Queen Anne's lace is blooming, and you know what that means

 

For the past few weeks, I've been giving a sharp look to every white flower with a flat top and tiny flowers that I see on my walks.

"Don't worry--that one's yarrow," I said to myself a few weeks ago with some relief. 

But when the flower has a tiny purple flower in the middle of the white ones, I can't deny it any more: it's Queen Anne's lace. 

Why do I dread seeing this innocent flower? Because it signals that the summer is well and truly almost over and that the fall semester is just around the corner. 

When Queen Anne's lace appears, you can count on getting email requests that, when you respond to them, lead to the inevitable autoreply: I am on vacation-away from my desk (etc.) and will respond in a few weeks when I return. Their request is urgent, but reading my response is not, I guess. Did I make a rule in Outlook for everyone from whom I got an autoreply, and am I declining to respond for a few weeks until I'm good and ready to look in the folder (after they return)? Yup. 

You know that you have to start thinking about your classes, but during this few weeks--the season of Queen Anne's lace--they are Schroedinger's Canvas course space, so to speak: They exist in the state of being both ready to go (alive) and in need to lots of work (dead), but if you open them, you'll have killed them and will spend the last few precious weeks bringing them back to life. 

Since you only have about two or three weeks left, you have to decide where to gamble with your money, by which I mean brainpower, time, and attention: the mind-numbingly dull task that you have to finish, or the creative one that you want to throw caution to the winds and work on. You realize that you can't do both, so which do you choose? 

Both the literal weather and the academic climate are--let's call it extremely challenging--right now, so I will close by noting something positive: I've been swimming a lot this summer, something I enjoy. I am by no means a "real swimmer," with goggles & metrics about distance, but "a person who swims," which is to say getting into the cold water and swimming for enjoyment. 

But those flowers are reminding me that this part of the summer is rapidly drawing to a close. 

At the Chronicle: Kevin Dettmar gets it right about summer service.

Over at The Chronicle, Kevin Dettmar answers a department chair's question--"How do you get professors to respond in the summer?" with some words of wisdom:  https://www.chronicle.com/article/ask-the-chair-how-do-you-get-professors-to-respond-in-the-summer. His answer is, basically, "pay them," and it is so good to hear that. 

From the piece (behind a paywall, sorry): 

For scholars, summers represent what the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are to the retail trade: the time when we move, if barely, from the red into the black for the year’s writing and scholarship. And as someone who has tried to remain productive, I guard that time jealously — no, viciously. So I’m in full sympathy with your faculty colleagues, as perhaps you are as well.

Other good advice: "plan ahead" and "show them the money."

Dettmar's analogy about the retail trade is a good way to look at it, too: it's not so much the time that you spend in answering an email as the loss of focus and time that answering a request represents. Northern Clime and its administrators have been good about this, even if you don't leave a scorched earth out-of-office message as I've seen elsewhere on the web.

But I needed the reminder that Dettmar provides and that I wrote about in 2018 to push me into applying this principle to another time-sucking practice, not from university departments but from faculty who are heading off for three weeks on a fabulous research grant or vacation and will eat up all your time on either side of their time away by impinging on your time with a flurry of emails and requests, especially if you haven't set a firm boundary.

You don't have to have a fabulous grant, or a destination further than your own back yard, to ignore these requests. As Dettmar says about department chairs, their timetable is not your problem, and you don't need to make it your problem to be accommodating. 

An example: in Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar, the mother tells Majorie, who's working for free at a summer camp, something like "they can wait for a while for what they're paying you." It's not always true, but it's worth keeping in mind.

Maybe this isn't a problem for you, or you have a scorched-earth out-of-office message doing that work already. But if you don't--if you're inclined, like me, to respond too quickly and be too accommodating--this is a reminder that you're paying yourself to write or research or relax this summer, and that anything work-related that interrupts might be able to wait a while, for what they're paying you.

Making it look easy/it's not as easy as it looks

An anecdote, or maybe a parable, about academe. 

If you have a large extended family, and that large extended family has gatherings periodically, chances are excellent that the women of that family have taken turns spending huge amounts of time organizing, cleaning prior to, cooking for, and cleaning up after those gatherings. 

Yes, people bring potluck dishes or rolls or steaks or whatever, but there's still a point person who's in charge of seeing to it that everything actually happens. Maybe you've had to do this yourself (raises hand). 

When my mother--let's call her Barbara-- was the one to do this when we all lived at home, it was . . . strenuous. She'd get up early, get the groceries, start cleaning (and we had to clean, too, or, since we were teenagers, at least heave all the clothes and random stuff strewn on the floor into the closet before everyone arrived), and then start cooking. You know the drill: boil the eggs for deviled eggs and the potatoes for potato salad; peel, chop, and cook some more stuff. Maybe some creamed potatoes, too? A big salad?  Make piecrust and a few pies, maybe rhubarb and apple and lemon meringue? And let's not forget a casserole and some kind of Jello thing with fruit or carrots or (I want to say one time) sauerkraut in it.

Then everyone arrives, and the table is laid, and everyone's ready to eat. 

And my beloved grandmother--truly, she was--says, "You know, Barbara always does this so easy." 

She thought she was giving a compliment, I think, but my mother had steam coming out of her ears every time.

I'm thinking about this because of the various tasks that faculty, and by this I mean primarily women faculty, undertake to keep things going in service and administration. 

And the tasks are always with a "just": 

• "You'd just have to call X or email Y or look up Z."
• "You'd just have to call a meeting." 
• "You might want to take a second and just reach out to these five people to see their thoughts on this."
• "It's just a report; it shouldn't take too long to do."
• "It's just a small gathering; it'd be nice to get everyone together to celebrate."

Point #1 is this: if you do it right, and you put the time and effort into it, whatever "it" is as a task, you'll make it look easy. Point #2 is that it's not as easy as it looks, but that no one will ever see that or credit you with it, or care that you've done it well, because see Point #1.

Because you do it so easy, you see.

 

Conferences: Might as well face it, you're addicted to sloth

What usually happens in the spring? Pay attention to conference calls for papers. Go to meetings on campus. Prep class. Grade papers. Try to write. Put in grant applications that you don't have a chance of getting. Drive, drive, drive, in all senses.

This spring has been . . . different. Even though I can see that all the people moaning on Twitter about how  Covid has sapped their productivity are in fact publishing up a storm, promoting themselves, doing Zoom lectures, on and on and on and on, I somehow . . . don't care. That is, I like and promote their work, but as for me? No FOMO here. 

 I recently had to add up all the conferences at which I was going to attend and present--and pay for; no conference money was going to be forthcoming from Northern Clime--and I thought I must have been crazy to agree to it all.  Farhad Manjoo had a recent opinion piece in the NYT--"Do you really need to fly?"--and posed the question that all conference-goers have asked themselves: do we really need to hurl ourselves across the country or across continents to read a paper aloud for 20 minutes, or, best case, give a 50-minute keynote? Couldn't we do this through Zoom? 

Yes, the point of conferences is really the conversations that we have in the hallways or session Q & A or, for you sociable types, cocktail parties or dinner. But couldn't some of this be done virtually?

Manjoo says that things are going to change, that we're going to see that this level of travel is nuts and that a lot can be done virtually. However, I think it's an arms race thing that may change, but only slowly. Unless the big conferences embrace some version of virtual conferences, it's going to create a two-tiered system, sort of like the way that (regrettably) online publications a few years ago were seen as inferior. "Is it a monograph that will count or an online publication?" we heard. "Both?" we said, but did the tenure and promotion committees agree? Do they agree now? 

Somehow we've got this Theodore Roosevelt strenuous-life attitude about travel as inherent virtue, however miserable the travel and wrong-headed it might be. Sure, it's a conference, but is it a real conference if it's not in person? Sure, the archive has all those materials digitized beautifully, but is it really research if you didn't go to the archive, spending money, taking time, and risking the inevitable misery of catching a cold to do so?* If you didn't suffer (and yes, in a privileged academic way; this does not compare with real suffering) to get to the archive in person, how do you know it's real scholarship? If you didn't eat the stale bagels and buy the $6 granola bar and drink the scalding coffee from the official Hell Caterer to the Conference World and feel anxious about every minute of the conference, did you really get the full experience? 

The conversations, ideas, and networking do make conferences worthwhile, not to mention they're pretty much required if you want to be an active scholar in most fields. And I'm not stupid enough to confess the relief from the constant travel that this year has given me, not when everyone everywhere is proclaiming in-person conferences as an absolute good, like chocolate chip cookies or clean air. But this year has given a sense of what life might be like without quite so many of them, and the grass on the other side of the fence (whispers) is a little greener than I thought it would be.

Either that, or I'm addicted to sloth. 

*The MLA Committee for Scholarly Editions says that digitized isn't good enough:  "Have all transcriptions been fully compared by the editor with the original documents, as distinct from a photocopy of those documents?"

If you can't travel to see the originals, or the archive is closed, you don't get the seal of approval, I guess. 

Update to the previous: Joseph Epstein doubles down on the condescension, gathers a doofus follower

 Briefly, because I don't want to give this much more house room: 

Some critic at the National Review, AKA a man with a lot of opinions and little information, took Dr. Jill Biden to task for her dissertation. Did he play the Yale card? Yes, of course he did. Did I not say it's the National Review, home of William S. Buckley, author of God and Man at Yale? 

Anyway, it didn't go well: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/national-review-critic-flunked-reviewing-201608730.html.

 And then The Chronicle of Higher Education, which I gave up reading (and subscribing to! I actually subscribed for a number of years) a while back for good reasons, has given him leave to explain his views, and folks, it's not pretty:

• Conservative tut-tutting about kids these days? Check.
  

• Ditto about grade inflation AND misogyny AND a racist theory to boot: "Those evaluations helped lead to rampant grade inflation (“somehow the grade of C jumped up to B”). “At the school where I taught, a proudly left-wing teacher was said to give black students automatic A’s as an act of reparation." Check.
  

• Too much political correctness ruining the university? Check. 

• And I refer you to my previous post about the ubi sunt lament that extremely privileged white men like to indulge in about the good old days. I think I should sue him for plagiarism, don't you? "Don’t get him started on college presidents today. Back in Epstein’s time, that office was occupied by scholars of stature like Robert F. Goheen at Princeton or Alfred Whitney Griswold at Yale. Now he can only dimly recall that “the president of Harvard is a woman, or was a woman until recently.” I can only assume he thinks that is some kind of sick burn. 
  

  The thing I don't  understand is why everyone is giving him house room, AKA responding to him on Twitter, FB and everywhere else after he's done the sh*t-stirring that he obviously set out to do. We corrected him, but like a certain person in the White House, he just feeds on it and sows more chaos. We should be ignoring him--but then again, what am I doing but giving this attention? 

  < Apparently one of his books is called Narcissus Leaves the Pool. No, kiddo. Narcissus is still at the pool, gazing at his own reflection and terrified that others might be able to gain a place at it.  
  

 

That's DR. Undine to you, Joseph Epstein

 This may be a blogtime first for the number of days between posts--sorry. This is a catching up and promising to do better post. 

First of all, how about that old rich white guy's screed against women academics using the titles they've earned and not knowing their places? I don't need to link to it, but there's a nice takedown here: 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/dr-jill-biden-wall-street-journal/2020/12/13/e43883a4-3d45-11eb-8db8-395dedaaa036_story.html

If you didn't see it (it's linked to at the takedown link), the basic argument is this: 

1. He, a B.A., is better educated 

Narrator: He's not

2. And more worthy of respect, even though he doesn't know the difference between an honorary and an earned degree

Narrator: Ditto

3. Than Dr. Jill Biden, who earned her Ed.D. and wrote a dissertation of "dubious value"

Narrator: A: No. and B: Is he qualified to judge?

4. And that she, "kiddo, Jill"--should shut up, stop using "Dr.," and get back in the kitchen, where she belongs.  And also, get off his lawn.

Narrator: Accurate summary. 

* note on "kiddo"--you know who uses "kiddo" all the time, according to Joyce Maynard? J. D. Salinger, about whom some of you here have expressed, um, strong and wonderful opinions. I think we've found out exactly what kind of person Holden Caulfield all growed up would turn out to be. 

Instead of apologizing, the WSJ doubled down and called women's outrage "cancel culture." Draw your own conclusions about that. 

But really, Epstein's screed is just another in the WSJ's series of "who is destroying our sacred white education?" series. 

Now we know the answer:  The wimmenz! The middle-class wimmenz!

As I wrote back in 2013--you can call me Cassandra--this is just one of their attacks on contemporary education: 

First of all, I think this is the same article they run every month under a different title and by-line. It goes something like this:

When I was at beautiful Ivy or Oxbridge back in the olden days, I had an extremely famous professor (this time: Frank Kermode) who inspired me with the timeless truths of the humanities curriculum. 

Alas, there were few such professors then, and there are none today. That pesky GI bill opened education to the masses, and now students want grades instead of reading literature for timeless truths. Literature has been sullied by the grade-grubbing paws of these students. Where is the pure love of literature of yesteryear?  

https://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2013/07/at-wsj-education-aint-what-it-used-to.html

A useful parable, or story, or something, about returning to campus this fall

Dame Eleanor asks about what we're thinking will happen in the fall--online or not?

Well, we are supposed to be back in person. I'm not giving it any more thought than that because summer is when I have to make up for all the writing I didn't do this spring.

If we go back, I will get ready for it, I hope. If we don't, I'll get ready for it, I hope.

One of my favorite ways to think about a situation like this is a joke or parable or story that I heard on a TV drama about Henry VIII decades ago. It goes something like this:

The king--oh, heck, let's call him Henry VIII-- was extremely fond of his favorite horse--let's call him Bucephalus, because that was not his name. However,  he had become really disenchanted with one of his advisors. Let's call him Cromwell, because that is not his name.

Really disenchanted, as in Anne of Cleves disenchanted, Tower disenchanted, thinking about the rack disenchanted. 

 Henry was about to send Cromwell to the Tower. Somehow he got wind of this and sent word that he had a great thing to tell Henry. He met up with Henry walking in the gardens.

"Your majesty, if you give me a year, I can teach Bucephalus to talk," said Cromwell to Henry's back.

Henry turned around. "You can?"

"Yes. If you give me a year, I will train Bucephalus to talk. But it will take the entire year."

"If you do not teach him to talk, you realize that you will be hanged, drawn, and quartered?"

"Yes."

"Very well then. A year from today."

Cromwell bowed his way back from the royal presence. A friend who had been watching stood there with his mouth open.

"Are you insane?" he hissed. "You can't teach a horse to talk. No one can."

"The way I look at it is this," said Cromwell. "A year is a long time. In the space of a year, many things may happen." 

"I may die."

"Or the king may die."

"Or the horse may die."

"Or," he added, "the horse may talk."

So while I can think about the contingencies and the likelihood (or not) of teaching in person in the fall, so far, I'm hoping that the horse will talk. 

Strategic alliances, or how I stopped worrying about not-loving some conferences

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, as the annual dues statements for professional organizations roll around and many have ratcheted up their dues substantially: how do you decide which ones you support?

This probably works differently in the sciences, where (I’m told) some organizations elect you as a fellow or a member and it’s a great honor, but in the humanities, you join a group, you pay the dues, you get the journal, and if your paper is accepted, you go to the conference.

There are lots of levels of engagement, including being involved with elected leadership or committees, but the basics are these:

1. You pay your dues faithfully every year, no matter what.

2. You submit to a conference and have to be a paid member to be there, so you join before you submit.

3. You get accepted to a conference and then join so that your name will be on the program. 

I’m usually in the #1 category, but a few years ago, I realized how sensible it was to be in #2 or 3.

Example: Let’s call it the Crunchy Granola conference, the one where everyone wears brown instead of black. For the better part of 15+ years I paid every year. I presented at some conferences. I was elected to office and went to conferences every year (and often on my own dime). 

And then I noticed that my proposals were getting rejected more often than not. That’s fine: the organizers can’t accept everyone. There was less and less in the journal that had any relevance to my work. My interests had gone in a different direction, and they weren’t Crunchy Granola’s cup of tea. We had Grown Apart, as they say in letters to Carolyn Hax.

But on a different note, I had also become fed up with a radical egalitarian rhetoric that was not, shall we say, matched in practice. 

So I stopped paying the dues notice, and you know what? It was a relief. I guess I figured that I somehow had to stay with Crunchy Granola for my whole career, as though we were academically married, but I so didn’t. 

When I get a dues notice now, therefore, I think before automatically paying it. Does the journal have materials relevant to what I’m working on? Do I meet up with people working on relevant topics at conferences? Is my work at least sometimes accepted at those conferences, and do I have good conversations that further the work when I go? 

This is all obvious, of course, except that it definitely wasn’t for me because as someone whose parents weren’t professors and who is terminally naive by nature, I began by not knowing the norms, which is why stating them now has become a real thing for me. What I learned is that you can & should be strategic about those alliances and not look back once they don’t work for you any more. 

Recognizing the same old, same old--curmudgeonly or wise?

How does change happen in academe? The Chronicle has one take on it, although if I hear one more empty phrase about "breaking down barriers" and "silos"--hey, all you MBA types who want to disrupt the university, they're called "disciplines" and represent a body of knowledge--I'm going to build a cliché generator and pitch the resulting article to the Chronicle myself.

If you've been in academe for a while, you recognize the pattern of change. (And this happens everywhere.)

1. New higher-up administrator(s) pledges increased transparency, faculty involvement, and an exciting goal. Sometimes it's assessment, but it's always something that takes time and thought from faculty.

2. Faculty are asked for their ideas. Sometimes they're asked to rank things, go to seminars or webinars, meet in committees. They're asked to dream big: what would X program look like in an ideal world? What would make your program achieve better excellence (if you get my drift)? What could you do without if we make your dreams come true, not that you'll have to do without it?

3. Faculty dutifully fill out forms filled with hope & dreams: more faculty! Fewer administrative regulations! More money for research, or for students!

4. They take time out from their research to write the reports, go to the meetings, and so on.

5. Outcomes: 

a. Possibility 1: "So will we be getting money to do this?" "No." "More resources of any kind?" "No." (This is what Roxie's Blog used to call "excellence without money.") And those things that you might do without in a perfect world? We're not funding your dream, but we're cutting those.

b. Possibility 2: Report is deep-sixed and the administration does what it was intending to do anyway.

c. Possibility 3: A different change is implemented despite the advice of faculty and may or may not be a success.

d. Possibility 4: Real and positive change occurs.

6. Administrator(s) move on to the next school, now with a fresh initiative under their belt as proof of their innovation and effectiveness.

For our own sanity, I guess we have to believe that the process moves change forward in positive ways, and sometimes you see incremental and real changes. And I do think those higher-ups putting us through our paces in the process are sincere in wanting to make things better.

But when you see a proposal come around and think "didn't we do this 10 years ago?" should you put your heart and soul into it?

Or should you follow the Academic Serenity Prayer? "Grant me the serenity to hear about another time-sucking initiative on which they claim to want our input, the strength to read between the lines, and the wisdom to know that it's already a done deal and I don't have to pay any attention to it."

Productivity is overrated? NOW you tell me.

I spent the last two weeks doing eldercare, cleaning and cooking and chatting and problem-solving and strategizing and being on the phone with banks, cable services, etc.,  trying to gain access to straighten out financial messes.  (PSA: for the love of God, please grant someone Power of Attorney so that they can legally act for you before you develop dementia.) When people inquired brightly "How are you enjoying your vacation?" I had to bite my lip.

In the meantime, the work I had no time to do rolled in through my email as usual, despite my autoreply. 750words gathered dust and spiderwebs because I had no words to give it.

But wait! The productivity writer Theresa MacPhail now says "OK, I admit it: Productivity is Overrated."

In questioning "academe’s 'I’m so busy' Olympics" MacPhail cites Melissa Gregg's Counterproductive:

"Paradoxically," Gregg writes, "the capabilities of productivity software create expectations of always more activity." And she should know. She’s surrounded by engineers and software developers trying to maximize their time. As Gregg is quick to point out, however, all of the time saved from efficiency and productivity apps only increases the amount of free time that one is then expected to funnel back into — you guessed it — more work.

 Isn't that the old joke about academe? You work harder and for that your reward is . . . more work?

Isn't it sick that I want to know exactly what "productivity apps" Gregg is talking about?

And isn't it ironic that the sidebar ad is  The Chronicle Productivity Guide to Writing & Publishing?

Maybe this is a welcome and needed corrective to the culture of busyness, like Slow Writing a few years back. Or maybe it's just the usual pendulum swing, as when HGTV derides as "dated" all the trends it spent the 2000s shilling for as "classic," or how 1970s-style unpadded & un-underwired bras are now making a return as the "bralet."

At this point, I'm going with "needed corrective" because my productivity meter has run out, and I need a break. It's nice to have the backing of experts on this.

Twitter reinvents itself as early blogs

I've been reasonably active on Twitter for a while now and have noticed a few things happening in the last few months.

Bear in mind that I don't have thousands of followers and don't follow thousands of people, as seems to be the goal for a lot of people. I'm on Twitter because--as in the "Minute Men defended our Revolutionary Airports" thing by the Dear Leader last week--it can be amusing and is occasionally a place to see good resources float by in the Twitter stream.

But it has changed.

1. Famous people (well, authors) who used to tweet a lot, like Margaret Atwood and Lin-Manuel Miranda, don't seem to be as active. My guess is that it's because they are actually, you know, writing instead of wasting time on Twitter as I am, but still.
2. There's a lot less interesting, or interesting to me, actual information being circulated. 
3. There are lots of retweets, the more outrageous the better, of the same information over and over. It's as bad as the NYTimes's months-long "Editor's Picks" on the front page. 
4. There are a lot more memes, not just funny cat pictures or whatever, but stuff like this:
1. Which literary critic or school of criticism are you? Take this quiz and find out.
2. How old were you when you had your first (male/nonwhite/gender non-conforming) teacher?
3. When is the movie better than the book?
4. Who here is a fan of Stranger Things? 
5. Focus on very particular and sometimes arcane forms of political outrage, while things like the Administration's big gift to Monsanto or whoever of rolling back restrictions on pesticides that kill bees (as our friends in France well know) go completely unnoticed. 
6. Lots of furious comment threads that any academic program that doesn't have as its primary goal how to organize and destroy the neoliberal university ought to be burned to the ground. Sometimes this is paired with scorching anyone who gives advice on the job market, how to apply for graduate school, etc.
7. Lots of comments about the Olds destroying the economy--emphasis on age rather than the real culprit, class and wealth. Thank you, Russian bots, for the "let's you and him fight" nature of this divisiveness that distracts from oligarchy and kleptocracy that is the real problem. 
8. More pictures of food or daily life things than there used to be.

My theory for #5 is this: Trump says his daily racist and/or stupid thing, Twitter goes nuts for 24 hours, and he torches more environmental and civil rights and immigration safeguards unnoticed.  Lather, rinse, repeat. I'm not alone in this theory.

The rest is pure speculation and observation, based on nothing more than random ideas as research. 

But if you're a longtime blogger, doesn't this remind you of something?

Getting-to-know-your-personality memes?

Rage at the (academic) machine?

Little reports from daily life?

Twitter, or my tiny corner of it, seems to be reinventing the early days of blogs, when the blogroll was long and active. Memes? We had 'em, but less so nowadays. Rage? Check. Daily life reports? Check.

If you are on Twitter, have you seen this? Better still, if you're an Instagram user, how is this different on that platform, if it is?

Time management and the confetti bomb

Gwinne and Dame Eleanor have good posts up about time management and schedules and also links to people who write about time management and schedules. ("fabulous SHU" and "GetaLifePhD" and "Raul Pacheco-Vega" are three of them.)

Such charts! Such beautiful, colorful charts! I hunger for their time charts.

But then reality sinks in. As xykademiqz described so eloquently (and I posted, too), charts are not for the likes of us INTP types. And even if the MBTI is invalid, I'm claiming that it is because it fits.

Figure 1. Leuchtteurm1917 or . . .

For now, I'm sticking with the ex post facto method: the black notebook, in which I record what I'm actually doing, with a to-do list in the right margin, rather than how I think my day might unfold. I also keep the Excel spreadsheet for writing and noting events.

It's gotten so bad (or good) that if I do anything mildly work-related--write, read, grade papers, answer emails (especially answer emails)--I grab frantically for the black notebook to write down the time.

If I work, it's in there. If I waste time, it's in there. At least I know what I was supposed to be doing, because of the to-do list.

Figure 2.. . . Moleskine? Name your poison.

This is where the confetti bomb comes in. Suppose you're sitting in your office, as one does, grading papers, as one does, and keeping to your color-coded grading block.

Then, if you're a person in the world, and especially an administrative person in the world, someone walks in and says, in effect, "Congratulations! Here's a juicy, complex problem that it will take many phone calls, meetings, and a lot of thought to solve. Oh, and it needs a solution now."

That someone heaves a confetti bomb, which then detonates all over your desk.

Now, you could say this: "Now is my SACRED WRITING TIME or SACRED GRADING TIME or MY ORANGE BLOCK! Can't you see that it is my orange block and not a confetti block? Go away immediately. My chart says you can't be here."

Or you could do what most of us do.

Get to work cleaning up the confetti bomb, and write it in your notebook so you'll know why your best-laid plans gang aft agley. 

Academic hoaxes: irritating waste of time or the most infuriating waste of time in a time of massive national lies?

A group of merry pranksters with a mean streak a mile wide and lots and lots of time on their hands perpetrated a hoax recently by submitting faked papers and getting a couple of them published. 

So whose time did they waste?

• That of the journal editors, who are doing this for no pay.
• That of the poor reviewers, who were forced to wade through the pretentious BS and try, in good faith, to say something not awful in case this was the misguided effort of a grad student.
• That of all of us who have to look at this nonsense in the news at the Chronicle and everywhere else.
• That of all in the humanities, who will now have to redouble their efforts to prove to skeptical legislators that the humanities are worth supporting. 

Academic hoaxers, or any kind of hoaxers (except Poe and Twain, because Poe and Twain) make me furious.

They abuse the trusting nature of human beings. It's a bullying move. It shows you have power over someone and that you're displaying it in front of an audience to humiliate your victim.

So you get to be a bully and make someone look like a fool. You do you. Happy now?

It's only one step away from the kind of bullying power trip that we saw in the news last week with the Kavanaugh hearings, and I don't have to say any more about that.

Abuse someone's trust. Trick them into believing one thing when you mean to hurt them. Carry out your plan and then laugh at your victims.

If you want to read more, here's some views from The Chronicle.

One of the people there said "Any academic who thinks hoaxing as such is unethical or nugatory is a dull and petty functionary."

Two points:

1. It IS unethical.
2. I'd rather be a dull and petty functionary than a jerk. 
 

The parable of the pies: how the sausage gets made

If you're in an academic department, and especially if you've held any kind of administrative position, you might recognize the truth of Bismarck's (or, as Wikipedia tells me, John Godfrey Saxe's) well-known apothegm, as paraphrased in one of my favorite Hamilton lyrics:

No one really knows how the game is played
The art of the trade
How the sausage gets made
We just assume that it happens
But no one else is in
The room where it happens.

 I'm not even close to the higher-up Northern Clime University "room where it happens," but at a lower level, I've had ample opportunities to see how the "art of the trade" happens in just about every set of decisions.

 But even assuming that everyone is nobly concerned with the best interests of the students and the university, differences of opinion happen while that sausage is getting made.

Let's say that your department wants ten apple pies and that the pies are not to fix something that is going horribly wrong.  You fill out the multitude of forms, talk to individuals, see the lay of the land, and then approach Admin with the request.

Admin says, "You must be joking! No pies for you."

You say, "But here are the reasons we need the pies to take better care of our students."

Admin says, " . . . "

You say, "And if you give us the pies, we can form a consortium, build partnerships, raise our standing among peer institutions, and be perceived as a local god."

Admin says, " . . . "

You say, "And we'll write a grant to get the matching funds and hope it gets funded."

Admin says,  "Well, we can see our way clear to give you five pies, four apple and one mince."

Jubilant at this success, you take this to your colleagues for the first time.

One group--let's call them the incrementalists, or Hillary voters--says, "It's a start! Let's get going on that grant. Do you think we could negotiate for two more pies?"

Another group--let's call them the ideologically pure, or Jill Stein voters--says, "You sellouts! Everyone hates mince! Why did you agree to this? We need ten apple pies, full stop.  This is untenable and ideologically impure. Ten pies or we dissolve this department! Burn it down!"

It seems to me that there can be good, sincere colleagues on both sides, but most people are probably more one than the other.

Incrementalists have some faith in change within the system--not all systems everywhere, but the specific little corner of the system that they can influence. This is sometimes true.

Ideological purists have faith that if they throw a cog in the machine or blow it up, something better will result. This is also sometimes true.

As an incrementalist who works to make things better ("bends toward justice"), I see the five pies as a glass half full. Not everyone would agree.

But I have become an ideologue in one respect: I am completely, totally, and utterly done with the loud virtue-signalling and vilification that ensues from people who haven't lifted a finger after some of us have worked our tails off to get those five pies.

Chronicle asks again: Faculty offices? Who needs 'em?

Oh, Chronicle, Chronicle, Chronicle. You brought up this "no faculty offices" idea in 2010. I guess you figured it was time to revisit it, yes? https://t.co/GSmdZYUD97

If you want to know how popular open office spaces are, check out the threads at Askamanager.org.  Hint: they are exactly as popular as decreasing the sizes of airplane seats--in other words, beloved by the executives being paid $$$$, who all have private offices, and not so much by the people who actually have to work in them.

Herewith, from 2010, since I don't want you to have to click the link, a vision of how this would actually work:

New office commons: a day in the life

Scene: The shared office commons now being touted in the Chronicle. Faculty sit at tables, their brightly-colored rolling carts by their sides. An elaborate Starbucks-like coffee counter is in the corner, its machines hissing and burbling. Students hover around the outside, waiting to see faculty but not wanting to break into the herd, so to speak. A few have braved the crowd.

Professor X: "I'm glad you came to see me, Stu Dent. I've noticed that you haven't been coming to class much lately."

Stu Dent: "mumble"

Professor Y to student at the next table: "I can lend you a copy of that--oh, wait, I don't have any books on campus any more."

Professor X: "I'm sorry, but I couldn't hear you. Can you tell me again?"

Stu Dent: (very quiet voice) "It's been rough at home, because my mother has ca--"

Barista: "MOCHACHINO UP!"

Stu Dent looks nervous, but continues: "cancer, and she hasn't been doing well lately--"

At the next table, a cell phone rings, and Professor M answers it: "HELLO? REALLY? SHE THREW UP AGAIN? I THOUGHT WHEN I DROPPED HER OFF THIS MORNING THAT SHE'D BE ALL RIGHT."

Professor X, trying to be encouraging: "That must be really hard. Well, on the assignment you missed the other day--"

Professor M: "DOES SHE HAVE A TEMPERATURE? ARE YOU SURE? OKAY, I'LL BE THERE IN HALF AN HOUR TO PICK HER UP."

Stu Dent: "I wanted to talk to you about that one, because [words drowned out in the noise from the steaming machine]"

Professor X: "I'm sorry, what?"

Professor N, who's been watching The Daily Show on his laptop with the volume low, now erupts in laughter.

Barista: "LATTE UP!"

At this point, Professor Y and the student are trying, but failing, not to look at/listen to the conversation of Professor X and Stu Dent.

Stu Dent: "Never mind. See you in class."

And--scene.

Disclaimer: This post in no way is meant to insult mothers, coffee drinkers, students, Daily Show watchers, professors, or baristas, but you get the picture.

Women in academe: short takes on the news

 Well, let's see what we've learned in the past few weeks.

1. At InsideHigherEd.com, we get our annual confirmation that "female professors experience more work demands and special favor requests, particularly from academically 'entitled' students," thus hurting us on course evaluations. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/01/10/study-finds-female-professors-experience-more-work-demands-and-special-favor

Comment: We're "helpers, not doers" according to the findings of the study. Awesome.

2. And IHE found the same thing true last year: women faculty--wait for it--do, yes, more service, to their "possible detriment." https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/04/12/study-finds-female-professors-outperform-men-service-their-possible-professional

Comment: I think this is an annual one and the most frequently replicated study in all of science. I've seen variations of it for 15 years, and I've learned two things: (1) the findings are always the same and (2) the role of women in doing service doesn't change.

If you want to see more variations, check out any of these past posts (which have links).

3. Also at IHE, which is killing it on reporting this stuff with a straight face: we can teach identical courses online, where students can't even see us, and they'd still rather have a male professor. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/03/14/study-says-students-rate-men-more-highly-women-even-when-theyre-teaching-identical

See also: lower course evaluations.

Figure 1. "Queen Bee" is a misogynistic red herring.

4.  But we're learning to be more rude to each other, apparently: https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/incivility-work-queen-bee-syndrome-getting-worse

 "Across the three studies, we found consistent evidence that women reported higher levels of incivility from other women than their male counterparts," Gabriel said. "In other words, women are ruder to each other than they are to men, or than men are to women."

Comment 1: Not to me, or at least they'd better not be. 

Comment 2: This is disheartening--or is it? Or are they interpreting as rudeness behaviors that they'd tolerate from men?

Figure 2. Joan Fontaine in Born to be Bad.

Comment 3:  The study defines incivility as "low-intensity deviant behavior with ambiguous intent to harm," but that's always been true for a certain subset of both men and women, hasn't it?

Think about Joan Fontaine's Christabel, in Born to be Bad, who is manipulative seven ways to Sunday. Example:

 Christabel is trying to oust the fiancee of the clueless and wealthy Zachary Scott, and doing a bang-up job of it, too. But she wants to keep Robert Ryan for her lover, so she praises the fiancee in the "bless her heart" manner familiar to those from the South (I've heard):

Christabel: "What a fine girl she is. So strong! So sensible! So capable!"
Robert Ryan: "You ought to see her change a tire."

He's calling her out on her passive-aggressive BS, but none of the other men see it for a second. So Christabel isn't rude, but she knows exactly what she's doing and the damage that she's causing. Who among us hasn't known a Christabel in academe?

Anyway.  Maybe there'll be some good news in the next set of studies. 

Holding academia to account, Bingo version

You know those bingo cards that appear every so often on Twitter or Facebook? The one I usually see is for department meetings.

I wonder if we could have a scorecard with Bingo squares or points for the times we hear and see things like the following, either stated or implied:

1. "He should still get the award, because his personal life has no bearing on the tremendous contribution he has made to scholarship. Aesthetics and the life of the mind is important; what happened to that grad student was beside the point. Besides, that incident was years ago."
2. Woman faculty member is interrupted and talked over.
3.  Woman makes a point,  and it's ignored; man makes the same point two minutes later, and it's brilliant.
4. "It wasn't such a big deal. She should get over it." 
5. Faculty of color asked to be on a zillion committees or outreach projects and then criticized for producing less scholarship.
6. "He's going to retire soon, anyway. There's no point in pursuing it."
7. "That's just how he acts; the bullying and yelling isn't about you personally. Stay out of his way and you'll be fine."
8. "This whole process will be a lot easier if we just give Professor Y what he wants in terms of this time slot/this course assignment/this committee assignment/this candidate for admission. Otherwise, he'll pitch a fit and make our lives miserable. Professor X won't complain about teaching at 8 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. MWF, so let's give that schedule to her."
9. "If he leaves the department, he'll take that big grant/that journal/that prestigious reputation to another university. He brings prestige, so we can't make waves."
10. "[Women faculty] should be in their offices more, in case students need to talk to them; they need the emotional support.  As for me, I'm not going to the meeting. I have writing to do." 

 Any more for our scorecard?

Chocolate and control and writing, oh, my!

Dame Eleanor has a post up with normal news, and JaneB has one that's funny and heartwarming, and John Scalzi has one about why it's hard to write  that's much more eloquent than my similar rant of a few weeks back.

So if you've already responded to the news and donated, etc. etc., here is a different question: how are you granting yourself a feeling of control when the world seems out of said quality--i.e., "self-care," as people say now? I've never had a mani-pedi or any of that salon stuff, but here are a few things:

1.  Eat more chocolate. I used to get this for special occasions, but now I keep a bag of my beloved Guittard chocolate chips in my office and eat them when I finish something especially administratively boring. Or feel more stressed than usual. Or after lunch. I'm trying to taper off, but maybe not right now.

2. Take another FB break. At first I was all "but--but--I won't be able to wish people whose emails I don't have Happy Birthday!" and then realized that they would survive. As to missing out on scholarly stuff that gets posted to FB--well, if you post a CFP there and there only, you've already limited your range considerably, so capturing the attention of a broad range of scholars clearly isn't what the organization is going for, and it doesn't need my attention.

3. Change office hours and meetings to suit the times I'll see the most people and that suit me the best. The corollary is that I've stored up enough rage courage to respond politely but with some heat to the people who are never in the office or attend meetings if I hear even a hint of "where were you when I looked for you at 4:30 on Tuesday?' or some such thing. *Yes, I keep track when I'm in a meeting and my colleagues are consistently absent, for exactly this reason. No, I probably shouldn't care.

4.  Figured out an academic version of the Serenity Prayer. As in "grant me the serenity to hear about another time-sucking initiative on which they claim to want our input, the strength to read between the lines, and the wisdom to know that it's already a done deal and I don't have to pay any attention to it."

5. Start writing again. Between travel and research trips and the news and writing conference papers and house renovation, this was a chaotic summer for writing; added to this is a series of things I promised to write and that are not exactly flowing from my pen. So: back on the horse, I say. I've actually written at least something every day for a few weeks, with the help of my old taskmasters Strict Workflow Pomodoro  on Chrome (which only lets me go to Twitter, my noncaloric chocolate substitute, when the apple turns green), 750words.com, and my black notebook where I record progress and cross things off. *My accountability group helps, too.

How about you? How are you gaining control over your life?
*Edited to add. 

Burned out on being accommodating

One of the truisms of our profession is that assistant professors have to protect their time and learn to say no so that they can get promoted and tenured, and that senior scholars have to make this happen. Fair enough. (Yes, I know that not everyone is lucky enough to have a t-t job.)

Another truism of our profession is that associate professors have to protect their time and learn to say no or else they'll never make full, especially women faculty, who often do a lot of service. Senior scholars should make this happen, too. Fair enough.

A third truism of our profession is that senior scholars and full professors are--to judge by the Chronicle and other chatter about the web--pretty awful: self-absorbed, selfish about their time, and generally interested in making life miserable for their juniors. All that NYTimes kvetching about millennials and their avocado toast is nothing compared to how the press sees professors.

I want to be accommodating and helpful.  I'm a full professor and happy to step up, right? To write letters and reviews of all kinds, right? To go to campus for an hour-long meeting that completely kills a research day or show up to warm a chair at an event, right? After all, where am I going to go from here?

Here's the problem. Because I technically can, and because I don't want to be THAT guy, I say yes to obligations. And I think I am happy to do so, at the time.

But it's taking me longer and longer to do the reviews, letters, and the rest, because I procrastinate about writing them. Why? Because I don't really want to but feel that I ought to, so I do twice the amount of work on them that I would normally do in an effort to feel enthusiastic about it.  I can't seem to just wade in and git 'er done (which, in academic terms, is still a lot of hours).

For every article review, I think of my own articles, all things that are not getting done because I'm doing work on someone else's work. Peer review is important, and we should all do it cheerfully.

As I should. Or should I?

What does a sabbatical do?

I've been on campus for a few things recently, and while it's nice to be missed (it really is!), the downside is realizing that the sabbatical is coming to an end. There's still the summer, but still.

Although I haven't done All The Things, I've done enough to feel reasonably good, though it still seems as though I wasted a lot of time. I'll keep working on All The Things.

But the main thing that the sabbatical did was to give me back a sense of joy and curiosity. If something interested me, I could follow it and read about it and above all think about it, often to good effect.

I know that this isn't the path to research that GetALifePhd and other efficiency experts, like Paul Sylvia,  recommend, where you state that you will have 15 points to develop by 7:45 a.m. on Tuesday and you just do it. Maybe if you have data, that's the way it works.

But maybe that's the difference between the humanities and the social sciences. We really have only a few weapons in our arsenal: curiosity, knowledge, and the ability to think about the two together in productive ways to see what's been done and what needs to be done in terms of research.

When you're pressed for time, as we all are during the school year, we're a little like our students. We don't have the time to follow those winding paths, or Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit holes, so we try to answer immediate questions. Our students use the first results on Google, and though we might not do that, we use the same process of working for efficiency in an answer rather than for complexity.

During the sabbatical, I learned a lot of things I needed to know, but I also learned a lot of things that I didn't need to know, or at least that I don't need immediately. That's not a waste of time. That's the point of a sabbatical.