Tag: academia

Do Academics Defend Pedophiles?

~ Clarissa ~ 16 Comments

We, the academics, are a source of all ills. Whenever anything goes wrong in our society, blame those commie pinko hippie feminist postmodern Baudrillard-reading Kristeva-quoting frappuccino-chugging enemies of humanity.

Not only do we pollute the minds of our impressionable adult students, we also pervert little kids. How do we manage to do this if there are no little kids on campuses? By spreading vicious pedophilic propaganda through our research, of course. Don’t you know that “research” is a horribly dangerous thing that undermines the things our society holds most sacred? Aren’t these vile academics the same people who brought us this completely invented evolution theory? And after you defend evolution, the next step is logically to promote pedophilia.

Anne Hendershott heard that some academic somewhere said (we don’t even know in which context) that “childhood innocence” is a fantasy. Another academic uttered a very boring platitude that “a child of seven may have built an elaborate set of sexual understandings and codes which would baffle many adults.” Hendershott must be the only person in the world unaware of the well-known fact that children of seven are hypersexual and that this biological reality in no way excuses pedophiles. She immediately fired off an angry article about horrible academics plotting to pervert little kids.

The article is, of course, just standard academia-bashing. We all know how much I detest pedophiles. Still, one could easily pluck some quotes out of my own doctoral dissertation to make me look like a huge pedophile. I also discuss in my classes that childhood is a socially constructed phenomenon of very recent origins. Academics study a variety of subjects that tend to shock when recounted in the language of a tabloid. However, the idea that academics infiltrate the university presses to spread their propaganda in books that maybe 20 people will get to read (and that’s wildly optimistic) is kind of silly. The greatest propaganda of pedophilia is how famous actors kiss Polanski’s ass in public.

Hendershott isn’t interested in that at all, though. An attentive reader will soon realize that pedophiles are not the greatest aim of her rage. The article is filed under the tags “homosexuality, pedophilia.” In the middle of the article we see the following advertisement:

Given that most instances of child abuse are perpetrated within a child’s own family, this exhortation tells us that Hendershott doesn’t give a rat’s ass about abused children. She simply wants to attack the two groups she hates the most: academics and gays. Then, of course, there are gay academics, which is a reality that, I’m sure, Hendershott finds very traumatic. She cannot confess that because in the academic environment homophobia makes you a pariah. This is why she masks her hatred of gays behind a completely spurious concern about non-existing movement of academic defenders of pedophilia.

I will now let you guess who is to blame, according to the very stupid, nasty, homophobic Hendershott, for the (again, completely spurious) tolerance for women who pervert little girls? Right you are, feminists!

I have to ask, why does King’s College in New York employ this vicious freakazoid?

Why I Love Doing Midpoint Tenure Review

~ Clarissa ~ 6 Comments

The time of reckoning has come for me, people. I have been on my tenure-track for 2,5 years, which means that the moment has arrived when I have to fill this humongous binder with papers documenting my every teaching, research and service-related sneeze.

Of course, I whine, complain, and tell everybody how stressed out I am by this process and how the need to write statements in the language that bureaucrats will be able to process annoys me. To be completely honest, though, I really dig the midpoint tenure review.

For one, just the mere chance of getting tenure is something very precious and extremely rare nowadays. Some of the schools that accept people into tenure-track positions don’t really do it in good faith. Their goal is not to ensure that new Assistant Professors get tenure and promotion at the end of the 6-year-long track but, rather, to find reasons to deny tenure to people who busted their asses in hopes of tenure.

My university is not like this at all. Everybody is extremely supportive of my tenure goals at every level of administration. As I’m gathering my documents and writing my narratives, I have many chances to be reminded of how great, helpful and encouraging my colleagues are. Everybody seems to be passionately invested into seeing me succeed, for some reason. And that makes me feel important, respected, and appreciated.

The midpoint review is also a great self-esteem booster. Academics often suffer from lack of feedback on their efforts. You work extremely hard to create an article but then rarely hear anything about it after it gets published. Student evaluations only happen once every semester. The same goes for peer evaluations. As a result, academics often feel lonely and disconnected. They begin to doubt whether what they do has any value.

As one is gathering the mountain of documents needed for the midpoint review, however, one gets a chance to look at all of the publications, conference talks, accolades, grants, letters of support, evaluations, reviews, compliments, etc. that one has accumulated.

“Wow, all of this in just 2,5 years?” one thinks. “I kind of totally rule.”

And that’s a very good feeling.

Nepotism: A Scourge of Higher Education

~ Clarissa ~ 19 Comments

Nepotism is a huge problem in Spanish universities. Everything is about being connected to the right people, kissing ass, networking, and placing your relatives and friends in key positions. The damage this does to the system of higher education is enormous.

Italy, it seems, has the same problem:

One reason for the poor performance of Italian institutions in world league tables may be nepotism, it has been suggested. The practice has been blamed for a “brain drain” that has seen many of the country’s best researchers move to the US or the UK after failing to progress at home because of their lack of connections.

This is an open secret in Italy. The news magazine l’Espresso and newspaper La Repubblica have reported that in Rome’s La Sapienza University, a third of teaching staff are closely related. Questions were raised after the wife, son and daughter of Luigi Frati, La Sapienza’s chancellor, were hired by its medical faculty. At the University of Bari in the southern region of Puglia, Lanfranco Massari, a professor of economics, has three sons and five grandchildren who are colleagues in the same department. And at the University of Palermo, Angelo Milone, a professor in the architectural faculty, works alongside his brother, son and daughter.

Of course, a system of higher education that is structured this way will never produce valuable research or good teaching.

Efforts are being made to infect the American academia with the same kind of nepotistic practices. The system of “spousal hiring” destroys entire departments. The most offensive thing about this kind of unfair hiring practices is that nobody even thinks of informing the students that some of their professors did not get hired competitively and are only there because they happen to sleep with the right person.

The only thing that stands between us and nepotism is our own personal integrity. This year, for example, I chaired a panel that reviewed research proposals and decided which ones to fund. One of the proposals was by a person I really adore. Nobody at the panel knew about my feelings, so I could have easily done something nice for my friend and gotten their proposal funded. However, I couldn’t act in this dishonest manner. Which is why I declared my conflict of interest to the panel members and removed myself from the discussions of my friend’s proposal.

I’ve seen what nepotism does to individuals, departments, and universities, and I’ll be damned if I ever get tempted to become part of a nepotistic culture.

Should Graduate Students Become Entrepreneurs?

~ Clarissa ~ 25 Comments

An article in Chronicle of Higher Ed suggests that in order to aspire to tenure-track positions, graduate students need to become entrepreneurs.

I find the idea very disturbing. As much as I respect people who possess entrepreneurial spirit and are talented in this area, I thought the whole point of choosing a career in academia was to be in an environment where you don’t have to be an entrepreneur. If I wanted to be in sales or marketing, I would have done just that and probably ended up making a lot more money than I do at this point. However, I chose the life of intellectual contemplation, research, and teaching. I don’t want to sell anything to anybody, not because I think there is anything wrong with selling but simply because I think that there should be some form of balance in each society. For every group of people that sells stuff, there should be a group that doesn’t.

I have no interest in approaching Google with business ideas, taking courses in statistical methods, or learn computer programming, as the author of the article suggests. I especially don’t want to do any of these things if they will take time away from my engagement with my own field. I also feel no shame when I confess that, in all probability, I will suck something fierce at these endeavors. Just like talented programmers, business people and statisticians will probably bomb at creating literary criticism and teaching Spanish.

When I worked as a Visiting Professor at a university of great renown, I had an opportunity to observe a tenure-track colleague in a contingent field who dedicated her every free moment to aggressive networking. I don’t think I ever saw her alone or with other tenure-track people. She was always in the company of higher-ups. I’d often see her interrupt conversations with students and colleagues to dash across the street towards a senior faculty member and administrator. She had an actual database of useful people she already met and had yet to meet. In terms of networking, this academic was a pro. When the tenure review came by, though, she did not have a single publication to offer. And there was nothing that any connections she had been able to develop could do to offset that.

What annoys me especially in this article is the suggestion that if graduate students embrace entrepreneurial values, this will somehow serve public good. It isn’t like we see many exhortations for business people to improve themselves intellectually and pick up a book on philosophy or literary criticism every once in a while, even though that would bring more visible benefits to society than academics who start trying to sell, market, and network.

Academia has already suffered a lot of damage because of the efforts to apply business mentality to running universities. It is a sad testament to how pervasive this push to transform colleges into businesses has been if a graduate student in English Literature writes an article for Chronicle of Higher Ed trying to sell entrepreneurship to academics.

Finals

~ Clarissa ~ 14 Comments

Fellow blogger Nominatissima requested that I write about the finals. I think that many people will find this topic relevant at this moment. Final exams are also something of a sore point with me, as people will see presently.

I hate finals. In my country, everything is always 100% about the final exams. You can never show your face in class, then ace the final exam, and get a top grade. I studied within this system for 4 years and it made me realize that the system is absolutely not conducive to any actual learning.

For the first 3 semesters I taught at my current school, I never offered finals. Then, my secret was discovered, and I caught hell. We passed a resolution at a departmental meeting that I have to give final exams in all of my courses. It was even mentioned that literature courses needed to have final exams, which I find to be very strange. Then, I got an official letter to the effect of finals being crucial and warning me that I was obligated to give them. I’m also forced to give the finals during the finals week, so scheduling them differently to ease the burden of the students who end up having 5 or 6 finals in one week is also out of the question.

So if you are a student and you think your prof is being mean by scheduling a final exam, you need to know that s/he probably doesn’t even have a choice in the matter.

I still try to make the finals as painless as possible. Usually, students come to the week of the finals completely exhausted. They simply don’t have the energy to bring their best to the final exam. I believe that it would be completely unfair to structure the grade in a way that would prevent a student who worked hard during the semester from getting an A just because the final exam was not spectacular. In all of my courses, you can fail the final but still get an A if you worked extremely hard during the entire semester.

Since I’m convinced that memorization of huge quantities of information is not a useful skill nowadays, my finals are not cumulative. I don’t want students to have any intense cramming sessions before my finals. Ideally, I don’t want them to prepare for the final at all. As I always tell them, “You can’t compete with Google.” This is why I don’t really care if my students don’t remember the year when Spain lost its last colonies. It is a lot more important that they manage to discuss why the Spanish-American war was crucial both to Spain and the United States.

It seems strange to me to grade people on how good their memory is. Some people simply have a bad memory but it says nothing about their intellectual and professional future. As a result, I construct my final exams in a way that requires no memorization and no guess work. Usually, I provide an excerpt from a text or a photo of a work of art (a building, a painting, a sculpture) and ask them to engage with it critically.

I have a feeling that many of the students would prefer to cram and then reproduce the “correct” responses during the finals. Analyzing is a lot more difficult than memorizing. But if I’m forced to offer final exams, I will at least try to make sure that they have some actual educational value to them.

In the second part of this post, I will offer advice to people who are preparing for their finals right now.

It Simply Isn’t a Gender Issue!

~ Clarissa ~ 46 Comments

The reason why I don’t participate in the #mencallmethings campaign that collects nasty names that male readers call female bloggers is that I don’t think this is a gender issue. I’ve been called names, insulted, stalked, harassed, and bullied by readers who are both male and female. I’m a feminist blogger but I honestly can’t say I see any special viciousness that male readers address to female readers. The anonymous commenting format of online communications brings a lot of nastiness out in people. There is no gender difference in how vile, threatening, and annoying online commenters can become.

Of course, when you cull out of discussions comments that men address to women, you end up with a very scary picture. But when you add nasty comments that women aim at women, women aim at men and men aim at other men, you immediately realize that this is not a gender issue.

Here is another example of what is essentially a non-gender issue that has been transformed into a feminist cause. One of the commonplaces of feminist discussions (if people need links, I can look for them but this has been discussed so often that I feel there is no need to make a separate search) is that women are socialized to please men. As a result, even in professional settings, women rarely dare to contradict men and formulate their objections in the form of questions. Often, they leave their sentences unfinished or use interrogatory intonations to avoid displeasing their male peers. This was even discussed at length in gender studies classes I took in college.

I was present at an intellectual discussion among fellow academics recently and I decided to observe people carefully to see if this was true. I’m not very observant by nature and usually just listen to myself speak during discussions, so here I decided to make a special effort to see if the theory about women trying to please men was true. Almost immediately, I noticed that it was. Female scholars of impeccable academic and intellectual credentials did, indeed, seem very eager to please even those of their male peers who didn’t have nearly the same kind of renown as they did. The star of the gathering, a female scholar who was light years ahead of all of us in terms of publications and scholarly recognition, addressed every response she made to male academics, even those who were beginning graduate students, in the form of questions. The men would sometimes say something completely silly, but she would invariably respond, “That’s very interesting. But don’t you think that. . .?” In her communications with female scholars, she was a lot more blunt and never used the question format.

“Hah!” I thought. “I guess all the theory I read on the subject was right. Women (of course, women from cultures other than mine because we have a very different history of gender relations) do try to please men to their own detriment.”

I was planning to write a post about that but never had the time to do so. And then I attended another gathering of academics. Once again, I decided to remain observant and see whether women were especially eager to please men and to avoid antagonizing them by being too argumentative.

The intellectual discussion in question consisted of two very strong, argumentative and aggressive women (yours truly being one of them) and six male academics. I immediately noticed that these male academics (several of them in a much higher standing than the women in question) were very eager to please the women. They worded their objections in the form of questions, allowed their sentences to trail off, and were inordinately pleased when women offered any kind of agreement with their ideas.

And then I had a valuable insight. Some people are more interested in pleasing others, I realized. There are also many people, however, who are not familiar with the concept of pleasing anybody. This is not a gender issue. This is an issue of personal psychology.

There are really crucial issues feminism still has to address. However, by transforming things that have nothing to do with gender into feminist causes, we dilute the power of feminist activism and serve no useful purpose.

Is Anything the Matter with Higher Education?

~ Clarissa ~ 48 Comments

The reason why I don’t participate in the current flurry of posts that try to answer the question of “What’s the matter with higher education?” is that I don’t want to become part of the academia-bashing movement. The seemingly progressive bloggers who have jumped on the bandwagon of studiously listing all of academia’s ills don’t see that the only goal they achieve is helping the cause of those who hate the very word “education.”

As my regular readers might have noticed, I don’t enjoy wallowing in the doom-and-gloom scenarios my fellow academic so often relish. Of course, there are problems in academia, just like in any other area of life. But the idea that academia is getting worse is preposterous. The number of disabled students and students from ethnic minorities keeps growing on campuses across North America. The number of women who graduate on all levels has also exploded in the recent two decades. Professors don’t come almost exclusively from the ranks of the upper middle classes any more. When I read scholarly articles in my field, I always feel impressed by how much more rigorous the scholarship is becoming. Electronic publishing makes reading more accessible for everybody. Doing research is much simpler today when we have global communications and electronic access to archives halfway around the world.

If all of this isn’t progress, then I don’t know what is.

Yes, there is adjunctification, and it’s obviously not a positive development. But the tenured and tenure-track faculty at my college is at least 40% female. Adjuncts are also mostly women but when exactly would they have had better jobs? In the 50s and the 60s? They probably wouldn’t have any jobs at all. Of course, the situation of an adjunct is far from perfect. But it’s in any case better than the life of a miserable 50s housewife.

So I’ll be damned if I lend a helping hand to the ultra-conservative forces whose greatest dream is to rob academia of its prestige and destroy our progressive campuses. The servility of academics who fall over themselves in their hurry to dump on a great system of higher education that we have in this country and to debase themselves to serve some very dubious political goals is astounding. In this boring self-flagellation, I see nothing but the same old pseudo-liberal guilt that is now riding even higher than usual on the wave of the 99% vs 1% movement.

I say let’s stop wallowing in misery already and start concentrating on all of the amazing achievements of our academia in the recent decades. This will allow us to achieve even more, instead of promoting the misguided belief in the academia of the past that somehow managed to be so much better than the kind we have today, in spite of being all-male, all-white, and all-upper-middle-class.

Debt-Free Education

~ Clarissa ~ 81 Comments

I keep hearing about people who struggle under mountains of debt they accumulated as a result of getting a college degree. This is why I decided to do a little promotional activity for my own university.

Tuition for in-state residents of our state university is just $8,864.80 per year (that’s just $739 per month). Tuition includes textbook rental, so the expense of textbooks is covered. I find this kind of tuition to be very reasonable, especially since there is also a great number of scholarships and grants both on the state and federal level.

Many of our students choose to live off campus, but if you want an on-campus experience, your room and board will cost you $8,051.00 per year. This is a price I also consider very reasonable. The room and board cost the same for out-of-state students. Tuition for them, however, is higher and runs to the amount of $18,809.80 (or $1567 per month). This isn’t low, but it is still a lot less than at many other places.

So what do you get in return for this money? Our university made a very smart decision to keep hiring aggressively during the years of the recession. In 2009, when I was hired, the majority of universities canceled or suspended their searches for tenure-track professors. I estimate that at least 60% of all applications I’d sent out returned to me with a letter saying that the search had been cancelled due to the recession. Our university, however, realized that this was the best time to bring a wave of enthusiastic, promising young academics to our campus. I was one of 55 new tenure-track profs hired in that year. Next year, we hired 40+ people. And these hiring efforts continued the year after that.

As a result, we now have a big group of young scholars who graduated from great schools and are very active in research. Nobody else wanted us but this university did. And it offered us great conditions of employment, too, instead of trying to exploit the desperate situation of recent PhD graduates, like some other schools did.

Our undergrads are taught by actual professors on all levels. This doesn’t happen at Ivy League schools where two thirds of undergrad courses are not taught by professors. You can go through your entire Major at certain Ivy League schools without ever taking a course taught by a person with a PhD.

Our university does everything it can to update its technology. None of the universities where I worked before coming here had anything similar to the kind of technology we get here. And I’m talking about really prestigious, famous schools where tuition is several times greater than what it is here. For language and culture courses, for example, it makes all the difference in the world to have satellite television from Spain, a languages lab, a plasma screen to show movies, computers in the classroom, sound systems, etc. It’s one thing to make photocopies of the Mayan pyramids and distribute them to students. It is a completely different experience to show them the pyramids on a huge screen.

Of course, we don’t have anything similar to the prestige of Ivy League schools. However, having studied and taught at the Ivies, I believe that this prestige is not worth getting in debt for. If you are from a background that offers you connections with important people, you’ll have those connections anyways. If you are from a poorer background, you will be a pariah at your Ivy and all that money you pay to be there will be wasted.

In the US, it is more than possible to get a good college degree for a very reasonable amount of money. I strongly recommend that you consider us or any other state university before getting into ruinous debt to pay for nothing but a cool-sounding name. As an added bonus, you might get taught by me, or somebody like me. And that’s nothing to be sneezed at. 🙂

Why I Hate Ethics Training

~ Clarissa ~ 15 Comments

Not only does it offer ridiculous stories about “John, a graduate student, and Fatima, his best friend who is also the Dean.”

Not only does it suggest that everybody needs to spy on their co-workers and report them whenever they leave 30 minutes early or check their Facebook page on their office computer.

Not only does it tell me that if somebody related to the University bequeaths their sailboat to me, it’s ethical to accept but if somebody offers me a free meal costing $80 at a fair it isn’t.

Not only does it humiliate me by informing me at length that accepting bribes from students is not a good idea.

Not only does it rob me of 40 minutes out of a very busy day.

It also dares to condescend to me by telling me “Now is a good time to take a break and stretch out.” Can I at least be left in peace to stretch out or not whenever I feel like, not whenever some bored bureaucrat tells me to?

 

The Ideology of Clothes in Academia

~ Clarissa ~ 27 Comments

I read this article in Inside Higher Ed that made me feel very proud of my colleagues in academia and then instantly very ashamed of them. The article’s title is “Why I (Usually) Wear a Tie“. This is what Nate Kreuter has to say about the way he dresses for work:

For me, wearing a pressed shirt, sport coat, and tie is a way of projecting respect for my job, and respect for my students. It’s a way of saying to my students and to my colleagues, “I take you seriously, I take my work seriously, and I don’t take either for granted.” . . . In my own field of rhetoric, it’s widely understood that the images we project through our writing, speech, mannerisms, and dress play a critical role in how we and our ideas are received by the people that we work with, the students that we teach, and the community members with whom we interact. I think that junior faculty especially, but all faculty, need to ask themselves, as shallow as it may sometimes seem, “What image am I projecting?”

I strongly believe that, for educators our personality is one of the most important means of production we possess. I educate students not only with the knowledge I have but with everything I am, everything I say, do, wear, etc. I couldn’t agree more with Nate Kreuter’s belief that the image one projects as a college professor is very important.

However, when I finished reading this inspiring article, I scrolled down and read the comments. I’ll save you the trouble of having to leaf through them. here are some of the most egregious responses for your perusal:

Professors “on the soft side” of the house (social sciences and humanities) need to dress up to project an image that they’re in charge.  Professors “on the hard side” of the house (sciences and mathematics) don’t have to worry about how they work — they get respect because they clearly KNOW more than their students.

I sincerely hope this is some kind of a clumsy joke. Especially the weird “hard vs soft” part of it.

Ties constrict blood flow to the brain. Someone in an intellectual profession should appreciate the disadvantages of doing that. They are also penis-symbols. Someone in an intellectual profession should appreciate the ludicrousness of wearing such a symbol to impress students and the difficulties it raises in terms of “professionalism”. Further, women don’t wear ties and cannot seem truly professional lacking one. Is that the message you want to communicate? Don’t you find that a tad problematic? Yes, conformity feels good. Shouldn’t an academic be questioning what it means to conform to an anachronistic custom, not embracing it?

First of all, women can wear ties. I have one and I love it. I don’t wear it as often as I’d like to because tying it is an adventure and I keep untying it in a fit of forgetfulness. Besides, the entire screech about conformity is beyond superficial. If anybody feels they are being non-conformist by wearing short shorts to class, they are fools. I thought people get over this teenage rebellion phase by the age they get a job in academia, but apparently it isn’t always the case.

And what’s with these sad attempts at humor?

According to this article the 99% would be a lot better off if the geniuses on Wall Street wore t-shirts and flip flops to work, so that they’d get the disrespect they most surely deserve.  Part of that hornswoggling magic is the three thousand dollar suit, right?  Surely somebody who looks that good must be a hard working and honest professional, yes?

Here is an example of how any conversation can be derailed completely by bringing in totally unrelated issues. I know that Wall Street is to blame for absolutely everything nowadays, including the weather. But it would be nice to be able to discuss an issue without somebody starting to yell “You, the horrible one-percenter!” to shut down all disagreement.