A Weird Article on College Education in the New York Times

While I agree that trying to impose the business model on academia is wrong and that high standards of education should be maintained at all costs, I am often baffled by how people go about defending these useful ideas. Take, for example, the recent article in The New York Times titled "Your So-Called Education." After reading it, I realized that, according to the article's authors, the greatest problem in higher ed is me. Let's look at some of the points the article makes.

The quality of college education is slipping because:

1. "In a typical semester, for instance, 32 percent of the students did not take a single course with more than 40 pages of reading per week."

I must be a real underachiever because in my undergraduate courses, I never assign more that 30 pages of reading a week in any given course. I teach literature and culture, so reading is pretty much all we do. However, my goal is not to get the students to skim through as many pages as possible. I want them to read critically, to engage with the text, to try to go through it slowly. If you read 3 pages a week but manage to come up with some analysis of it, it's a lot more useful than gulping down 100 pages of a text just to fulfill some silly requirement.

2. "50 percent did not take any course requiring more than 20 pages of writing over the semester."

In my trademark course on Hispanic Civilization, students write several short essays that come up to less than 20 pages per semester. The writing component is crucial to that course. (Because I decided that it should be.) However, I don't see how it helps anybody to get the students to hand in reams of poorly written garbage. If a student manages to produce a single beautifully written page at the end of the semester, I will believe that my goal in the course has been accomplished. Students come to this Freshman course with no understanding of what distinguishes good and bad writing. Giving them humongous writing assignments will only lead them to reproduce the same horrible writing techniques they brought to college from their high schools.

3. "The average student spent only about 12 to 13 hours per week studying — about half the time a full-time college student in 1960 spent studying."

I wonder if anybody has counted how many of those hours a student in the 1960 spent hunting for information and doing manually all those things that today are simplified to an incredible degree by the Internet and text processing. If we take into account how much faster the writing becomes thanks to text editors, I'm sure we will arrive at a conclusion that today students work more.  

4. "Not surprisingly, a large number of the students showed no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing that were administered when they began college and then again at the ends of their sophomore and senior years. If the test that we used, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, were scaled on a traditional 0-to-100 point range, 45 percent of the students would not have demonstrated gains of even one point over the first two years of college, and 36 percent would not have shown such gains over four years of college."

I must have poor critical thinking skills myself because I truly fail to understand how critical thinking and complex reasoning can be measured on "a traditional 0-to-100 point range." The authors of this article bemoan the fact that the business model has been imposed on academia, but they fail to notice to what incredible degree they have been infected by this very model. Good reading and good writing for them are about a number of pages. Complex reasoning is about a number of points. In short, numbers rule supreme.

5. "Expanded privacy protections have created obstacles for colleges in providing information on student performance to parents, undercutting a traditional check on student lassitude."

The idea that educators would somehow benefit from having even more helicopter parents buzzing around them is bizarre. Has anybody ever developed their critical thinking skills because they were afraid their parents might scold them in case they didn't? 

6. "Too many institutions, for instance, rely primarily on student course evaluations to assess teaching. This creates perverse incentives for professors to demand little and give out good grades."

The idea that professors who demand little and hand out easy grades are the ones who get good student evaluations is completely misguided. If I told you what percentage of students I fail each semester, I think you'd agree that I'm anything but an easy grader. My evaluations, though, have always been fantastic. Students actually don't like professors who ask too little of them. In my teaching experience, the only way to get students to evaluate you highly is to demonstrate that your knowledge of the subject matter is profound.

7. "And the Department of Education could make available nationally representative longitudinal data on undergraduate learning outcomes for research purposes, as it has been doing for decades for primary and secondary education."

Given that primary and secondary education in this country have gone completely to the dogs in the past couple of decades, this suggestion really mystified me. "Longitudinal data on learning outcomes" is the bureaucracy-speak version of teaching to the test. This model inflicted untold damage on our secondary education on a daily basis, but now we are to inflict it on higher education as well.

In short, even when The New York Times is trying to do something good, it ends up  producing the exact opposite.

Corruption in the Higher Education System in Spain

A professor in Murcia is claiming that he is persecuted for writing a book about how corrupt the system of higher education is in Spain:

A Spanish university has denied that disciplinary proceedings against one of its professors are a response to a book he wrote alleging corruption at the institution. José Penalva, professor of education at the University of Murcia, has been accused of absenteeism and could face dismissal. He told Times Higher Education that he believed the real reason for the action was a book, published last month, in which he claimed that political influence and nepotism were rife in Spanish universities. Corrupción en la Universidad (Corruption in the University) describes what Professor Penalva sees as the incestuous relationship between Spanish universities and local politics, which he believes is a major factor in the "mediocrity" of the country's higher education institutions. "The rector always is a person who has a lot of power in the local community, and is always supported by a bunch of deans and politicians who scratch each other's backs," Professor Penalva told THE. "This explains why Spanish universities are at the bottom of the international rankings: there is no accountability, so the quality of research is very low," he said. . . Professor Penalva said Spanish universities were legally obliged to advertise academic positions, but that the majority of the members of the selection panels were appointed by the university's rector and the dean of the department in question. "This explains why 98 per cent of lecturers and professors in Spanish universities are 'local candidates' who have already worked in the department and have a 'godfather' there," he said.

I have no idea whether Dr. Penalva is, in fact, guilty of absenteeism, but I do know that he is absolutely right in his charges against the higher education system in Spain. I love Spain and have dedicated my life to the study, teaching and promotion of its culture. However, I have to agree that Spanish higher education is for shit.

When I first started out as a student in Hispanic Studies, my dream was to do my PhD in Spain. Then, gradually, I began noticing certain things that made me reconsider this plan. All of the brightest Hispanists I knew were doing all they could to leave Spain. When I asked them why they didn't want to look for a professorial position or a grad school program in their country, they would tell me that they didn't have the kind of connections it took to be successful in Spanish academia. The quality of courses in the Humanities is, more often than not, abysmal. Sexual harassment, nepotism and exploitation of graduate students are rife. As a result, scholars who want to do actual research and advance on their merits and not on the number of anuses they have been able to wipe clean with their tongues abandon the country.

It is not humanly possible to dedicate enough energy and time to research while simultaneously trying to cultivate connections with everybody who might be remotely "useful." Of course, I have seen academics here in the US who choose ass-licking (and I don't mean in a good, sexually fulfilling kind of way) over doing scholarship. Eventually, however, brown-nosers realize that this is a losing strategy and nobody in the academic community respects them. In Spain, it is just the opposite. As a result, students end up receiving sub-standard education and the prestige of Spanish college diplomas evaporates.   

P. S. If anybody knows where I can get the book in question, I will be very grateful. This is a book I would love to read and review. (Ordering online from Spanish bookstores is a humongous waste of time, as anybody who has ever tried it will know.)

The Ultimate Career Goal

I think it really helps to know what it is you ultimately want to accomplish in your career. Unless you have a very concrete vision of your ultimate destination, it is hard to avoid making false moves and wasting time and energy on moving in a direction that will ultimately prove to be a dead-end.

I do have a vision of where I want to get in my career. I don't think that something like tenure can be the ultimate goal. For me, tenure is a means to an end. Of course, I will be very happy and celebrate massively when / if I get it. However, that will only be one of the sine qua non conditions that will help me get closer to my goal. There are academics who never look beyond tenure while on the tenure-track. The tenure process is such a time-consuming, complex and often daunting proposition that it often tends to obscure the fact that one will spend many more years in academia after one gets tenure than on the actual tenure-track (which normally takes between 5 and 7 years.) I know several people who experienced a major letdown and a couple who got seriously depressed after getting tenure. For years, the list of tenure requirements was the organizing principle of their lives. Once it was gone, they had no coherent vision of why it made sense to do research and publish any more. (I felt something very similar after I passed my doctoral comprehensives and was left without a reading list that would organize my existence.)

My ultimate goal (and if you want to make fun of its sheer grandiosity, feel free) is to become a female and non-Marxist Terry Eagleton. What I mean by this is that I want to arrive at a point where I will write books on scholarly subjects that interest me (ideology, identity, feminism) for wider audiences. I chose Eagleton as my model because he manages to write in a way that is accessible to any reasonably educated person who is not a literary critic. He does so, however, without compromising the quality of his ideas. Eagleton doesn't dumb down or simplify. Rather, he uses his incomparable writing style to explain even the most complex matters in a way that makes them easier to understand.

Most people believe that academics live in a world apart, that they condescend to those who are less educated, that they can only speak in jargon that nobody other than them can decipher. I can't say that these opinions are completely misguided. The image of the academia as an Ivory Tower is more relevant today than it has ever been. As I said many times before, I am not a Marxist. I don't believe that economic interests guide people's actions and form the basis of everything that happens in society. History has demonstrated time and again that economic interests are nothing compared to the power of ideas. By locking ourselves in our Ivory Towers and excluding everybody not versed in our jargon from gaining access to ideas, we end up creating a society that will eventually expel academia altogether. We are seeing the beginnings of this process already in a slow erosion of tenure and closures of so many programs on the Humanities. 

Yes, politicians do damage to academia and so do anti-intellectual corporate administrators. I love ranting against them as much as the next person. (Read the archives of this blog if you don't believe me.) However, we are to blame, too. There needs to be a greater effort made to bring our ideas to a wider audience. And this is precisely what I want to end up doing.

Words of Wisdom from a Senior Colleague

A senior colleague in a field closely related to mine is about to retire. Here are some excerpts from a personal email I received from this scholar*:

As I look back on my career in academia, the greatest regret I have is that I didn't prioritize my research as much as I could have. I know that I could have done a lot more, made a greater contribution to my field, published more consistently. The world of academia offers so many activities and imposes so many obligations that seem designed to entice us away from our desks, from our unfinished manuscripts, from that eternally terrifying blank page it is our calling and our duty to fill. It is never too hard to find convincing, seemingly valid reasons why this difficult and often painful work needs to be postponed. "Just one moment more, executioner, just one little moment more," we plead in the style of Madame du Barry faced with the guillotine whenever we find ourselves in front of that blank page. This, however, is the greatest mistake made by so many scholars. . . Your are still very young, and your life as a scholar is just beginning. Since you asked for advice, here is the best suggestion I can offer: do everything in your power to make a name for yourself as a specialist in your field. Your record of publications will be the bulwark that will protect you in times of strife and uncertainty, give you security, respect, and ultimately, yes, power. There are institutional humiliations that become harder to accept as you age. . . The only way you can prevent the work of a lifetime from being undermined by these kinds of pressures is by ensuring that your name carries enough weight to shield you.

*Of course, I requested and received permission to publish this text anonymously on my blog. I translated it into English, so all verbal infelicites should be attributed only to me.

Who Matters More, Educators or Administrators?

Educators are being constantly admonishes to cut costs. Funding for conferences is almost impossible to obtain. Library collections don't get updated for years. Some universities remove telephones from professor's offices. In many colleges, teaching faculty have to purchase class supplies with their own money. Many academics buy into this narrative of scarcity and accede to measures that are supposed to save their institutions by cutting corners on vital things. This, of course, is completely silly because all that money we save by depriving our students, ourselves and our universities from crucial education-related materials only goes to feed a growing army of bureaucrats:

 Even at nonprofit schools, top-level administrators and financial managers pull down six- and seven-figure salaries, more on par with their industry counterparts than with their fellow faculty members. And while the proportion of tenure-track teaching faculty has dwindled, the number of managers has skyrocketed in both relative and absolute terms. If current trends continue, the Department of Education estimates that by 2014 there will be more administrators than instructors at American four-year nonprofit colleges. A bigger administration also consumes a larger portion of available funds, so it’s unsurprising that budget shares for instruction and student services have dipped over the past fifteen years.

This is worth being repeated because of how shocking it is: by 2014 there will be more administrators than educators at our nonprofit institutions of higher education. On what planet can this possibly make sense, people? How can we allow even our non-profit universities to become places where a bunch of useless bureaucrats proliferates parasitically by feeding off the hard work of students and teachers? Why are we letting this happen? Why do we sit there like patient dummies while some semi-literate idiot du jour explains to us that we need to drop everything that we are doing and fill out yet another bunch of ridiculous paperwork? Why are we letting these bureaucrats squeeze us out of academia? 

Philip Roth's The Human Stain and the So-Called PC Police in American Academia

Dr. Calvo's tragedy has reawakened popular interest in Philip Roth's great novel The Human Stain. In several online discussion about Dr. Calvo's suicide, I have seen references to this novel. It is being used as "definitive proof" that some completely fictitious "PC police" operates in American academia and ousts anybody who doesn't comply with its speech codes and rules of behavior.

If you are one of those people who have bought into this line of reasoning, I have a newsflash for you: there is no PC police. What does exist is a concerted Conservative campaign aimed at robbing academia of its intellectual prestige. Examples of the Conservative push to demonize academics and portray them as haughty, irrelevant and completely out of touch with "regular folks" abound. Take, for example, the following book review from The Economist that starts with a ridiculous assault on scholars of literature:

ACADEMICS are rarely reliable guides to literature. The magic that draws eggheads to certain books tends to get bludgeoned by theory, jargon and the need to be obscure.

After this dismissal of academics as people whose job it is to bludgeon all magic out of literature, the reviewer then proceeds to spout a string of extremely offensive stereotypes about the Russian people. A day doesn't go by without a similar nasty assault on academics gracing the pages of our leading newspapers and magazines. What is really appalling, though, is that now the work of a great American novelist should be co-opted as a weapon in this battle against intellect.

First of all, we need to remember that The Human Stain is a work of fiction. It is a great work of fiction, but still, fiction it is. It does not offer a factual account of anything. According to a blurb of the novel at Amazon,

Shocking, intensely dramatized events precipitate Silk's crisis. He remarks of two students who never showed up for class, "Do they exist or are they spooks?" They turn out to be black, and lodge a bogus charge of racism exploited by his enemies. 

 Now, anybody who has actually read the book (and not just skimmed the first few pages looking for "proof" of the evil nature of academia) knows that there is nothing bogus about the charge of racism leveled against professor Coleman Silk. He is, in fact, a racist who severed all ties with his black family and spent his entire life trying to "pass" as white. The seemingly innocuous comments Silk made in class turn out to be an expression of his deep-seated belief in the inferiority of black people. The entire message of the novel, in my opinion, is that no matter how hard you try to hide your racism, it will come out and destroy you in the end.

But, of course, I'm just one of those people who bludgeon literary magic for a living, so why listen to me anyways?

Was There a Conspiracy Against Dr. Calvo at Princeton?

In the aftermath of Antonio Calvo's suicide that followed his humiliating dismissal from Princeton, people have been trying to offer explanations as to how something this atrocious could have happened. It has been suggested that a conspiracy between several graduate students and a lecturer at Dr. Calvo's department led to his contract not being renewed by the university in spite of the wishes of the majority of his colleagues. An article in New York Post states the following:

He wasn't PC enough for Princeton. A vicious campaign to end the unblemished 10-year career of a popular but often politically incorrect Princeton teacher left him so despondent that he took his own life, brokenhearted pals said yesterday. . . Another pal said, "Those people didn't want his contract renewed. The campaign was led by graduate students who teach Spanish who were essentially under Antonio's supervision, and a lecturer also teaching there." At least two un-PC incidents were among complaints about Calvo during the review of his contract -- although his department supported the renewal. Calvo once raised his voice in a meeting with a female graduate student, who interpreted the confrontation as "aggressive behavior," the pal said. Another incident apparently involved a grad student whom Calvo chided, "You're spending too much time touching your balls. Why don't you go to work?"

This push to demonize the female lecturer and the grad students who complained about Dr. Calvo's conduct comes, in my opinion, from a deep-seated reluctance to recognize that what happened is not the fault of a small group of individuals but, rather, a sign of a profound systemic problem in North American academia at large. Of course, it's easier and very comforting psychologically to think about these sad events as the result of a personal grudge that some people might have nursed towards Dr. Calvo. It is much more difficult and disturbing to recognize that his tragedy is the result of a much more general malaise experienced everywhere in our system of higher education. The malaise I am referring to is called casualization. Please remember this word, as you will be hearing it more and more often in the coming years. 

Casualization is a process of a gradual erasure of the institution of tenure, where tenure-track positions are substituted by lecturer, adjunct, instructor and postdoc contracts. Such contracts offer absolutely no protection to the educators. Lecturers, instructors, adjuncts and postdocs have to teach an insane number of hours per semester just to make ends meet. In the meanwhile, they are under a constant threat of their contract not being renewed. It is, of course, easier for college administrators to have an army of underpaid and overworked employees who are permanently terrified of losing their livelihood than to hire tenure-track professors who will have some degree of protection from being summarily dismissed.

I have been teaching at a university level for exactly ten years now. I have taught as a graduate student, a Visiting Professor, and now a tenure-track professor. And let me tell you the following: graduate students and lecturers do not have the power to remove anybody from their job in academia, no matter how much they might try. The idea that people who have worked at a university for 10 years can get fired because a bunch of grad students and a lecturer complain about their loud voice or their use of colloquial Spanish is risible. 

Everybody who works with people generates resentments, annoyances and conflicts. I have no doubt that some of my colleagues, students and supervisors have, on occasion, found me to be annoying. I am sure that in many of those cases they were right to get upset or angry with me. Even the most professional and courteous among us have been known to raise our voices or write an angry email. If you have worked in the same place for ten years and have never raised your voice, then you are either dead or completely indifferent towards your job. However, in the same way as petty bickering between spouses does not always end in immediate divorce, small daily conflicts between colleagues don't always lead to people being escorted from their offices by security guards or to senior lecturers being expelled from the workplace in the midst of the semester. 

Dr. Calvo wasn't thrown out of his office in this humiliating manner and threatened with deportation because a few of the people he supervised didn't like him. Rather, these complaints were used against him by the administration that had decided to get rid of him for whatever reason. This can happen to absolutely anybody. The only way we have to defend ourselves from such things happening is by fighting against casualization. Dr. Calvo's story is only exceptional in that he took his life in response to being discarded by his institution. Such dismissals, however, take place all the time. 

What we need to do is to protest as loudly as we can every time our academic institutions cancel tenure-track positions and substitute them with lectureships and instructorships. Casualization is the most dangerous thing happening to academia right now. Let's stop blaming this tragedy on the non-existent PC-police, the grad students and the lecturers, who are as powerless as anybody in academia can be. Let's lay the blame where it belongs. And that, my friends, is the systemic transformation of academia according to the most egregiously inhumane corporate model anybody could imagine. 

More on Dr. Calvo's Suicide

This is a comment left by Ana Martin Sevillano at the discussion board of The Daily Princetonian:

I am an old friend of Antonio; we studied together in Madrid. I was with him two weeks ago in NY, visiting from Canada. He had already told me about the university activities against him. I believe they were trying to address the complaints of spoiled graduate students and a language lecturer. He was suffering. He had been working non stop for more than three years, but in his opinion the dean seemed to be more interested in keeping the complainers happy than in acknowledge all he had done for the program. Yet he was still hopeful that they would finally come to their senses. But they did not. If they fired him, they are now responsible for what has happened. Antonio was a great person, if he told some of the language teachers to put up with their job is because he had to. I hope an investigation is quickly opened and helps us coping with the terrible pain of not having him among us any longer.

And another comment from the same person. This is somebody who, I believe, can definitely be trusted because she comments under her own name in a situation where senior faculty members seem to be completely silent:

As a friend of Antonio, I only know what he told me. I would like to post it here once again so speculations abut him stop. The investigation conducted by the dean about him had been instigated by some graduate students and a lecturer. As language coordinator, Antonio had to supervise their work, and at one point they had a harsh disagreement during a meeting. This investigation (asking letters from specific people, etc) went on for months. 

If the administration wanted to fire him, it should have done it as it is customary in academia, either with one year notice or last fall, so Antonio could have applied to the positions available in his field. The job market is now over. Antonio would have had zero chances of applying for another job. If the administration also wanted to remove its sponsorship for his visa, he would have been suddenty in Spain, after more that a decade in the United States, where he had all his professional network. 

The people who decided on his fate were deliberately mean to him, they did not want to give him a chance, despite he had, as far as I know, the support of most of his colleagues and of many past and current language lecturers. 

Was the fact that he had a disagreement with some of the graduate students so terrible? Why was so important for the administration to please grad. students? 

The administration needs to come forward and explain why they did what they did. Why did they treat a human being like that? 

I have been in Academia for the last twenty years, everybody knows that the language coordinator suffers a lot of pressure: he has to deal with other faculty and with grad. students (all of whom normally teach language against their will, they want to teach literature and culture), and the lecturers. They are all under his supervision, but since this position is not tenured, it is a very vulnerable one, where the obligation to make decisions is not supported by any factual power. 

The administration is there to mediate and to help faculty, even if they are lecturers, foreigners, or any other minority. Why they were not there for Antonio? 

Those of us who were close to him won't be able to mourn until we have some answers. 

He might be ultimately responsible for his death, but there are other kind of moral responsibilities.

Those who feel guilty now claim Antonio was ultimately responsible for what he did. That might be true. But all we know to hear is why the Princeton administration treated him in such a way for a something that happens day in day out in academia (disagreements and fights). 

Does anybody have any more questions as to why it is so extremely difficult to raise the standards of language teaching at our departments? Is anybody still wondering why preserving the institution of tenure is absolutely crucial to the future of the American higher education?

A Lecturer at Princeton Commits Suicide

On the heels of the discussion about the exploitation of adjuncts, instructors and lecturers at our universities, comes the horrible news that Dr. Antonio Calvo, a senior lecturer at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures in Princeton, has taken his life after his contract was not renewed by the university:

The University has not released further details about the recent passing of senior lecturer Antonio Calvo, a member of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures and the director of the department’s Spanish language program and the Princeton in Spain summer program in Toledo, Spain.
The circumstances surrounding Calvo’s passing have not been made public. “We don’t feel that it’s our place to speak to private family matters,” University spokeswoman Cass Cliatt ’96 said on Monday evening. “As a policy, we never discuss matters of personnel.” However, former colleagues and friends of Calvo’s said that he took his own life last Tuesday in New York City. They also said that he had recently learned that his contract as a lecturer would not be renewed.  Several calls to the Spanish and Portuguese department offices went unreturned on Monday afternoon, and several department faculty members and administrators did not respond to calls or emails. 

Apparently, Dr. Calvo's colleagues at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese were not consulted in the matter of whether he should be retained or not. The Department's recommendation that his contract be renewed was disregarded. Now, Dr. Calvo's colleagues are forbidden to speak about what has happened:

Philip Rothaus ’11, a Spanish and Portuguese concentrator who described himself as a “good friend of Antonio Calvo’s,” said in an email that he understood that faculty and staff members had been forbidden from speaking about the situation in public. “Antonio’s dear friends, his colleagues in the Spanish and Portuguese Department, have been forbidden from speaking about this to anyone,” he said. “I am, thankfully, not under subject to the same constraints, and, at this point, am angry enough not to care.” Marco Aponte, a friend of Calvo’s who was affiliated with the University as a Ph.D. student and then as a lecturer during the 2005-06 and 2007-08 academic years, said that Calvo had been undergoing a routine review process. As part of the review process, the University solicits letters from colleagues of the faculty member in question, but Aponte said he had never been contacted and questioned the University’s choices of colleagues to contact. He said the University only asked for letters from people it knew had "some sort of conflict" with Calvo. On Monday, Aponte started a Facebook group called “Justice for Antonio Calvo.” The group had over 100 followers by Monday evening. Rothaus said he believed the University neglected to interview members of the Spanish and Portuguese department. “The department’s recommendation was to continue his contract,” he wrote. “The reappointment committee, if they performed any sort of investigation whatsoever, never interviewed a single member of the department nor Antonio himself.” 

I'm sorry for giving these long quotes but the situation is really egregious and it's very important that we pay attention. This is what the system of higher education has come to. A person works for the university for years and is obviously loved and appreciated by his colleagues and students. Then, some paper-pusher decides that the school needs to get rid of him. A review process that only consults people who have a reason to dislike him and excludes his colleagues from the department gets started. Then, the scholar and the pedagogue gets escorted from the premises by a security guard - just think about this, people, consider the hurt and the humiliation of being escorted from your office because some shadow committee said so - and placed on leave. Nobody at the department even knows what's going on and Dr. Calvo is still scheduled to teach this semester.

To make things even worse, not having his contract reviewed would mean almost immediate deportation for Calvo. Being deported within weeks of this shady decision by a group of useless and anti-intellectual administrators is a disaster for somebody who has been living in this country for a decade.

Of course, we will now hear stories that Dr. Calvo was unstable, depressed and what not. But let me ask you, who wouldn't be? This is what the system of higher education has come to. People are placed in positions where there is no hope for tenure and they can be discarded like used Kleenex whenever some administrator says so. For those of us in Foreign Languages and Literatures this often means an almost immediate deportation since so many of us are from other countries.

The only situation when such drastic measures against a teacher could make sense is if s/he represented an immediate threat to the physical safety of students or colleagues. Judging from the comments that people left to the article I quoted, this was obviously not the case. (I will post some statements from people who were close to the situation in a little while.)

Princeton University will not be able to shroud its atrocious actions in secrecy if we all refuse to be silent. We need to blog about it and make the situation as widely known as possible. We cannot stand by and allow our colleagues' lives be destroyed by stupid and profit-driven administrators. 

I really hope. . .

. . . that I will never get so out of touch and so full of myself that I will start dispensing condescending advice to adjuncts, lecturers and instructors like Tenured Radical does in this nasty and offensive post. Of course, nobody wants to admit that here, for the grace of Lady Luck, go we all. It's easier to convince yourself that somebody as brilliant, productive, smart and unique as you could have never ended up stuck in a crappy adjuncting position. The sad reality is, though, that those of us who got tenure-track positions have been incredibly lucky. And that's all there is to it. You can hide from this simple truth behind a mountain of contemptuous advice you dispense to your colleagues, but it still remains the truth.

It is mind-boggling to me that people who position themselves as progressives would be so blinded by vanity as to disregard the glaring facts of reality. The system of higher education is being slowly destroyed by exploitative practices that are geared towards eroding the system of tenure and substituting tenure-track positions by an army of underpaid and overworked adjuncts, lecturers, and instructors. This system is exploitative and wrong. Instead of sneering at our colleagues, we need to join forces with them and struggle to take our academia back.

Here and here you can find  some really great posts from Anastasia, an adjunct, who responds to Tenured Radical's contemptuous rant.

Relationships and Commuting

I made the mistake of having a long nap today, so I will now bug my readers with a multitude of posts.

My relationship with the love of my life started as a long-distance one. I had to undertake long and painful Greyhound journeys from Canada to the US to be with him. He couldn't travel to see me at all because of visa restrictions. That entire year when I was making very long and painful trips to see him and then go back was the year when I was writing my doctoral dissertation. (I'll tell the whole story of our relationship one day because its is very educational. :-)

Once, when I submitted a portion of my doctoral dissertation to my adviser, she wrote the following in response:

"Clarissa, what happened on page 86 of your dissertation? Before that page, your writing was passionate, intelligent and exciting. In the middle of page 86, it suddenly became plodding, repetitive and boring. Why did this dramatic change happen?"

My adviser was (and is) a brilliant scholar who knew what she was talking about. Page 86 coincided with the moment when I left the guy I liked and traveled back home. 

As I'm preparing to become a commuting academic yet again, I remembered this story. This memory was brought to my mind by a post on the blog of Jonathan Mayhew who  somehow managed to maintain a beautiful commuting relationship with his wife (who is one of the most highly respected and feared academics in our field) and stay extremely productive.

Consulting Services for Fellow Hispanists (And Other Colleagues in Humanities)

When you finally get your PhD and find that first professorial position, you feel elated and nearly ecstatic. Finally, you will be able to become a scholar in your own right and transform your field of knowledge. Then you discover that your graduate program taught you how to be a great grad student but left you with no knowledge whatsoever as to how to be an actual scholar. You know how to write a brilliant final essay for a grad course, but have no idea how to transform it into an article that a good journal will want to publish. There are now no course deadlines which used to help you organize your time, so you spend your free hours floundering in the sea of conflicting ideas as to what your next step should be. Articles you submit for publication are rejected with a few lines that give you no clue as to what is wrong with your article. Should it be reworked and submitted to another journal? If so, then how you should rework it? Or is it utterly hopeless and should be abandoned altogether? How do you go about transforming your brilliant doctoral dissertation into a book ready for publication?

So many young academics manage to find no answer to these questions and eventually give up on their dream of becoming research scholars altogether. A distance between being a fantastic grad student and becoming a real scholar is huge and we almost never receive any training on how to bridge that distance while we are in grad school.

Well, my friend, if you are in the field of Hispanic Studies, you are in luck. I have recently discovered that Jonathan Mayhew, a highly esteemed scholar in the field of Peninsular Literature, is starting a consulting business where he will offer a variety of invaluable services that will help young scholars to find out what they are doing wrong and improve. Here are some of the services that Jonathan offers:

Peer Review ($75). I will act as a peer reviewer for your unpublished article, giving you a full report (Humanities fields only). 
Evaluation of the Scholarly Base ($150). I will help you make an inventory of your scholarly base and identify areas of weakness. 
Prose X-Ray ($50). I will read three pages of your prose and tell you what you are doing wrong (Spanish or English). 
Poetry manuscript($200). I will read your book of poetry and give you suggestions for writing less crappy poems. 
Mentoring (variable price). I will design a mentoring plan for you for an agreed-upon price for a minimum of six months. 
Time management ($100). I will show you how to schedule your time so you can get three times more done. 

For the entire list of services and to read Jonathan's extremely helpful motivational blog go here.

The only reason why I'm promoting Jonathan's services on my blog is because I have tried them and now want to spread the joy. I asked Jonathan to look at the most recent article of mine. When he read it, he sent me a) a report on the article that he would have written had he been reviewing it for a scholarly journal and b) extremely useful comments on what was wrong with the article and helpful practical advice as to how the article could be improved.

Often, brilliant scholars make really crappy pedagogues and are completely useless as mentors. They word their criticisms of your writing in a way that makes you want to go jump off a cliff instead of making you want to improve. (To give an example, I was told once by an older scholar that the way I write in English puts me on the same level with people who are functionally illiterate. The 1,174 visits I had to this blog just today seem to contradict that statement.) There is another breed of scholars who only tell you how brilliant you are and how amazing everything you write is. Neither of these approaches is extremely helpful. Sadly, scholars who know how to offer incisive criticism of your research in a way that is both useful and respectful are hard to find. 

Jonathan offered some pretty harsh criticisms of my article. However, he did it in a respectful way that didn't hurt my feelings in the least. It was obvious from the comments that his only goal was to help me improve the piece. I haven't received such helpful comments on my writing in many years.

So if you are in need of helpful, productive criticism and valuable scholarly advice, consider using Jonathan's consulting services. Visit his blog for more details.

Women and Self-Respect, Cont'd

I am still traumatized by the utter lack of self-respect demonstrated by a female academic that I discussed in my previous post. 

We cannot expect others to bear a greater responsibility for our comfort than we do ourselves. If I choose to sit there and giggle at anti-Semitic comments that insult me as a Jew, I have no right to complain in the privacy of my anonymous blog about the anti-Semitism of others. If I tolerate anti-women comments from my male colleagues, I am not entitled to criticize them for those comments behind their backs. If I put up with being treated like crap, it means that I have consented to such treatment. 

We can talk ad nauseam about how male chauvinists, racists, xenophobes, homophobes and anti-Semites should know which of their comments are wrong and unacceptable. However, we cannot hold others to a higher standard of accountability than the one to which we hold ourselves. Unless you call bigots on their bigotry in no uncertain terms whenever they express it, you are just as much to blame for the existence of hatred, discrimination and inequality as they are. 

As academics, we also have a responsibility to our female students. Female Science Professor must know very well how hostile academia is to female students in the sciences. The male colleague who insulted her is, without a doubt, very likely to act in a condescending, disparaging way towards his female students. Students are powerless in their relationship with a professor, while female scholars are not. A female academic who allows herself to be spit on by male colleagues betrays her female students who will receive a much worse treatment at the hands of a chauvinistic jerk they have for a professor.

In this situation, I despise the female academic who puts up meekly with a disrespectful treatment a lot more than I do her male colleagues. They, at least, defend their own interests consistently. She sells out herself and every other female academic at her institution because she is not woman enough to stand up to jerks.

Stopping the discrimination of women is not the task of men, people. It falls to us, the women, to stop being eternal and consenting victims of every kind of abuse. You, my female reader, have to shut up the jerks who denigrate and dismiss you to your face. Nobody else will do it for you. 

Women and Self-Respect

Instances when even highly-educated, powerful women allow themselves to be treated with a complete lack of respect annoy me to the point where I just get extremely angry. Female Science Professor describes on her blog the following situation that took place during a meeting with a group of male colleagues:

TWICE during the first half hour of the meeting, somewhat out of context, and completely gratuitously, one of The Guys mentioned that I was only part of this group because "they had to have a woman". He hastened to say that he was totally on board with this because he recognized the realities of the world today. Diversity has been deemed to be important -- although he noted that he has seen no evidence of the discrimination that some women in our field claim to experience -- so our group should be diverse.

So what do you think this scholar did in response?  Told this jerk and the group of losers who just sat there quietly in the meanwhile exactly how far they could stick their group and their diversity into their assholes? Not even close.

What did I do when my esteemed colleague made his "FSP is a token" comments? I calmly changed the subject to one more relevant to the meeting, made a point that no one else had thought of, got complimented (by someone else) for having noticed something that had long been overlooked by other members of the group, and basically just moved on with the tasks at hand. I am a useful member of this committee, and I will continue to contribute for as long as it is worthwhile for me to do so.

She gets insulted by some creepazoid and her response is to try to prove that she is useful. When I first read this, I thought it was some kind of joke. This is taking place in a civilized country in the twenty-first century, and a woman whose professional qualifications have been dismissed in such an offensive manner meekly and submissively strives to demonstrate her usefulness and celebrates that one of the jerks in the group complimented her. Has the world suddenly gone insane? I wonder, if she thanked the kind sir and master for acknowledging her usefulness with a compliment.

If something like that ever happened to me, I would immediately and very vocally inform the losers of the group that I despise them and will not find myself in their company until every single one of them issued a public apology to me. Then, I would inform the entire university community exactly of what happened. And finally, I would publish the story on my blog with names and, if possible, pictures of every jerk in that group. 

Women who put up with this treatment signal to the offenders that it is perfectly fine to insult and dismiss their female colleagues in such a way. If the FSP wonders where such jerks come from, I can tell her: they are encouraged daily by meek, weak and sad women like herself. We, the women, form half of the population of this planet. Together with men who are our allies in the belief that women are valid human beings, we are a huge power. We do not have to put up with crap. Let's stop sitting there like silent little robots, smiling and trying to prove our usefulness. Let us finally start telling the jerks that it is not OK to treat us like crap. Let's form our own groups and decide whom we accept based on their usefulness to us. 

A Question about Publication Requirements

Since I have many academics reading this blog, I would like to hear people's opinions on the following issue: do you think that the number of publications that is expected yearly from Full Professors (tenured, of course) should be the same as the number expected from non-tenured Assistant Professors?

Non-academics are welcome to answer too, of course. For those who are not sure about the terminology, an Assistant Professor is a person who is in her first to sixth year in her career while a tenured Full Professor is somebody who has been in academia in the professorial capacity for over 12 years (sometimes it's 10 years, but that is very rare.)

Just wondering what people think about this.

Sales Training for Academics

At least once a day, somebody visits my blog to read my posts on how to deal with rejection in academia (you can find them here, here and here.) Failed job searches, rejected articles, book proposals or conference presentations - all that traumatizes academics to the point where many decide to stop trying altogether. One of the most recent searches that led a reader to one of these posts was "heartbroken over article rejection academia." 

All of this made me think that we, the academics, might benefit from the kind of training that people in sales get that helps them immunize themselves against being emotionally ravaged by rejection. These brave people (especially those in telemarketing) get rejected - and often in a very rude form - dozens or even hundreds of times a day. So if they can do it, the we most definitely can find a way to deal with a rejection every couple of months that is more often than not couched in fairly polite terms.

Seriously, if anybody has had any such training, or alternatively, has developed strategies of your own, please share. Many people are in need of this kind of advice.

Republicans Are Such Great Comedians

The persecution of progressive scholars by Republicans continues. It has now spread to Michigan. These politicians probably don't realize how ridiculous they are making themselves look with their attempts to police e-mail communications of university professors. Just look at this fresh bout of idiocy that they have regaled us with:

The Mackinac Center, which describes itself as a nonpartisan research and educational institution and receives money from numerous conservative foundations, asked the three universities’ labor studies faculty members for any e-mails mentioning “Scott Walker,” “Madison,” “Wisconsin” or “Rachel Maddow,” the liberal talk show host on MSNBC.

 Of course, we all understand why mentioning Rachel Maddow in any context must be seen as a subversive act. The attempts to persecute people for writing the word "Wisconsin," however, are too ridiculous to be discussed seriously.

I really wish that the Democrats would fight back and request emails of conservative scholars (if they can find any, of course) that mention words like "Arizona," "birth certificate," and "Bill O'Reilly." We need to start treating these freaks the way they treat us. Let's stop taking their blows patiently and deliver some of our own!

UK's David Cameron Pushes for the Destruction of Academia

So many things have happened while I've been away that I hardly know what to blog about first. The conservative assault on scholarship in the UK is one of the topics that deserve immediate attention of all of us who value intelligence and oppose the cult of ignorance promoted by conservative forces everywhere. David Cameron's government will now pull the funding of all research in the Humanities that does not support his weird idea of "big society":

Academics will study the "big society" as a priority, following a deal with the government to secure funding from cuts. The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) will spend a "significant" amount of its funding on the prime minister's vision for the country, after a government "clarification" of the Haldane principle – a convention that for 90 years has protected the right of academics to decide where research funds should be spent. Under the revised principle, research bodies must work to the government's national objectives, although the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said that ministers will not meddle in individual projects. It is claimed the AHRC was told that research into the "big society" was non-negotiable if it wished to maintain its funding at £100m a year.

The article where I found the above-quoted statement proceeds to suggest that

It is government money. They have the right to spend it on what they want.

This, of course, is completely ridiculous. This money doesn't belong to the government. It belongs to the taxpayers who hired the government to manage this money. If the way these hired managers administer the funds given to them by the people does not serve the public good, the citizens of the country have every right to send the government packing.

The problem with forcing academics to pursue only those projects that study the "big society" is that nobody really knows what this concepts actually means. It was coined in order to promote a political campaign of a party that is not famous for its high intelligence and is supposed to have as its goal 

 to create a climate that empowers local people and communities, building a big society that will 'take power away from politicians and give it to people'.

I don't think that even the people who came up with this strange definition know exactly what it's supposed to mean. As a result, it will be possible for the UK's conservative government to exercise firm control over the country's intellectuals based on a set of criteria that nobody has even bothered to define.

What Cameron and his posse of fools don't understand is that when people start their research, they don't know where it is going to lead them. If you begin a research project and expect it to reach a predetermined set of conclusions, you are going to fail. A responsible academic does not conduct research in order to support ideas s/he had before beginning the project. Nobody can reasonably guarantee that the funding one received to promote the "big society" will end up supporting conclusions that have anything to do with that goal.

Now, every academic who wants to engage in a project will have to come up with elaborate ways of convincing illiterate idiots in charge that the project in question will fit into these unintelligent politicians' view of what the country needs. This will result in a lot of aggravation, bureaucracy, corruption and will bring about absolutely no positive results whatsoever. Unless, of course, you count the destruction of UK's academia among positive results. This, I believe, is the ultimate goal of the British government.

Georgia Rejects a Scholar for Quoting Marx

Kennesaw State University, a dinky, insignificant joke of a university somewhere in Georgia, was going to hire Dr. Timothy J. L. Chandler as its new provost. Some local ignoramuses, however, disinterred Chandler's article from 13 years ago and used it to create a scandal in the uneducated, stupid, and fanatical local community. The horrible truth that this community of fools discovered is that Chandler quoted Marx in this article:

The controversy started with a column in The Marietta Daily Journal, written by three of the newspaper's top executives -- who did not respond to request for comment for this article. The headline of the article suggests that Kennesaw State might need a new color (red) to go with its traditional black and gold. The column goes on to give a series of citations of Marx or of Marxist philosophy that appear in Chandler's 1998 journal article, such as "Increased competition results in increased ethnicity and racism." And: "Ownership is taken for granted in capitalistic societies and is central to the accumulation of wealth and domination. All ownership of land or material means of production was at one time or another obtained by force." And: "While the United States has the most sophisticated propaganda apparatus ever assembled, it is also the most violent nation-state in history."

What the sad fools around Kennesaw don't understand is that there are no major philosophers, thinkers, scholars in the Humanities today who are unfamiliar with Marx's work. If universities were to fire every scholar who quoted Marx or his followers, there will nobody left to teach. 

It is unconscionable that a bunch of fools who have obviously read less in the course of their entire lives than Dr. Chandler has published would think nothing of expressing their uninformed opinions in a public forum. There is a cult of stupidity in this country, which makes it possible for such idiots to parade their ignorance around with a profound belief in their own importance.

This Is How Universities Kill Their Reputations

I'm sure everybody has heard the name - or at least the inspiring story - of Dr. David Protess, a professor of journalism at Northwestern who started the Innocence Project and helped exonerate people who had been wrongly convicted and often even placed on death row for the crimes they'd never committed. Now Northwestern University where Protess works demonstrated that it has no respect even for scholars of his stature. As a result of some vague rumors of somebody's possible wrongdoing of some unknown kind, the university decided to prevent Protess from teaching his trademark course on investigative journalism:

A Northwestern University journalism professor whose investigations of wrongful convictions were cited when Illinois recently banned the death penalty has been sidelined amid allegations that some of his students may have violated the law.In a one-sentence e-mail, the university notified David Protess, the director of the Innocence Project, that he will not be teaching his investigative journalism class this spring. That course, which Protess created 12 years ago and has taught ever since, has resulted in the exoneration of 12 prisoners, including five on death row.

Good investigative journalists are hard to find as it is. Nobody wants to go to the trouble of conducting actual investigations. Why make the effort when you can simply sell uninformed, badly written opinion pieces on subjects you know nothing about? The majority of American print journalists do exactly that. So Northwestern decided to add to the pool of students who aren't getting educated on how to be good journalists by preventing Protess from teaching his class. 

It's scandalous that some nobody of an administrator has the gall of notifying a famous professor in a one-sentence e-mail that he will be prevented from teaching a course he wants to teach. While we are sitting here terrified of telling college administrators that their job is to shut up and do what we tell them, they become more convinced of their own importance with every passing day. For how much longer will we allow them to entertain the illusion that they matter? These ignorant, useless creatures need to be prevented from playing any role in the education process apart of making sure that we have enough paper in our printers.


P.S. Thank you, J., for sending me this link!