Update on the Troll

For those who don't know: I have this troll who's been stalking my blog for a very long time. I think it's been close to a year. At first, it tried posting offensive comments, which I obviously never publish. Still, it comes here on a regular basis and still tries to comment from time to time.

I have to say that it's very difficult for me to imagine a life that is so empty, useless and bereft of all meaning that a person would think nothing of wasting it on reading a blog they obviously hate. As far as I can remember (and if I'm mistaken, troll, I'm sorry. You mean a lot less to me than I do to you), the troll initially got obsessed with the blog because I mentioned that sex is something good and enjoyable. Evidently, in all the months that have gone by the troll has not been able to find anybody who would be willing to alleviate their sexual loneliness for love or money.

I hope that when people see what lack of sex has done to my poor troll they will stop arguing with me about the importance of a healthy sexual life.

Political Advertisement

Political advertisement in Illinois is extremely inane. I just saw two ads from competing candidates running one after another. The ad from the Republican candidate had the following message: "My opponent campaigned for Obama. This means he's bad! Don't vote for him." The Democrat's ad said: "My opponent was friends with Bush. This means he's bad! Don't vote for him." Both ads feature photos of the opponent shaking hands with the offending president.

I have no idea why somebody would want to waste money on such idiotic ads. Of course, a Democrat or a Republican supported the presidential candidate of their party at least at some point in their career. Are the voters considered to be so stupid that they need this to be pointed out to them?

American Academics' Inept Struggle for Their Rights: SUNY Albany

Finally, the folks at SUNY Albany started to make their dire situation known to the members of the academic community. Sadly, they are doing it in a way that is unlikely to be very effective. Instead of creating a blog to inform everybody of what is happening on a daily basis and placing a petition there that can be signed on-line, they got ACTFL (our professional association) to circulate a letter on their behalf. Unfortunately, this letter is being circulated in a .pdf format, which makes it impossible for allies like me to place the letter on my blog. PDF files are also huge, and many people will not want to clutter their mailboxes with such a big file. They would have been a lot better off including their letter in the body of the e-mail itself. People are much more likely to read it this way as opposed to an attachment of any kind. Another thing that makes little sense is that they are sending the letter to departmental chairs and administrators, instead of regular faculty members who are a lot more likely to want to join the struggle.

American academics have a lot to learn from their Canadian and Welsh colleagues who don't make this many false moves in their struggle to defend their departments. The first step should always be going online. Start a blog, contact other bloggers, get people to tweet about your situation and link to it on their Facebook pages. The strategy of contacting the few select individuals high on the academic hierarchy is outdated and useless. What I find especially curious is that even though I've had over a hundred and fifty visitors from SUNY Albany to this blog, not a single one of them left a comment or got in touch. This attitude couldn't be more different from that of our Swansea colleagues who know how to interact with their allies in a productive way.

Only a few decades ago, American college campuses taught the world how to organize fruitful social protest. Today, it seems that while the entire world is putting these lessons to good use, they have been completely forgotten by the American academics and students themselves.

What's Up with Our IT People?

What I dislike about the IT department at my university is that it never takes care of things that don't work but instead messes with stuff that does work, destroying it in the process. I haven't been able to get them to make sure I have a working computer for the third semester in a row. An IT person comes to my office, looks at the computer, says "Huh. . ." in a pensive manner and then disappears for a month.

One thing that always worked great was our university e-mail system. Until, that is, the IT people decided to change the interface because obviously they have nothing better to do with their time. Since then, I can only access university e-mail about 7 times out of 10. The interface is clunky, overbusy and hard to manage compared to the one we had before. It also takes forever to load.

I also discovered today that I don't receive all of my e-mail. Which is very annoying news for somebody who is awaiting decision on 3 articles she submitted for publication. There is this journal that promised to have an answer for me before July 4. And probably they did but I never got their e-mail. This is beyond annoying.

Anonymity and Blogging

People keep asking me why I don't write this ("cool," "fascinating," "high-quality" - the adjectives have been suggested by the readers) blog under my own name. The main reason is that I write very harsh - and very honest - stuff about college administrators, both at my own university and at other educational institutions. Don't get me wrong, I stand by every single word I have ever written about them. I have absolutely no problem with telling the administrators exactly what I think. Since the beginning of this semester, I've had separate meetings with 4 people at different levels of university administration. Unlike some other (mostly male) colleagues who toadied to those administrators like there was no tomorrow, I said exactly what I thought and as loudly as I wanted.

The difference between blogging and speaking face-to-face, though, is that a blog post cannot demand an answer from those who read it. If I were convinced that people I criticize have the courage of their opinions in the same degree that I do, I would have no problem writing under my own name. What I want to avoid is people reading what I have to say and then - instead of discussing things with me directly - retaliating behind my back and without my knowledge.

Mario Vargas Llosa Wins the Nobel Prize!

Finally!!! After years of handing out Nobel Prizes to people almost nobody knows and absolutely nobody reads, the Nobel committee conferred the prize to the impossibly talented Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. Of course, I am convinced that while Juan Goytisolo is living giving the Nobel Prize to anybody else is a joke. But then again, Goytisolo - the most gifted writer of the second half of the XXth century in the world - is way too good for the Nobel.

Vargas Llosa is an amazing writer. Among the writers of the Latin American Boom, he is definitely my favorite. Vargas Llosa simply doesn't know how to write a bad sentence. His novels are complex and beautifully structured. He is even a lot less machista than other writers from Latin America. Of course, male chauvinism is still there in his books. However, unlike Garcia Marquez, who is a virulent and unrepentant woman-hater, Vargas Llosa has gone to great lengths over the years to reduce the degree of male chauvinism in his work.

Now, of course, everybody will rush to buy his books. (Maybe they will appear in Kindle format in the original). I feel extremely jealous of those who will now get a chance to read Vargas Llosa's books for the very first time. As one of my professors once said, "I really wish I get Alzheimer's when I grow old. Imagine the joy of re-dicovering all these amazing books as if you had never read them before."

If you are among the lucky readers who are about to discover Vargas Llosa, I recommend that you start with his beautiful novel The War of the End of the World. It will give you a taste of what Vargas Llosa is capable of but, at the same time, this is not one of his most difficult novels, so it will ease you into his way of writing.



In case you want to read something more recent - but still absolutely amazing - by this author, I recommend you read his The Bad Girl: A Novel. Written in 2006, this novel is an attempt by the writer to analyze the roots of male chauvinism and address machismo as a way of being that has dominated Latin America for centuries. Among the male writers of Latin America, Vargas Llosa, I believe, is the only one who at least made an effort to recognize his own machismo and look at it critically.

Congratulations to Mario Vargas Llosa and to all of us who have loved and followed his work for years!

Laura Lippman's Hardly Knew Her: A Review

Female writers are often terrified of their own literary talent. They take refuge in writing mystery novels where they can vent their artistic frustrations through describing fictional mutilations, torture and dismemberments they inflict on their female characters. The most violent, gruesome descriptions of torture inflicted on women and children can be found exclusively in mysteries written by women. Tess Gerritsen and Lisa Gardner, for example, specialize in scenes of female torture and debasement that are almost too painful to read.

Many people have tried to figure out why this happens. Elizabeth George, for instance, recently wrote an article on the subject suggesting that this occurs simply because readers don't care enough about male victims. Describe the murder of a man in your novel, she says, and it is guaranteed not to sell. I feel, however, that female writers create mystery novels that are so much angrier than male mysteries because they experience a degree of frustration in their daily lives and creative endeavors that is unknown to their male colleagues.

Not all female mystery writers cultivate the excessively gruesome variation of the genre. The amazingly talented Tana French and Laura Lippman write really great fiction that masquerades as mystery through a half-hearted addition of a couple of dead bodies here and there. While Tana French seems to be moving to a stage in her writing where dead bodies become more perfunctory than ever with every new novel, Laura Lippman still isn't ready to quit pretending she is a lot less talented than she is. Hardly Knew Her is a collection of Laura Lippman's short stories that are so good they could almost be compared to Joyce Carol Oates's. There is some sort of a crime in each of them but this collection is so much more than that.

Lippman's stories explore various ways in which women sell sex for money. The stories are very different, they are narrated in very distinctive voices and are set in extremely different social surroundings. Still, each of them addresses the relationship between sex and money in a way that is always insightful and fresh. Cheap didacticism is alien to Lippman. Among her female characters who sell their bodies in a variety of inventive ways, the only one who has character and integrity is a career prostitute. She is, of course, despised by housewives who believe that selling themselves just to one man is somehow better. Lippman makes it very clear that her sympathies lie with the honest, resourceful prostitute and not with the spoiled housewives who go to great lengths to convince themselves of their non-existent superiority:

“Is there anyone who works harder than a stay-at-home mom?” Ditchdiggers, she thought. Janitresses and custodians. Gardeners. Meter readers. The girl who stands on her feet all day next to a fryer, all for the glory of minimum wage. Day laborers, men who line up on street corners and take whatever is offered. Hundreds of people you stare past every day, barely recognizing them as human. Prostitutes.

This kind of honesty is not easy to find in a genre that is addressed to an overwhelmingly female audience. The desire to keep the housewives happy and cater to their tastes has been the downfall of many an entertainer. Thankfully, Lippman is not one of them.

Laura Lippman lives in Baltimore, and most of her stories are set in this city. The few times that she ventures to other settings, her stories lose in quality. The only part of Hardly Knew Her: Stories that I didn't enjoy too much was a story set in New Orleans. On home turf, however, Lippman is brilliant. Her love of Baltimore and her profound understanding of its history make her stories fascinating to those of us who have an emotional attachment to this beautiful city.

Wider Ramifications of the Assault on Tenure: A Post by an Anonymous Guest Blogger

One of the things I like the most about blogging is that really smart, fantastic people get in touch and send me their ideas on important subjects. Today, for example, I got an e-mail from a reader who takes issue with some of the points I make in my post about an on-going assault on tenure. This reader's comments were so great that asked their permission to publish them as an anonymous guest post. Enjoy and feel free to leave comments.

I think that your comment on a conspiracy to eliminate tenure misses the larger point. I believe that America is on a path to a Mexican style of governance where a small group of wealthy families control the majority of the net worth of the country and the political process. There is also a small and docile middle class. The majority of the society is poor, desperate and crime ridden. A necessary but not sufficient precondition for this situation to occur in America is the diminution of critical reasoning which the loss of tenure for academics would accentuate. The political discourse in America has been reduced to a series of logical tautologies (in the original Greek sense) and non-sequiturs packaged into sound bites. I think that a more appropriate term is a coalescence of parallel interests rather than a conspiracy and that a few examples would be useful at this point.


Stockwell Day, the Canadian minister of corrections, stated in June of this year that it would be necessary to spend billions of dollars on correction facilities due to an increase in unreported crime. If the crime is unreported then how can anyone draw conclusions as to a change in the volume of crime?

The conservative government in Canada eliminated the long census form for next year. If the census data doesn’t support the assertions on which you base your policies then eliminate the census. I’ll argue my anecdotal evidence and ideological stance against your anecdotal evidence and ideological stance!

Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School. He is one of the luminaries who support the slashing of federal government spending in America to reduce the long term debt. An unstated effect of this policy would be an increase in the income disparity of the wealthy with the rest of society. In a recent conference, he argued his point on the fact that a linear projection of the current increase in debt implies that by the year 2080 the total debt would be three and a half times the GDP of the country and the Interest payments alone would absorb the entire federal budget. The math is impeccable but anyone who makes a seventy year linear projection is either a fool or disingenuous.

In recent TV commentaries (not just Fox news), President Obama is presented as a secret Muslim with socialist aspirations who is simultaneously a corporate lackey and a tool of big business. What can I say?

I don’t have a problem with people who make these statements. They’re only trying to advance their own agendas and I suppose it could be argued that I’m cherry picking in order to advance my thesis. I do have a problem with people who have the responsibility to their profession to query these assertions instead of soft ball questions and rapt attention. I’m a science guy rather than humanities person but I do have analogues. In undergraduate school, I remember that the dosage levels for drugs were implied to have been handed down from God or in more measured form that the pharmaceutical companies had done their “due diligence” and based their dosage range on careful, extensive and statistically valid studies. Later on in life I discovered that a lot of these ranges had been based on the results derived from studies on a rather small group of white, healthy, middle class males. When your non white, sickly, poor female did not show the expected response to the dosage, it was not biological variability or patient non compliance but a normal aspect of a systemic faulty analysis of the data. The patient in this case is the body politic and we desperately need people like yourself to objectively analysis the situation and offer solutions to very important questions which go beyond the usual boundaries of academia.

Papers and Excuses

My Hispanic Civ students have to hand in a mini-essay tomorrow. As usual, beginning at 8 pm tonight, I started getting panicky e-mails from the students asking what the topic is and offering a series of very convoluted excuses for why they didn't start writing the paper until this late hour. It saddens me that they think I'm too old to remember that every normal student starts working on a paper the night before it's due at the earliest.

P.S. While I was writing this short post, I received two more of these e-mails.

Students and Pajamas

One thing that I love about my campus here in Southern Illinois is that I never see students who come to class wearing pajamas. During the years I spent hanging around Purdue, it seemed to me that a full third of students wore pajamas on campus. I thought this was something of a tradition in the Midwest. The idea of coming to class and seeing (and even worse, smelling) 10 or 15 students who came to school straight from bed, without changing or even taking a shower, terrified me.

Thankfully, there is nothing like this going on in Southern Illinois. Most students are dressed very nicely and all of them look very clean. Maybe this happens because we are close to a big city. Just one more reason to be thankful for my students.

The Patriarchy Within

I don't write about my personal life a lot on this blog but today I will because I have an important point to make. Namely, that patriarchal ways of thinking are so deeply ingrained that even the most progressive of us need to be on the lookout for the patriarchal woman within. She is there, people, always ready to rear her ugly head and devour all of our feminist achievements. My goal in life has never been to service anybody's needs or to make anybody happy. Except, of course, mine and myself. My number one priority in life is not relationships (as I'm told it should be by pop psychology swill). It's my intellectual growth. Sacrificing my needs to please men is completely alien to my way of being. Or so I thought until the patriarchal woman within showed me how easy it is for women to succumb to patriarchal conditioning.

So here is the story. From the day N. and I started living together (which was on our second date), we have had the following distribution of household duties: I cook and he cleans and does the dishes. (If it seems to you that his duties are heavier, it's because you never tried my food. False modesty aside, I'm a fantastic cook.) This system worked great for us for years, and we never had a single discussion - let alone an argument - about household stuff.

Last Saturday, though, I had this very bizarre experience. Maybe it happened because I was exhausted. Or maybe I had a mini-stroke. Or maybe it was a temporary bout of insanity, I don't know. But I heard this weird voice in my head that said, "Oh, poor N. He has such an important project he needs to finish. Why don't I do the dishes to help him out?" Get it? HE has an important project. Because, obviously, I don't. The three projects I'm working on at the moment (a literary translation of a novel, a talk for a conference in November, and an article on Galdos's Lo prohibido) pale in comparison with the really important stuff my husband is doing.

So believe it or not, I proceeded to do the dishes. Then, I did the laundry. And then - oh, horror - I folded it. Folding the laundry is weird on two counts. One is that I never fold my own laundry and consider the habit to be a weird waste of time. The other one is that in all of my marriages and relationships I'd never had an occasion to touch male socks. Until now. And I can't really say that it did a lot to enrich my existence. Just the opposite. Our heretofore perfectly balanced and beautifully feminist co-existence suffered a blow.

First of all, N. wasn't all that happy that I did this stuff for him. Turns out he likes doing the dishes and folding the laundry because it's a way for him to take a break from the above-mentioned important project. Since on that day he didn't get an opportunity to take his little breaks, he was cranky and curmudgeony for the rest of the evening. And on the next day even weirder things started happening. First, he said he was tired and suggested I do the dishes again. And then, he went off on a strange discussion of. . . gender differences.

Now, what you have to know about N. is that he is extremely feminist. Obviously, I wouldn't even be with him if he were any other way. Jessica Valenti's Yes Means Yes  is one of his favorite books. When we were discussing what would make each of us consider a divorce, I said cheating while he said that he would consider divorcing me if I turn out to be not a true feminist. (I then asked him whether this means he would be fine with me cheating, to which he responded that cheating would be un-feminist. Which is, of course, very true.) So for him to discuss gender differences like they actually exist is equal to me saying that I hate reading and books are evil. To say I was flabbergasted at this turn of events doesn't even begin to describe it.

Of course, since then we re-established the balance of the relationship but this situation made me think about how easily women slide into patriarchal subjection without even noticing it. In this country, women still do most of the housework, which drains their energy, undermines their careers, and gets in the way of their personal and intellectual growth. For the most part, women choose this household slavery without any prompting from men. I'm sure there are male ogres who refuse to clean their own shit and do their own laundry, but why enter into a relationship with such a prehistoric creature to begin with? Most men have no problem with taking care of themselves and doing things around the house. Women choose to infantilize men because it offers them a certain degree of empowerment they can't find in other spheres of their lives. We all hear these nasty little voices in our heads, from time to time, telling us to postpone activities that would enrich us professionally, intellectually and spiritually and go take care of some guy instead. And this state of affairs will not change until we start changing it.

So, dear female reader, please step away from that laundry hamper, that dishwasher, and that pile of stuff spread all over the living room. Take the baby, put her in her father's hands, and leave the room. Go read a book, take a nap, call your friends and go out drinking and dancing until the closing hours. If you are just embarking on a new relationship, enter into an agreement about how the household duties will be distributed and, no matter what happens in the future, never do more than your share. If you start having those images of the house going to seed, the husband starving, and the kids running around dirty and famished, remember: this is patriarchy speaking to you, trying to scare you into subjection.

Oxy- and Other Morons

A student is struggling with his analysis of a poem.

Student: "A silent music, a loud silence". . . Erm. . . That's . . . Er. . . an . . .

Me: Oxymoron.

Student: What did you just call me?!?

Me: No, it's a figure of speech.

Student: Well, it may be a figure of speech but it's still offensive.

Assault on Tenure: What Can We Do to Stop It?

A full-scale assault on the institution of tenure in the United States started this summer when several leading newspapers published a series of articles arguing that tenure should be abolished. Immediately after that, several universities announced that they are planning to fire several of their tenured faculty members. For now, I know of two such schools: Southern Mississippi and SUNY Albany. If you know of any other schools where tenured faculty are being let go, please leave their names in the comment section. We need to create as much bad press as possible for the universities that engage in such shameful, anti-intellectual practices.

So what can we, the academics, do to prevent the institution of tenure from being destroyed completely in this country? I believe that unless we make a concerted effort to oppose these practices, we can say good-bye both to tenure and to the integrity of the higher education system. The university as a bastion of knowledge, learning and cultivation of intellect will disappear. Instead, we will have glorified trade schools that will produce nothing but brainwashed, illiterate robots.

This is why I am convinced that we need to act and we need to do it now. I propose that every academic in this country and abroad should engage in a boycott of those schools that participate in the assault on tenure. We should refuse to collaborate with anybody who has the misfortune of working for Southern Mississippi or SUNY Albany. We should refuse to listen to their conference papers, we should refuse to admit them into the conference sessions we organize, we should avoid submitting our own papers to conferences they organize. We should refuse to collaborate with them in any way. We should refuse to review their articles for publication. We should speak out against these universities whenever we get a chance.

People will say that this will only serve to punish innocent scholars who happen to work at these institutions and who are not responsible for the actions of their administrators. Such objections are doubly wrong. First, a sustained and active boycott of Southern Mississippi and SUNY Albany will result in an immediate loss of prestige by these schools. The administrators who thought they were working for a respectable university will find themselves managing a backwater school that is ridiculed and despised by everybody in the academic community. Let's see how much they like hearing people scoff in their faces every time they mention their place of employment. Let's see how much they like seeing prospective students avoid applying to their schools unless every other option is exhausted.

As for the so-called innocent faculty members of these schools who will suffer as a result of a wide-spread boycott of their institutions, how innocent can they be if they have heard these horrible news about their own colleagues being deprived of employment and they still have come to work today? If they are in the classroom right now, instead of staging a protest in front of the administrators' offices? If they are tacitly collaborating with the administrators who are throwing their colleagues out on their asses? If they haven't even made a collective statement of protest against this atrocity? The kind of boycott I propose will serve their interests in the long term because - as much as they want to believe otherwise - this process will not stop at the professors of the "useless" foreign languages. We will all live to see a complete destruction of the institution of tenure.

I want to remind my colleagues everywhere of the following quote from pastor Martin Niemöller they must have heard a thousand times but don't seem to have taken to heart:

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I remained silent; I wasn't a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

If we don't speak out today, it will be too late tomorrow.

Jessica Valenti: Let's Stop Essentializing Gender

Jessica Valenti just wrote a beautiful piece for The Nation on the future of feminism. I agree with Jessica completely that essentializing gender is what brought American feminism to a standstill in which it has been stewing for the past 30 years or so. The second American feminists embraced the idea of some essential, inherent female differences feminism in this country was doomed.

In her article, Valenti discusses just one area where essentialist feminism has hurt women: politics. If there is some mysterious, undefined set of qualities, beliefs and experiences that accompanies the biological fact of being female, then it only makes sense to suggest that any woman is indisputably better off voting for Sarah Palin than for Barack Obama. Which is, in fact, what the religious right in this country has been arguing recently with great success. No matter how anti-woman your policies are, if you are biologically female, you are a feminist and any criticism of you is, consequently, anti-feminist.

There is, of course, a host of other problems caused by gender essentialism. The assumption that women are inherently different from men can be used to promote all kinds of discrimination: in the workplace, at school, at home, etc. As if it weren't enough that we have been bombarded by the mass media marketing of the essential female difference, the so-called third-wave feminists in academia have been teaching female difference to their college audiences as if it were gospel truth.

When I was teaching my course titled "Collective Identities in Contemporary Spanish Literature and Film" at Cornell, I discovered that my students had been brainwashed into believing that women were essentially different from men to the degree where I could barely teach my course. I even had to interrupt our scheduled discussions and dedicate about two weeks of class time to bringing articles by actual scientists who explain that no such differences (except, of course, the obvious physiological ones) have been discovered.

There are many reasons why gender essentialism flourishes in this country. Unless we confront the damage it is causing to the feminist movement, we will never achieve the goals of gender equality.

Here are some excerpts from Valenti's great article, which has already been placed under virulent attack by gender essentialist feminists:

The right once disparaged feminism as man-hating and baby-killing, but now "feminist" is the must-have label for women on the right. Whether or not this rebranding strategy actually succeeds in overcoming the GOP's antiwomen reputation is unclear. After all, Republicans have long supported overturning Roe v. Wade, voted against family and maternity leave, and fought groundbreaking legislation like the Lilly Ledbettter Fair Pay Act. When it comes to wooing women's votes for the GOP, there's a lot of damage control to do. Feminists are understandably horrified—the movement we've fought so hard for is suddenly being appropriated by the very people who are trying to dismantle it. But this co-opting hasn't happened in a vacuum; the mainstream feminist movement's instability and stalled ideology have made stealing it that much easier. The failure of feminists to prop up the next generation of activists, and the focus on gender as the sole requisite for feminism, has led to a crisis of our own making.

If there was ever proof that the feminist movement needs to leave gender essentialism at the door—this is it. If powerful feminists continue to insist that gender matters above all else, the movement will become meaningless. If any woman can be a feminist simply because of her gender, then the right will continue to use this faux feminism to advance conservative values and roll back women's rights. . .

Feminism isn't simply about being a woman in a position of power. It's battling systemic inequities; it's a social justice movement that believes sexism, racism and classism exist and interconnect, and that they should be consistently challenged. What's most important to remember as we fight back against conservative appropriation is that the battle over who "owns" the movement is not just about feminists; feminism's future affects all American women. And if we let the lie of conservative feminism stand—if real feminists don't lay claim to the movement and outline their vision for the future—all of us will suffer.

You can find the full text of the article here.

High Fashion and the Kindle

I just discovered that Diane von Furstenberg, who - in case you don't know - is one of leading American fashion designers, now makes a line of Kindle cases. You can see one of them in the picture on the left.

In my opinion, this is a great sign. Even though the Kindle has many functions, it is first and foremost a reading device. If a leading fashion label think it makes sense to create a line that caters exclusively to the owners of electronic readers, this means that there are enough people out there who see reading as cool and fashionable.

American entertainment industry consistently markets reading as frumpy, unattractive and old-fashioned. In order to make people see brainless TV shows and stupid Hollywood movies as the only valid form of entertainment, mass media have done their best to present reading in this unflattering way. Now, extra efforts will need to be made to convince young people that there is nothing shameful and uncool about reading. This is especially challenging for young women. I spent years learning to be comfortable with being publicly bookish. So if a designer Kindle clutch makes it easier for young women to accept their inner reader, then that's definitely a great thing.

SUNY Albany Is Dead

The following things become painfully clear from the letter I cite in its entirety at the end of this post:

1. The SUNY University system, which used to be famous for the high quality of its education and research, is now officially dead. If you've been trying to convince yourself that New York State is not the same as Southern Mississippi, think twice. It is now exactly the same in terms of a methodic destruction of higher education in both these states.

2. It wasn't for nothing that we've been reading all these articles in the New York Times and Co about the need to abolish tenure. Those articles marked a beginning of an official campaign to destroy scholarship in the US. Religious fanatics that came to power in this country 10 years ago hate secular education. Now they have proceeded to destroy the university, which is a place where their ignorant superstitions are ridiculed and where young people are taught to think for themselves.

3. A corporate takeover of the system of American higher education has now been completed. Uneducated crooks have made their way into college administration. They share the desire that drives the religious fanatics to stamp out every last vestige of intelligence and knowledge in their country. In their opinion, the great unwashed masses should serve their purpose by working themselves to death without complaining about their horrible work conditions, consume more overpriced junk, get into debt, and be extremely grateful to be allowed to lead this beautiful existence.

4. With the imminent death of the overwhelming majority of language programs in this country, the US will find itself even more isolated from other cultures. Americans already feel like pariahs who are hated by people from other countries for the atricities the American government keeps perpetrating abroad. Now, Americans will not be able to talk to foreigners and find out that, in spite of all the propaganda that Americans are brainwashed with daily, their work conditions are amongst the worst and their lifestyles are the saddest in the developed world.

While these changes have been taking place, we, the academics, have been doing nothing. We have been sitting there quietly, agreeing to fulfill our administrators' every whim, kissing our Deans' and Presidents' asses, and hoping that at least our own positions would not be cut just yet.

Hasn't the time finally arrived for us to break our pathetic and terrified silence and start doing something? It happened to SUNY today and it will happen to you tomorrow.

Dear Friends and Colleagues,


Today the seven members of the French faculty at SUNY--Albany (all tenured) were informed that by presidential decision, ostensibly for budgetary reasons, the French program has been "deactivated" at all levels (BA, MA, PhD), as have BA programs in Russian and Italian. The only foreign language program unaffected is Spanish. The primary criterion used in making the decision was undergrad majors-to-faculty ratio. We were told that tenured faculty in French, Russian, and Italian will be kept on long enough for our students to finish their degrees--meaning three years at the outside. Senoir faculty are being encouraged to take early retirement. The rest of us are being urged to "pursue our careers elsewhere," as our Provost put it.

Needless to say, the decision is personally devastating to those of us affected, but it is also symptomatic of the ongoing devaluation of foreign-language and other humanities program in universities across the United States. I'm writing to ask for your help in spreading the word about this decision as widely as possible and in generating as much negative media publicity as possible against SUNY--Albany and the SUNY system in its entirety.

There is much background to add about how this decision was reached and implemented, too much for me to explain fully here. Suffice it to say that the disappearance of French, Italian, and Russian has resulted from  an almost complete lack of leadership at the Albany campus and in the SUNY system. Our president, a former state pension fund manager, holds an MBA as his highest degree, has never held a college or university teaching position, and has never engaged in any kind of scholarship.

More disturbing still, due process was not followed in the decision-making process. The affected programs were not consulted or given the opportunity to propose money-saving reforms. Our Dean and Provost simply hand-selected an advisory committee to rubber stamp the president's decision. The legalities of the situation remain to be discussed with our union, UUP, but in the meantime I welcome any advice you may have.

best,

Brett

Brett Bowles
Associate Professor of French Studies

I found this shocking letter at a great blog you can find here.

Apolitical Academics

I recently witnessed the following dialogue between a senior faculty member and a high-ranking university administrator.


Senior faculty member: So who should we vote for in the November elections?

High-ranking administrator: Well, I can’t tell you directly who to vote for, that wouldn’t be right. But, you know, we are a public university and the state currently owes us a lot of money, so I think it’s pretty obvious.

Senior faculty member: But who should we vote for?

High-ranking administrator: Well, I mean, when we have a party that promises severe budget cuts, it’s obvious that we are going to suffer. Public education will be the first to suffer from these cuts. The other party realizes that since our state is in deep trouble we need to raise state income tax by at least 1%. If that happens, the state will have funds to cover its debt to us. So I think this makes it pretty clear.

Senior faculty member: But who should we vote for?

High-ranking administrator: Well, I’d say it might be a good idea to vote for the people who will not cut our funding, don’t you think?

Senior faculty member: I still have no idea who to vote for.

Mind you, this is an American faculty member who has a PhD and has lived her entire life in this country. It’s not like there are 20 or 30 political parties in the US, there are just two. Is it so hard to keep track of just 2 political parties?

More on State Schools vs Ivy League Schools

I have written before on why state schools are often a lot better for both students and professors than the super-prestigious, extremely expensive Ivy League universities. Every day, I discover more things that make the balance tip heavily towards universities that aren't daunted by the Ivy fame and dubious fortune.

Take for example the perennially painful issue of the relationship between academics and university administrators. Everybody who has been following this blog knows that I view college administrators as enemies of genuine learning and scholarship. However, there are always gradations in this long-standing animosity between administrators and professors. In Ivy League schools, junior faculty members are treated like crap. There is simply no other word for it. They are overloaded with endless administrative assignment and then persecuted for not being active enough in research. An administrator will never even greet a junior faculty member if they see one on campus or in the hallway. You are treated like a pariah who has to be grateful simply to be tolerated in such an important and famous school. Even a very minor administrator will never agree to give you an appointment and will disregard your e-mails for months. None of this is conducive to helping younger scholars feel good about themselves, which is exactly what the administrators of such schools want. If they convince young academics that they are worthless nobodies, it will be easy to treat them disrespectfully and exploit them without any protest on the part of these junior faculty members.

Even though the relationship between administrators and teaching faculty at less prestigious universities is still painful, it is a lot less humiliating than at Ivy League schools. In the past two weeks, for instance, I have had separate lunch appointments with our Dean and our Chancellor (who is the equivalent of the President of the University at Yale.) Both of them knew my name, what I teach, and listened attentively to what I had to say. They also mentioned how important what I do is for the university and how great it is to have me here. When I compare this attitude to the condescending questions addressed to me by a Cornell administrator ("So who do you say you are? When did we hire you? You do realize that you'll have to leave next year, right?"), I feel blessed that I don't have to be exposed to Ivy humiliations any more.

Babies As Accessories

Julia Roberts is rumored to be next in line to purchase a third-world baby. In her case, India will be the fortunate place that will have this insanely rich person come to select a baby to buy. This whole practice of rich white women scavenging the world for yet another black or brown human toy is beyond disgusting. It is based on a deep colonial conviction that Africa and Asia are there to be exploited by affluent white people in any way they can think of.

There is, however, another side to this problem. Lately, having a baby to drag around and show off has become a sort of a job requirement for all sorts of celebrities. Babies are now marketed as the most fashionable accessories one can possibly possess. Any aspiring starlet only has to start surrounding herself with endless babies to attract media attention and get tabloids to follow her and the poor babies who hardly enjoy being used as props. Of course, a child is only useful in its infancy. Babies are cute and cuddly. They make the woman dragging them around look more youthful. As they grow up, however, they become a lot more dispensable. Nobody wants to market themselves as a parent of a teenager. That would make you look old, and what can be scarier for a celebrity? So an endless supply of newborns is needed. How lucky for Roberts and Co that there are entire continents out there where babies can be procured cheaply and easily. They can keep pretending to be young and fashionable until the day the die.

I agree completely with Jonathan Franzen when he points out that nowhere is the resounding ideological victory won by the Republicans as evident as in this unhealthy obsession with babies. What is especially disgusting is that under the guise of the so-called "family values" people engage in such completely irresponsible and exploitative practices.

Teaching Anniversary: 20 Years of Fun

Today I am celebrating 20 years of my career teaching languages. When I told this to my colleagues last week, they started looking at me suspiciously. "She must be a lot older than we thought" - this was a message written all over their faces. The secret, however, is that I started very early. I taught my first language class when I was 14 years old. I had no idea what I was doing and felt completely terrified. Still, even then I realized that there is something very attractive in teaching, especially in teaching foreign languages, which means teaching not just grammar rules and vocabulary but an entire universe that comes with them.

Since then, I have realized that if you were lucky enough to be born with a "teaching gene," this profession offers rewards like no other. I would like to share some of those especially rewarding moments with my readers.

A few years ago, I volunteered to teach a course in Hispanic Civilization to a group of high school kids from immigrant Hispanic families. These students came from very disadvantaged backgrounds, many of them had history as gang members and of being arrested. The course was also challenging because students ranged from 13 to 17 years of age, which made it very difficult to come up with the kind of material that all of them woould respond to. Among my students there was one guy, let's call him Felipe, who very obviously hated being in that class. He spent every class session hiding behind his dark sunglasses (even in winter) and never removed his headphones. I was honestly afraid of asking him to remove the headphones because the guy was huge and dressed like gang members in MTV videos. Since I knew that he had a history of gang participation, it hardly made any sense to try to discipline him in a conventional way.

Students had to hand in written assignments at the beginning of each class session, but Felipe never did. Once, however, he turned in his homework. I realized immediately that his text was copy-pasted from Wikipedia without a single change. Of course, I could have berated him for that, shamed him in front of the class, reported him to his high school teachers, and even kicked him out of my class. None of this would have made an impression on Felipe who had been hearing what a screw-up he was during his entire career as a student. So I decided to address the issue in a different way. On Felipe's homework, I wrote: "Wow, this is really good! I loved your paper. I wish you shared your ideas with the rest of the class. Your classmates need to hear what you have to say."

When I was handing back homework, I could see that Felipe was awaiting his in a defiant state of mind. As soon as he got it back, his facial expression changed to one of confusion and suspicion. On this day, he removed one of his headphones half way out of his ear and started listening in. Probably, he wanted to know if I was going to mention him and make fun of him. He did the same thing during the next class session. A couple of classes later, Felipe finally decided to make a comment on the topic we were discussing. When he did that, I said: "This is a fantastic comment, Felipe! Everybody, please listen carefully and write down what Felipe has to say because it's such a crucial comment. Please, repeat it, Felipe."

I can't say that things changed dramatically right after that. But there were tiny shifts in Felipe's degree of interest and involvement during that entire academic year. When at the end of the course I took my students on a field trip in New York, Felipe was invaluable in helping me look after 24 rowdy teenagers. After the end of the course, I was required to discuss each student's progress with their high school counsellor. When she heard that Felipe not only got an "A" in the course (and a well-deserved one since I don't hand out easy grades for any purpose) but was also my stellar student, she was convinced I was confusing him with someone. "Felipe? Felipe Suarez??" she kept saying. "Yes, Felipe Suarez," I responded. "Your school is so lucky to have a mature, intelligent, and responsible student like him."

I heard from these students a while ago. Felipe graduated from high school and a year later started going to a community college. My other student who had a long-standing history of gang involvement, graduated from college and is planning to go to law school. They wrote to tell me that I changed their lives. When I got that e-mail, I bawled in my office for forty minutes. These are fantastic kids and all they ever needed was that somebody believe in them and treat them with respect.

In short, there is nothing in the world that can compare to teaching.