Behold: My Site Feed

I said behold, dangit. No, not here, down there. To the right. No, down a bit more. There...yeah...that's the spot...oh yeah...

Due to repeated requests (technically, two counts as repeated, so wipe that incredulous look of yer face you) I have installed a SITE FEED!

Well, I have made the words 'Site feed' appear over there on the right, anyway...

What does a site feed do? Heck if I know. Apparently you can sign up or something and get notified when I deign to post jools of wisdom. This stuff is cool and all, but, as I was explaining to Peter, who prompted me to do this, I barely have enough time to write the occasional post for this thing, which leaves exactly no time at all to actually learn even the most rudimentary technical stuff about blogging.

Basically all my time is taken up by the ridiculously heavy teaching load here at the University of Infinite Evil. (I shouldn't complain--people at many other places have it lots worse.) That and interviewing job candidates, which we will be doing for approximately half of the semester here in the philosophy department since UIE has apparently decided that most of the teaching should be done by non-permanent people. So we spend much of our time reading dossiers and interviewing new temporary people to fill the slots abandoned by outgoing temporary people. About 2/3 of our classes are now taught by non-tenure-or-tenure-track people, and at one time 40% of our courses were being taught by adjuncts making less than $2000 per course. How can UIE get away with this? Volume! We got 190 applications for the last tenure-track job we advertised--I want to make it clear that that's for a single job--and that's about average in philosophy these days. This is a decent but by no means excellent place to teach, but it's not much of an exaggeration to say that lots of people would kill to get a job here. And then there's the publishing part, which is what you try to do when you get a break from the relentless teaching and committee work parts.

All of this, of course, portends the utter downfall of Western civilization...but I digress...

I just meant to tell you about my alleged site feed, and say a few words about why, technically speaking, I am such a dolt.

But make no mistake about it: academia is a god-awful F#@%ing mess these days. If you are getting ready to go to college or to help your kids pick a school, then, if you aren't already pretty familiar with the place, you should just call up some faculty members at random and ask 'em whether they'd send their own kids to the place. Don't listen to the propaganda the administration of the school pumps out. Christ, if you listen to the students leading the parents and potential students on tours around here, programmed as they are by the boys in the UIE marketing division, you'd think that this place was freakin' Oxford. (Note: it is not Oxford.) What it is is a radically underfunded institution that spends all its money on new buildings, technology, and amusements for the students, while relying more and more on the disastrously bad academic job market to provide it with the slave labor it uses to teach the classes. A very large minority of the students, rich beyond the dreams of avarice, spoiled rotten to the core, and caring nothing for learning, are unwilling to and incapable of doing college-level work but expect to receive 'A's in their courses nevertheless. They are incurious in the extreme, interested only in obtaining a piece of paper that will increase their earning potential. If they do not receive the grades they desire, or if their professors fail to entertain them, they will make their displeasure known on the end-of-semester student evaluations. And, since their instructor is likely to be of the temporary variety, low evaluation scores can mean the instructor won't be re-hired--and, in the current job market, that usually means the end of the instructor's academic career. Note that I'm not venting anger about personal failure here. I have one of the more semi-quasi-permanent jobs in the department, my publication record is fine, and so are my teaching evaluations (despite the fact that I refuse to play the entertainer, I'm proud to say.) But I've seen better people than me get the boot because they weren't amusing enough, or because they got on the bad side of some spoiled rich kid who had her daddy call the Dean. (Note: I'm not kidding. I know someone who was basically fired because he caught a kid violating the honor code by putting her (absent) boyfriend's name on the attendance sheet. The instructor counted the names, discovered that there were more names than people, and figured out who had done it. Because he embarrassed her in class by identifying her as the culprit, she raised a stink to the Chair and the Dean, and his contract wasn't renewed. He was, incidentally, an excellent teacher.)

O.k., that's enough. This place also has some of the best people I've ever met, and some of my students are so great that you just can't believe it. But the major trends in academia are mostly going very much in the wrong direction.

Or so it seems to me right now, dead tired and pissed off, looking at a stack of ungraded papers, at 11:21 pm on a Wednesday night...

Things'll probably seem less awful in the morning...

Oh, don't forget about that site feed thingy. That was the point of this post, anyway...