Tag: academia

Administrator Humiliates Professors at the College of William & Mary

~ Clarissa ~ 40 Comments

I just found the following in Inside Higher Ed:

The e-mail to some faculty members at the College of William & Mary came out of the blue, reminding them to be careful about the language they use in class and, specifically, asking them not to use the word “retarded” in class.

Its appearance last week perplexed some professors and prompted one or two to tell the student newspaper that administrators were questioning their professionalism. Several experts on faculty speech said that the missive was unusual, but that rather than a threat to academic freedom, they saw a sincere effort to protect potentially vulnerable students. “…[T]he word retarded has returned in slang usage to mean dumb or stupid, but this is not an appropriate way to use the word in class,” Kelly Joyce, the dean of undergraduate studies, wrote in her e-mail.

Mind you, there had been no incidents surrounding the word “retard” on campus where this piece of idiocy originated. Based on the email of this sad excuse for an administrator, one could assume that profs at the College of William & Mary run around all day long, calling students retards. However, there was nothing of the kind going on at this college.

The insulting email that this administrator sent to professors is not a response to any existing issue on campus. It is nothing but yet another attempt by an overpaid and useless administrator to take vengeance on the teaching faculty for being more intelligent and productive than s/he is. As we all know, scholars go into administration when they realize that they can’t make a name for themselves in research. Their rage against their more successful colleagues who laugh at their ineptness as researchers makes them lash out at professors with these ridiculous and condescending demands.

The other two groups of administrators are either spousal hires (i.e. useless husbands and wives of academics who are given these cushy positions of authority because they’ll get bored at home) or people hired from the corporate environment whose overall stupidity makes them incapable of understanding what the academia is all about. Of course, such folks have no idea how to do anything useful on campus, so they insult and condescend to professors instead.

I have blogged time and again  (and then some) about attempts by administrators to rob educators and scholars of our autonomy, dignity, time, and authority. What is really frustrating is that, more often than not, academics do not resist the offensive onslaughts by the useless and ignorant administrators. Kelly Joyce, the dean who had the incredible gall of sending this condescending message on the proper use of vocabulary to people with PhDs, should immediately become a pariah on campus. A good way of showing this administrator their place would be to recite definitions of words to them whenever they appear in public. For example,

Table, 1. an article of furniture consisting of a flat, slablike topsupported on one or more legs or other supports: a kitchentable; an operating table; a pool table.

Or better yet,

Professor – a person who often gets insulted by administrators, but this is not an appropriate way to use a professor on campus.

One could also email this dean lists of offensive words s/he shouldn’t use in public and explain in detail why these words are offensive and shouldn’t be used.

Unless we start doing something to show these ignoramuses their place, they will continue to insult us.

Greek

~ Clarissa ~ 16 Comments

A student comes up to me and says, “I’m sorry, I’m Greek, which means I need you to fill out a form saying how many absences I’ve had.”

“Oh my God,” I think. “This is horrible. I had no idea that Greek students were discriminated against on our campus!”

“Are you sure about this?” I ask the student, preparing to unleash my fury on the haters of Greece at our university.

“Yes,” he says and hands me a paper that bears the name of his fraternity.

Who Offers Health Breaks?

~ Clarissa ~ 17 Comments

I really suck at analyzing texts, it seems. For a long time, I’ve been preparing for my philosophy conference. We only get funding to visit one conference during this protracted budget crisis, so conferences have to be picked carefully. I’ve been dying to branch out into philosophy for a while. The Spanish philosopher whose work I discuss in my presentation will be at the conference, and I really wanted to listen to him, ask questions, and make an impression.

The conference committee took forever to send us a program. So I only discovered the horrible truth about this conference today when I finally received the program.

There had been hints, though. I could have guessed if only I’d paid attention. I got a pre-registration e-mail a while ago, which said that the registration fees would cover the reception, the lunch buffet, and health breaks.

Got it? Health breaks. I should have known right then and there. Who the hell offers health breaks? English-speakers give you coffee breaks. Spanish-speakers offer cigarette breaks. Only the French-speakers, may God be kind to them and their Mamma, schedule health breaks instead.

So finally I get the program of the conference, and as you must have guessed by now, it is in French. The entire flapping conference is in French. Except the talks by yours truly and a scholar from British Columbia. The opening and closing remarks, all but two of the talks, the presentation by the philosopher himself – everything is in French. The philosopher will present a new edition of his most recent book. Translated into French. And during the five years I lived in Quebec, I lost my spoken French completely. I will not be able to understand a word spoken at that conference. Unless it is spoken by me and the fellow sufferer from British Columbia.

The most annoying thing is that the conference’s title is in English, the promotional materials and the call for papers were in English, the conference takes place in Ottawa, and the organizer’s name is Spanish. Of course, the call for papers did say, “Papers will be accepted in English, French, and Spanish.” But we are talking about Canada, so I thought that this was simply the question of both official languages making it to the list.

And now I will feel like a total idiot, sitting there, listening to talks that I can’t even understand. Imagine what will happen if somebody starts asking me questions in French. That is going to be embarrassing.

Câlice de crisse de tabarnak d’ostie de ciboire du saint-sacement!! Tabarnak!!

Do You Know Why University of California Is in the Toilet?

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

Because of this:

Senior administrators now officially outnumber faculty at UC. And would you like to know how much the university that is supposedly broke pays its useless paper-pushers? See here. The only job of these bureaucrats is to make the lives of the faculty and the students so miserable that very little actual education takes place. And they are amply compensated for producing reams of useless paperwork.

This is why it is not at all surprising that University of California has been circling the bowl for a while now.

Harvard’s Kindness Pledge

~ Clarissa ~ 6 Comments

I just found out about Harvard’s silly attempt to make its freshmen sign a “kindness pledge” and I haven’t been able to stop laughing ever since. The text of the pledge was going to be posted at the entrance to each dorm. It was supposed to contain the names of the students living in that particular section of the dorm and offer a space for each student’s signature. This, of course, means that the people who didn’t feel like participating in this exercise in inanity would be easily identifiable.

Here is the text of the pledge for your reading pleasure:

“At Commencement, the Dean of Harvard College announces to the President, Fellows, and Overseers that ‘each degree candidate stands ready to advance knowledge, to promote understanding, and to serve society.’ That message serves as a kind of moral compass for the education Harvard College imparts. In the classroom, in extracurricular endeavors, and in the Yard and Houses, students are expected to act with integrity, respect, and industry, and to sustain a community characterized by inclusiveness and civility.

“As we begin at Harvard, we commit to upholding the values of the College and to making the entryway and Yard a place where all can thrive and where the exercise of kindness holds a place on par with intellectual attainment.”

The problem with this attempt to bully students into exercising kindness (aside from the incredibly constipated language) is that will make them even less likely to engage in any kind of more or less vigorous debate than they are already. As it is, they had to grow up in a culture where tolerance for any kind of opinion, even one that is completely baseless, ridiculous and offensive, is mandated:

Meanwhile, to their peers, Harvard students may, if anything, be a little too nice. Some veteran faculty members tell me that the students’ drive to succeed manifests itself in a surprising way. A social norm has emerged, they report, in which students avoid saying anything that might make others look bad in class, even if that restraint means stifling discussion.

“I note in the current generation of undergraduates a tendency to hold back on disagreement or criticism of other students in class,” says Jeffry Frieden, a political scientist. “They’re much more respectful of each other — much more than when I was an undergraduate. If someone states an opinion, even if absurd, they take it in stride.”

Vigorous debate, disagreement and forcefully expressed opinions scare university administrators so much that soon we will be left with intellectually castrated universities where intellectual activity will be substituted with kindness pledges and celebrations of difference for the sake of difference.

Be Very Careful About What You Say in Class

~ Clarissa ~ 23 Comments

Because there might just be a student present who snoozed through the lecture, only managed to catch the quote you used in order to criticize it, and will rush off to complain:

A York student hears a professor say something anti-semitic, rushes out of the room in a rage, and informs on him all over the Jewish community. The professor is branded an anti-semite.

The professor, who is Jewish, was clearly using the anti-semitic statement in his lecture about prejudice as an example of a reprehensible opinion. The student failed to understand this.

[Senior Sarah] Grunfeld said Tuesday she may have misunderstood the context and intent of Johnston’s remarks, but that fact is insignificant.

“The words, ‘Jews should be sterilized’ still came out of his mouth, so regardless of the context I still think that’s pretty serious.”

Brainwashed by a culture where you are not complete unless you are a victim of something, the student in question was searching for a reason to be offended and found it by ripping a quote out of context. And is she apologizing after it has been explained to her that the fault lies with her for not listening properly? Not at all. She actually insists that the statement was still offensive.

So, as I say, be very very careful about what you say in class. There are potential victims in search of victimization everywhere.

York University has, indeed, gone completely to the dogs. They’ve had freedom of speech issues before, too.

Joining the Liberation Front

~ Clarissa ~ 12 Comments

A fellow Hispanist has started a Liberation Front whose goal is the following:

Here are the sentences against which I am in open rebellion:

1. Writing is an onerous, and also meaningless exercise you must undertake for form’s sake.
2. Publishing is almost impossible.
3. Teaching is dangerous since doing it responsibly can cost you your job.
4. Any service or administrative experience proves you have no intellect.

In this liberation front we say instead that writing is fun, publishing is easy, teaching is a pleasant social and artistic experience, and administration is creative. It is an antidote.

The moment I read this post, I became enamored of the entire idea. I am also exhausted by the endless whining that pervades the academic world, so I want to join this liberation front.

Let’s liberate ourselves from the erroneous idea that a good academic is a perennial miserable, overworked, suffering creature!

What If You Are Not Horribly Busy?

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

On her blog, Z wrote:

I do not think it is the work itself that is hard, I think it is the working conditions that make it hard. One of these working conditions involves having to listen to warnings about how hard it is and so on, and how you need to feel that it is hard.

I had to respond to this, and here is what I wrote:

This is SO true. I was at a committee training session last week, and the person conducting it kept repeating, “I know that you are all horribly busy, I know that all of you barely have a moment to breathe, I know that all of you have too many obligations as it is. . .” Maybe this was supposed to sound reassuring or something but, to me, it just sounded like something was wrong with me because I didn’t feel all that busy, had ample time to breathe, read, blog and take walks, and didn’t have all that many obligations.

I just hate this idea that unless you act the role of a permanently exhausted academic, you will be seen by everybody as an underachiever and a non-productive person. I fulfill all of my work-related obligations very well, and it doesn’t make me all that horribly tired or busy. I don’t think this makes me a bad academic or a weird person.

I recommend that you read Z’s post in its entirety because I find it very insightful and refreshing.

Who Has the Power to Refuse?

~ Clarissa ~ 37 Comments

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries has published a great post about tenure and the power (or lack thereof) of tenured faculty. Make sure you read the post (and subscribe to the blog because it rocks) but, in the meanwhile, I wanted to call your attention to the story of Dr. Alexander McPherson who resisted the attempts of  the University of California Irvine to take the mandatory sexual harassment training:

“I have consistently refused to take such training on the grounds that the adoption of the requirement was a naked political act by the state that offended my sensibilities, violated my rights as a tenured professor, impugned my character and cast a shadow of suspicion on my reputation and career,” McPherson said.

“I consider my refusal an act of civil disobedience. I even offered to go to jail if the university persisted in persecuting me for my refusal. We Scots are very stubborn in matters of this sort.”

It’s so good to hear that such things still take place. Normally, at every campus I have visited or heard of, the most beaten down, brown-nosing, terrified folks who are ready to kiss ass of every minor administrator are not the tenure-track faculty, the adjuncts, the instructors, the grad students, or the secretarial staff. It’s the tenured profs. It’s as if the moment you got tenure, you somehow immediately learned to tremble in the presence of any minuscule administrative pseudo-authority. I have no idea why that is but I have gotten used to the fact that any resistance even to the greatest act of stupidity on campus will not come from tenured people.

Kudos to Dr. McPherson who resisted the silly and humiliating “training” the university wanted to inflict on him. And shame on all those tenured colleagues of his who did not join his protest.

Every year, I am forced to take the so-called “ethics training” that teaches me in the most condescending way you can imagine not to accept bribes, not to divert university funding to my relatives, and not to steal office supplies. So I know where McPherson’s outrage is coming from.

Academic Schedule and Fairness

~ Clarissa ~ 6 Comments

One of the reasons why I love my department is that everything is always organized in a very fair, transparent way that doesn’t leave junior faculty members feel downtrodden or exploited.

I know that at many other universities untenured faculty are stuck with the courses that nobody else wants to teach and are given the most inconvenient schedules ever. The level of intrigue surrounding the creation of course schedule is worthy of Calderon. At the end of the process, everybody hates each other so much that people are practically ready to put cyanide in each other’s coffee mugs.

Not so at my great university. Today, for example, I sat down with the Chair of my department and chose the courses I wanted to teach and the schedule that I find convenient. Not a single course that I’m teaching here has been foisted upon me against my will. To the contrary, senior colleagues seem obsessed with making sure that I teach exactly what I want and that the breaks between the classes are neither too long nor too short.

Our department has escaped what I call “the hierarchy curse”, which is something that tears apart many an academic unit. We all take turns teaching higher-level courses and nobody gets stuck always teaching the same lower-level course (unless that’s what they really want to do.) It’s the same at faculty meetings where nobody ever pulls rank or expects you to sit there quietly not daring to voice your opinion until you get tenure.

Every day, I discover more proof that accepting a position at this university was a great decision for me. Let alone for the students and the university at large. 🙂