription? How much would you personally agree to pay for a subscription to this blog if the blog keeps offering an open and free access? I’m guessing nothing.

Do you believe journals will agree to the idea that their articles should be available for free online? Obviously, they won’t. There is no possibility that a library will agree to pay a subscription to a journal whose content is easily available for free on the Internet. There is also no possibility that a library can justify such a bizarre purchase, especially given that library funding is getting slashed everywhere.

So obviously, journals will not agree to sign a permission for me to place my article that the journal published online. So obviously, I should either stop trying to get published or resign myself to breaking state law. Neither alternative seems enormously attractive.

The problem that this law is trying to solve doesn’t exist. Taxpayers who are so desperate to read my research could simply request a copy of my article from the library. Or they could contact me directly since my contact information is publicly available. There has never been a single complaint from a single taxpayer who was dying to read my article on a novel by the Spanish writer Galdós and was suffering for lack of access. If such a taxpayer exists, please point her in my direction and I will make her a happy woman.

Every time when an article is published in a prestigious scholarly journal in the US, Canada, UK, Spain, etc. and is signed by “Prof. Clarissa Bulochkina, University of Koompi-Loompi”, this helps Koompi-Loompi to get noticed as a place where high-quality research is conducted. As a result, the value of the degrees awarded by Koompi-Loompi grows. Taxpayers benefit from getting more valuable degrees. Am I explaining this process clearly enough, or is my argument too academic?

Bulochkina gets published, Koompi-Loompi wins. Bulochkina doesn’t get published, Koompi-Loompi loses. Does it make sense to hurt Koompi-Loompi’s chances of generating a positive image in order to solve a problem that does not exist?

Instead of this imaginary problem, Koompi-Loompi has a real one: its name isn’t well-known, especially not in the context of scholarly excellence. Bulochkina’s “spectacular record of publications” (according to her dean at Koompi-Loompi) helps solve that problem. Should we prevent Bulochkina from getting published? Will that somehow advance the interests of the state where she works?

“We need to embrace this as the trend of the future!” joyfully proclaimed an administrator who, in his entire life, has read less than I have published.

Continue reading “Why Professors Should Stop Doing Research” →