A young Armenian fellow mowed down a crowd of pedestrian in Toronto. Armenia has been experiencing its worst political upheaval in years this past weekend but everything has been resolved peacefully. So I don’t know why this fellow freaked out.

Toronto is a great city, and I love it. This stinks.

I don’t even know what to say other than that I have an intense desire to vomit. And if people who are getting this email are not pushing back and telling this fellow where he can shove it, they deserve everything their poor excuse for a school is about to get.

-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Dear Chairs, I know you are swamped right now with various requests and annual duties. I apologize for adding to that, but I am here to advocate for something that merits your attention. The Alumni Association has initiated a pilot program involving the College of Science, College of Liberal Arts, and the College of Applied Sciences and Arts, seeking qualified alumni to join the SIU Graduate Faculty in a zero-time (adjunct) status. ——-> Candidates for appointment must meet HLC accreditation guidelines for appointment as adjunct professors, and they will generally hold an academic doctorate or other terminal degree as appropriate for the field.

These blanket zero-time adjunct graduate faculty appointments are for 3-year periods, and can be renewed. While specific duties of alumni adjuncts will likely vary across academic units, examples include service on graduate student thesis committees, teaching specific graduate or undergraduate lectures in one’s area of expertise, service on departmental or university committees, and collaborations on grant proposals and research projects. Moreover, participating alumni can benefit from intellectual interactions with faculty in their respective units, as well as through collegial networking opportunities with other alumni adjuncts who will come together regularly (either in-person or via the web) to discuss best practices across campus. <——-

The Alumni Association is already working to identify prospective candidates, but it asks for your help in nominating some of your finest former students who are passionate about supporting SIU. Please reach out to your faculty to see if they might nominate a former student who would meet HLC accreditation guidelines for adjunct faculty appointment, which is someone holding a Ph.D., MFA, or other terminal degree. One of the short-comings with our current approach to the doctoral alumni is that the database only includes those with a Ph.D. earned at SIU, but often doesn’t capture SIU graduates with earned doctorates from other institutions. Here are the recommended steps to follow:

· Chairs in collaboration with faculty should consider specific needs/desires of their particular department, and ask how they could best utilize adjunct faculty. For example, many departments are always looking for additional highly qualified members to serve on thesis committees, and to provide individual lectures, seminars, and mentorship activities for both graduate and undergraduate students.

· Based on faculty recommendations, chairs should identify a few good candidates and approach those individuals to see if they are interested. The interested candidate should provide his/her CV (along with a brief letter of interest outlining areas in which they are willing to participate) to the department chair, who can then approach the Graduate Dean for final vetting and approval.

The University hasn’t yet attempted its first alumni adjunct appointment, but this is the general mechanism already in place. Meera would like CoLA to establish a critical mass of nominees before the end of the summer. A goal of at least one (1) nominee per department would get us going.

Thanks,

Michael

—
MICHAEL R. MOLINO
Associate Dean for Budget, Personnel, and Research

COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS
MAIL CODE 4522
SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY
1000 FANER DRIVE
CARBONDALE, ILLINOIS 62901

mmolino@siu.edu
P: 618/453-2466
F: 618/453-3253

Just one more quote from the essay linked in the previous post:

Yet the editorial logic of right-wing media resembles closely the default position of many recent books and dissertations in literary studies: The true story is always the oppositional story, the cry from outside. The righteous are those who sift the shadows of the monolith to undermine it in defense of some notion of freedom.

After years of parsing through incredibly stupid garbage that Chronicle of Higher Ed is famous for, I have finally been compensated with a good essay:

The midcentury ideal — of literature as an aesthetically and philosophically complex activity, and of criticism as its engaged and admiring decoding — is gone. In its place stands the idea that our capacity to shape our protean selves is the capacity most worth exercising, the thing to be defended at all costs, and the good that a literary inclination best serves.

And more:

The consequences of our disavowal of expertise are becoming clear. The liquidation of literary authority partakes of a climate in which all expertise has been liquidated. In such a climate, nothing stands against demagoguery. What could?

And the best part:

For going on 50 years, professors in the humanities have striven to play a political role in the American project. Almost without exception, this has involved attacking the establishment. As harmful as institutionalized power can be, as imperfect as even the most just foundations inevitably appear, they are, as it turns out, all we’ve got.

There are no professors of literature without strong institutions of a secure and stable nation-state. As Zygmunt Bauman, pointed out, raging against the establishment had a purpose 50 years ago. But that battle has been won, and we are the useful idiots who stand to lose.

Look at the horrible bullying of a Muslim kid that took place at a middle school right here in St Louis. It seems that, as of now, there have been absolutely no consequences for the bully.

I’m reading The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle that was kindly provided to me by reader el and peeing myself with laughter. The book is not supposed to be funny because it’s supposedly about the suffering of illegal Mexican immigrants. I keep saying “supposed” because this author has either never seen a Mexican or has and is taking the piss.

These Mexican characters have the temperament, the communication skills and the emotional range that makes them look downright Finnish. They sit there, alone and in complete silence, terrified of any human contact, incapable of connecting with anybody, struggling for hours with the unbearable task of saying a word to other illegal Mexican immigrants.

Of course, portraying illegal immigrants as emotionally stunted and communicationally challenged makes them look a lot more pathetic. Mexicans in this novel are barely human. This obviously ridiculous way of writing about them tells us nothing whatsoever of Mexicans and everything about the culture that produces and consumes this kind of novels.

I’ve only a third of the novel in but I definitely recommend. I saw in online reviews that this is standard fare in highschool English classes, and that explains an enormous lot.

I’ve got to say, it was a really good idea to start my Spring Clean Challenge back on April 1. I was on the verge of submerging myself in the drama of “OMG, the end of the academic year, I’m stressed and overworked, somebody shoot me now.” The challenge reoriented my energies to completely unrelated things, and I forgot to notice the end of the academic year or care about it. The end of the challenge felt like the academic year, so I’m existing in the relaxed summer state of mind at this point.

Of course, I immediately started a new challenge. This one, however, is long-term and will work until my next birthday. This means I will be ticking off daily challenge points for a year. Just having a challenge of this sort reduces daily stress like magic. It’s not even important what’s on the challenge (although it can be used to promote good health-related or intellectual habits), as long as it exists as an organizing principle of the psyche that holds it together. The absence of such an organizing principle, by the way, is commonly recognized as the cause of the soaring anxiety and depression disorders and stress-related mental health issues.

It’s not even hypocrisy but simply infantile habits of thought that lead people to maintain that Kevin Williamson should have been fired for his tweets while Randa Jarrar shouldn’t be for hers. And vice versa, of course. Either obnoxious, dumb posturing on social media (which absolutely everyone has engaged in) should be cause for immediate firing if enough people claim to be wounded by a tweet or not.

Yes, this is a country of at-will firing but these are two cases where the employer clearly doesn’t want to fire and is being hounded to do so by the Twitter-wounded.

Twitter is the preferred hangout for adrenaline-addicted folks with immature habits of thought. Obviously, expecting any logic from them beyond “Mommy, it hurts, let the bad booboo go away” is useless. But just like an angry toddler can drown out everybody in the room with a series of frustrated bellows, we are letting the most immature among us to drown out everybody else.

I’m hoping for a world where the phrase “Can you believe what Prof. Jarrar said on Twitter?” would be impossible not because Jarrar or me or you wouldn’t vent on social media – that’s the whole point of social media, after all – but because it’s ridiculous to pay attention to such ventings.

Since that is clearly not going to happen, it would be good if people at least tried to define the parameters of their approach. If everybody should be subjected to Twitter-purity checks, how often should they be conducted? Should they be extended to Facebook-purity? How about Instagram? How far back should they reach? How far should one go to break the resistance of the employer who is unwilling to castigate an employee for lack of Twitter-purity? This is a useful exercise that would train the brains of the Twitter-whisperers a lot more than months of outraged Tweeting.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I want to mention that I also have made anti-Barbara Bush comments on social media. And I’m not sorry because, what can I say, I never liked the broad. I have vented on other subjects, too. So yeah, of course, I’m afraid that excitable Twitteroids will come for me, too, one day.

We sit down to an accidentally international dinner of borscht, buckwheat, guacamole, naan and sardines.

“We are celebrating,” Klara says.

“What are we celebrating?” I ask.

“We are celebrating food,” she explains.

It really is a great feeling to have absolutely nothing that I need to do on a Saturday afternoon. Klara and I spent the morning on campus, admiring squirrels and gueese, gathering pine cones, exploring the artwork we have all over the grounds, and visiting the huge toy giraffe at the university bookstore. And now I’m considering having a nap.

The only thing that is not entirely welcome about the end of the semester is that my Latin American course will be over. This was absolutely the best course of my entire teaching life. Curiously, it was also the least prepared of my courses. I decided to teach it pretty late, it’s not my area (I’m strictly Spain), there was no time to prepare, etc. I don’t usually spend a lot of time on prep because that’s what graduate school was for. But still I do a bit of preparation for every day of class.

With this course, however, I had spent exactly one day developing the syllabus, choosing the readings, and creating the tests. After that, I was done. And it turned out to be the best course ever. Of course, I obviously know the material extremely well and don’t need to look up dates, names or events before class.

I think I learned an important lesson with this experience.