I'm Insulated from the Worst of Academic Madness

My morning reading reminds me of something I often take for granted: that I'm damn lucky. My job is not an academic job that graduate students dream of--it's certainly not the one I dreamed of. But I really am lucky, for one thing, in that our president is committed to freedom of speech and academic freedom--our provost does not seem to be, but our president is. More importantly, my colleagues--my immediate departmental colleagues, that is--are smart, sane and reasonable. Sure, they're a little kooky in some ways, but, overall, they're an unusually level-headed bunch. They're also pretty tolerant of my antics. I certainly don't agree with everyone about everything, but it's very rare for me to think that one of my colleagues (here I mean: my departmental colleagues) is being flat-out unreasonable. (Though it does happen.) There are a lot of departments out there such that, were I in them, it would be war without end. 

   Although my grad school department was overall pretty reasonable, we did have a nutty pro-PC faction (led mostly by born-again feminists). I did like them as people, and they were right about a few things. But they had been infected by the woke mind-virus (though the 'woke' jargon had yet to be invented.)

  Well anyway.