Quotulatiousness

February 1, 2019

Severian explains why he quit teaching

Filed under: Education — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Spoiler: it wasn’t fun anymore. As to why it wasn’t fun, it was (say it together with me) the youth of today:

It’s not that kids today are mal-educated, woefully ignorant, and wouldn’t know serious academic work if it bit them on the ass. Those are all true, of course, but that’s the way it has always been — I have no doubt Plato said the same thing about Aristotle (and Socrates no doubt said it about Plato). In my experience, the rueful phrase “back when I was in college” first escapes your lips approximately 36 hours into graduate school.

It’s not the quantity of ignorance, then, but the quality. Generation Snowflake really are New Soviet Men. If you’ve read about life under Stalin, especially, you’ll know what I’m talking about — at once invincibly self-righteous and cringingly subservient, modern students come across like junior volunteer commissars. If they don’t already know it, it’s by definition not worth knowing… and you’re an asshole — to be avoided, undermined, ignored, or (very, very grudgingly) tolerated, as the situation dictates — for trying to make them “learn” something new.

They’re not sociopaths, exactly, but that’s close enough to what they are that we’ll go with it. For instance: They have no problem asking you to move due dates, even for big things like midterm exams, if it inconveniences them. And just them — the rest of the class should still have to take the exam on Friday; it’s just that she, Suzy Snowflake, has a big sorority function that weekend that she really needs to prepare for, so she should be allowed to take it Monday. Nor do they have a problem with lying on spec, just to see if you’ll bite. Tell Suzy no, she still has to take the exam on Friday like everyone else, and there’s a decent chance you’ll be getting a “dead Grandma” email from her over the weekend — my Grandma died suddenly this Friday, I had to go home for the funeral, I’m so broken up, I’m free to take the makeup exam on Monday.

No, I’m not joking, and yes, you can check Suzy Snowflake’s social media and find pictures of her downing shots at the big sorority do Saturday night. And yes, she knows those pictures are out there; Generation Snowflake regards the concept of “online privacy” like your cat thinks about calculus. It’s just that hey, maybe you won’t check. Worth a shot, right? If anyone should be upset it’s her, for making her feel bad by doubting her story. She’ll saunter into class on Monday like nothing happened…. because to her, nothing did. She threw a Hail Mary, it got intercepted, oh well, what’s new in the Netflix queue?

Faced with that, any attempt at education is like King Canute ordering back the tides. It’s excruciatingly pointless, and that’s why I quit. Life’s too short to spend raging against the inevitable.

January 22, 2019

“I grew up in pre-history, or rather in Portugal (in some ways, same thing) in the 60s”

Filed under: Education, Europe, History, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sarah Hoyt on “toxic masculinity” and the rise of angry feminism:

… it’s such a just-so story it spreads and hides. It hides so well that people don’t realize they’re infected. But its distorting effects twist society’s processes to the point that something vital stops working.

Yes, the entire myth of “toxic masculinity” is one of these. It was born of the disappointment of feminists. Look, in the days when women were actually held back, those that made it were exceptional people.

Since I grew up in pre-history, or rather in Portugal (in some ways, same thing) in the 60s, where sexism was matter of fact and every day, I can tell you that, yes, to have the same grades as a boy you needed to work twice as hard, be brighter, more nimble, and more consistently good. Any boy started out with a good 20% on me in any teacher’s head, because “boys are smarter” wasn’t disputed, or even questioned.

So I understand that in the early twentieth century, women that made it to positions of prominence, where they became known for professional excellence, had to be GOOD at it. Amazing, in fact.

And even then, they might hit a glass ceiling, because they were the nail that stuck up. Everything conspired to bring them down.

Female liberation was played against this. People looked at these women, knew what they’d achieved against what obstacles, and dreamed that “if only women were allowed to be on an even footing with men, they’d be the best at everything. Every woman would be a leader.”

This is a form of insanity, because women are still human, and most humans are … average. That’s why they call it “average.”

But you can see how what they saw would deceive them.

Except that the obstacles were removed and women … were people. Sure. There are exceptional women, just as there are exceptional men, but in many ways, even with contraceptives, we women are still running with our legs in a biological sack. Oh, men too. They’re just different sacks. And men’s impairments, in a way, apply better to business, to creating, to competition.

Look, it’s become “sexist” to refer to PMS and women’s hormonal cycle as being at all different than men’s hormonal gearing up. Yeah. Any ideology that requires me to ignore my lying eyes in favor of their theory is bad-crazy which can destroy society, so these are my middle fingers. Reality is what it is.

Rowan Atkinson Live – Headmaster kills student

Filed under: Britain, Education, Humour — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Rowan Atkinson Live
Published on 24 Jan 2014

One of the most loved clips from Rowan’s vast back catalogue, a hilarious sketch where the angry teacher played by Rowan invites a father in to talk about the trouble with son…

Whether mesmerising us with the sheer visual mastery of Mr. Bean, beguiling us with the acerbic wit of Edmund Blackadder, or simply entertaining us as the suave, but rather hapless British Secret Agent Johnny English, you surely won’t have escaped the comic genius that is Rowan Atkinson.

In Rowan Atkinson Live, co-written with Richard Curtis (4 Weddings & a Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually) and Ben Elton, Atkinson runs the whole gamut of his remarkably versatile 30 year career, with sketches, mimes and monologues that are guaranteed to have you shedding tears of laughter. Performing live on stage alongside ‘straight man’ Angus Deayton, the show features a number of original and familiar routines, including sketches that appeared in the original Mr. Bean series.

I first heard this sketch many years ago (pre-internet days when we knapped our own flint) on an audio tape of clips from the Dr. Demento radio show, put together by my friend William. He didn’t know the performer, so he titled it “Fatal beatings”.

December 31, 2018

7 Things You Should Know About Free Speech in Schools: Free Speech Rules (Episode 1)

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

ReasonTV
Published on 13 Dec 2018

Watch the first episode of Free Speech Rules, a new video series on free speech and the law. The first episode looks at the seven things you should know about how the First Amendment is applied in schools, from black armbands to ‘Bong Hits 4 Jesus.’

——————–
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Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
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Watch the first episode of Free Speech Rules, a new video series on free speech and the law that’s written by Eugene Volokh, the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA, and the co-founder of the Volokh Conspiracy, which is hosted at Reason.com.

The first episode looks at the seven things you should know about how the First Amendment is applied in schools:

1) Political and religious speech is mostly protected.
Students, from first grade to twelfth, can’t be punished based on their political or religious speech. As the Supreme Court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District: “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gates.”

2) Disruptive speech is not protected.
Schools can punish speech that “materially disrupts schoolwork” — for instance, because it prompts fights.

3) Vulgar or sexual speech is not protected.
Schools can also punish students for using vulgarities or sexual innuendos.

4) Praising drugs is not protected.
Schools can punish speech that seems to praise drug use, and probably also alcohol use and other crimes, at least when the speech doesn’t seem political.

5) Official school newspapers are the school’s own speech.
Courts see the newspaper as the school’s own speech, even if students are the ones who write it.

6) This only applies to public schools.
Under the so-called “state action doctrine,” the First Amendment doesn’t limit private schools, even those that get tax breaks or government funds.

7) California is different. Some states, like California, have passed laws that provide more protection to students.

Written by Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment law professor at UCLA.
Produced and edited by Austin Bragg, who is not. This is not legal advice.
If this were legal advice, it would be followed by a bill.
Please use responsibly.

December 27, 2018

QotD: The deep state

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The deep state is no myth but a sodden, intertwined mass of bloated, self-replicating bureaucracy that constitutes the real power in Washington and that stubbornly outlasts every administration. As government programs have incrementally multiplied, so has their regulatory apparatus, with its intrusive byzantine minutiae. Recently tagged as a source of anti-Trump conspiracy among embedded Democrats, the deep state is probably equally populated by Republicans and apolitical functionaries of Bartleby the Scrivener blandness. Its spreading sclerotic mass is wasteful, redundant, and ultimately tyrannical.

I have been trying for decades to get my fellow Democrats to realize how unchecked bureaucracy, in government or academe, is inherently authoritarian and illiberal. A persistent characteristic of civilizations in decline throughout history has been their self-strangling by slow, swollen, and stupid bureaucracies. The current atrocity of crippling student debt in the US is a direct product of an unholy alliance between college administrations and federal bureaucrats — a scandal that ballooned over two decades with barely a word of protest from our putative academic leftists, lost in their post-structuralist fantasies. Political correctness was not created by administrators, but it is ever-expanding campus bureaucracies that have constructed and currently enforce the oppressively rule-ridden regime of college life.

In the modern world, so wondrously but perilously interconnected, a principle of periodic reduction of bureaucracy should be built into every social organism. Freedom cannot survive otherwise.

Camille Paglia, “Hillary wants Trump to win again”, Spectator USA, 2018-12-04.

December 12, 2018

Why Socrates Hated Democracy

Filed under: Education, Europe, Government, Greece, History, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The School of Life
Published on 28 Nov 2016

We’re used to thinking hugely well of democracy. But interestingly, one of the wisest people who ever lived, Socrates, had deep suspicions of it.

November 30, 2018

QotD: A university education is not for everyone

Filed under: Australia, Education, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We went through a generation in this country where parents discouraged their children from going into trades, and they said to them, “the only way you will get ahead in life is to stay at school until year 12, go to university.” Year 12 retention rates became the goal, high year 12 retention rates became the goal. Instead of us as a nation recognising there are some people who shouldn’t go to university, and what they should do is at year 10, decide they are going to become a tradesman. They will be just as well off, and from my experience and observation, a great deal better off than many others. I think we have to change that, and it’s a very big challenge because 30 years ago, we started getting this foolish bind that everybody had to go to university. Everybody doesn’t have to go to university, and a lot of people will be a lot better off if they don’t go to university and they recognise that at age 15 or 16, and go down the technical stream.

John Howard, interviewed by Mark Riley, 2005-03-06.

November 22, 2018

The apparently unexpected backlash over cancelling a French-language university in Ontario

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I suspect a lot of the uproar is actually just target-of-opportunity stuff to justify criticism of Ontario premier Doug Ford. Chris Selley points out that until the announcement, there wasn’t actually a lot of support for the new university among French-speaking Ontarians:

You would never know it since Thursday, when the Ontario government cancelled plans to open a new French-language university in Toronto, but those plans were not universally beloved. A lot of people hated the location. In an op-ed in Le Droit, University of Ottawa political scientist François Charbonneau complained it was being built to serve future francophone immigrants, not proper Franco-Ontarians in a community where they’ve been established for generations.

He called it “a historic mistake that perfectly illustrates what it means to be a minority: to have no power over one’s own destiny and to be dependent on ideological rantings with no democratic legitimacy.”

Higher-education consultant Alex Usher was among many who dismissed enrollment projections for the university as “fantasy.” Writing on the Higher Education Strategies blog, Usher called a recent survey of francophone Ontario high school students the “worst piece of social science I have ever seen.” It found lots of interest in attending the new university, but didn’t bother asking about their interest in existing bilingual alternatives like Laurentian University and the U of O.

To language hawks, bilingualism is the enemy: French always loses out in a budget crunch, and it does nothing to advance the right to live one’s life solely in French. Trouble is, very few students at French-language Ontario high schools are remotely interested in living their lives solely in French.

These are all things Premier Doug Ford and his ministers might have mentioned if they hoped to leave an impression other than that Ontario francophones just aren’t worth the money. They might wisely have chosen not to axe the French Language Commissioner in the same fiscal update, transferring its complaint-resolution powers to the ombudsman but orphaning its advocacy mandate. Finance minister Vic Fedeli hasn’t even said how much of its $1.2 million budget he hopes to recoup.

But they did what they did, all at once, and they said it was all about saving money. I suspect the whirlwind they reaped came as a surprise.

Good heavens, though, what wind.

November 12, 2018

QotD: The importance of prices

Filed under: Economics, Education, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I frequently teach economics principles courses, offering many college students their first exposure to the subject. While we cover all the basics — supply and demand, elasticity (consumer and producer sensitivity to price changes), taxation, trade, and externalities — I’m under no illusion that most of them will remember a lot of the material come a year from now, much less longer.

But there is one thing I hope all my students remember forever — the role of prices and private property. In particular, I want them to remember how these mechanisms are vital for a free and prosperous society. I make it clear to them that I think this material is of the utmost importance. In fact, prior to beginning our discussion of prices, I tell them I will be thrilled if the price system is one thing they remember from the class fifteen years from now.

Prices and private property rights are fundamentally important. Failure to grasp how these forces work leads to positively detrimental outcomes.

Abigail Blanco, “Marxism on the Menu: Why This Communist Restaurant Failed”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2016-12-27.

November 9, 2018

Sniffing out the heretics in academia

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

There’s apparently an easy way to figure out who the secret conservatives are in the academic world:

In Evan Maloney’s fun little campus-bashing documentary Indoctrinate U, there’s a psychology prof who’s been outed as a conservative (and, of course, harassed out of employment and blackballed from academia, because Liberals are all about the dissenting viewpoints and how dare you suggest otherwise!!!). Maloney then interviews several of her former students:

“Oh yeah,” they say, “we all knew.” He asks them just how they knew, and they all reply with a version of “because she was the only professor we had who didn’t go off on political rants all the time in class.”

Which is how all but the deepest-cover shitlords get blown. Unhinged political rants are so common in academia, in every class from the loopiest Angry Studies seminar to the hardest of STEM labs, that simply not acting like an SJW lunatic during class time is unusual enough to get you noticed. It’s like being the first guy to stop clapping for Dear Leader at a North Korean politburo meeting.*

    *It’s a mark of Orwell’s genius that he even thought this through. I always wondered why the put a time limit on the Two Minutes’ Hate… until I realized that, Stalinists being Stalinists, no work would get done otherwise; they’d keep ranting until they dropped from exhaustion (and the first guy to pass out would probably still get shot).

October 10, 2018

Bryan Caplan on “Sokal 2.0” or the “Grievance Studies Affair”

Filed under: Education, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Much has been said and written about the successful academic hoax pulled off by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian to get multiple bogus papers published in peer-reviewed journals in the “grievance studies affair”. Bryan Caplan rounds up several comments and then explains why he is impressed by the work of the hoaxers:

My idea has inspired multiple actual tests. But frankly, none of them are in the same league as Sokal 2.0. Three scholars who held a vast academic genre in low regard nevertheless managed to master the genre’s content and style expertly enough to swiftly publish enough articles to earn tenure! Frankly, if that doesn’t impress you, I don’t know what would.

The main question in my mind: Does Sokal 2.0 primarily show that the authors are intellectually strong… or that “grievance studies” is intellectually weak? Both can be partly true, of course. But the harder the authors had to toil to achieve their goal, the less they impugn the honor of their target. So how hard did they toil? The authors’ self-account:

    [W]e spent 10 months writing the papers, averaging one new paper roughly every thirteen days… As for our performance, 80% of our papers overall went to full peer review, which keeps with the standard 10-20% of papers that are “desk rejected” without review at major journals across the field. We improved this ratio from 0% at first to 94.4% after a few months of experimenting with much more hoaxish papers.

In other words, they barely broke a sweat. While you could accuse the authors of self-deprecation, this is a rare human failing. When we succeed, most of us like to highlight our own awesomeness, not the ease of our goals. While most people would have been less successful than the hoaxers, what they did was far from superhuman. And that, in turn, amply supports their main theses: the fields they hoaxed have low intellectual standards and don’t deserve to be taken seriously.

Does this mean that the subjects of race, gender, sexual orientation, body image, and so on don’t deserve to be taken seriously? Not at all. You shouldn’t blame subjects just because the fields that study them fall short. Identity is too important to be left to people who embrace their own identity. Still, until the researchers who study these subjects calm down, speak clearly, and treat dissent with civility, they will continue to produce little knowledge.

P.S. My main caveat about my positive evaluation of Sokal 2.0: I’ve seen too many hoax movies not to wonder if there’s a hoax within a hoax. Probably not, though.

October 8, 2018

Debunking state education rankings

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest issue of Reason, Stan Liebowitz and Matthew L. Kelly explain why you should ignore those “authoritative” rankings published by U.S. News and World Report and others:

You probably think you know which states have the best and worst education systems in the country. If you regularly dip into rankings such as those published by U.S. News and World Report, you likely believe schools in the Northeast and Upper Midwest are thriving while schools in the Deep South lag. It’s an understandable conclusion to draw from those ubiquitous “Best Schools!” lists. It’s also wrong.

The general consensus on education, retold every few news cycles, is that fiscally conservative states are populated by cheapskates. In those necks of the woods, people are too ignorant to vote in favor of helping their illiterate and innumerate children. Intelligent people understand that high taxes and generous pensions for public school teachers are the recipe for an efficient and smoothly functioning education system. If skinflint voters would just lighten up, the story goes, they too could become erudite and sophisticated.

Paul Krugman rehashes this narrative regularly in his New York Times column, frequently bemoaning the country’s purportedly miserly education budgets. Increasingly, he perceives libertarian barbarians at the gates of state governments, brandishing axes for dreaded spending cuts. In April, he wrote that “we’re left with a nation in which teachers, the people we count on to prepare our children for the future, are starting to feel like members of the working poor.… One way to think about what’s currently happening in a number of states is that the anti-Obama backlash, combined with the growing tribalism of American politics, delivered a number of state governments into the hands of extreme right-wing ideologues. These ideologues really believed that they could usher in a low-tax, small-government, libertarian utopia.”

In Krugman’s view, which reflects the education establishment’s view as well, those attempting to keep the size of government in check are a danger to your child. To support this claim, education wonks and activists point to state rankings in U.S. News, Education Week, or WalletHub — outlets that grade states according to a few key measures, such as graduation rates, education spending, and test scores. When education is discussed in the news, these rankings are often cited to illustrate the havoc that restrained budget growth and right-to-work laws can wreak.

Indeed, such rankings do seem to show that the highest-quality state educational systems tend to be in big-spending states in the Northeast or Upper Midwest. These places apparently honor and respect teachers, while Southern states inexplicably abhor them. But the cheapskates in cheap states get their just deserts: Sophisticated northern jurisdictions grow ever smarter, while stingy conservative backwaters sink into ever-lower depths of ignorance. The solution is obvious: Pay up or your kids will suffer.

There’s just one problem with this narrative: Traditional rankings are riddled with methodological flaws.

September 7, 2018

A model modern university syllabus

Filed under: Education, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Philip Carl Salzman outlines what the modern university strives to impart to students:

Universities in the 20th century were dedicated to the advancement of knowledge. Scholarship and research were pursued, and diverse opinions were exchanged and argued in the “marketplace of ideas.”

This is no longer the case. Particularly in the social sciences, humanities, education, social work, and law, a single political ideology has replaced scholarship and research, because the ideology presents fixed answers to all questions. And, although the most important thing in universities today is the diversity of race, gender, sexual practice, ethnicity, economic class, and physical and mental capability, there is no longer diversity of opinion. Only those committed to the ideology are admitted to academic staff or administration.

Universities have been transformed by the near-universal adoption of three interrelated theories: postmodernism, postcolonialism, and social justice. These theories and their implications will be explored here.

The courses may not be as transparently labelled as Salzman says, but the content will be remarkably similar:

Postmodernism: In the past, academics were trained to seek truth. Today, academics deny that there is such a thing as objective Truth. Instead, they argue that no one can be objective, that everyone is inevitably subjective, and consequently everyone has their own truth. The correct point of view, they urge, is relativism. This means not only that truth is relative to the subjectivity of each individual, but also that ethics and morality are relative to the individual and the culture, so there is no such thing as Good and Evil, or even Right and Wrong. So too with the ways of knowing; your children will learn that there is no objective basis for preferring chemistry over alchemy, astronomy over astrology, or medical doctors over witch doctors. They will learn that facts do not exist; only interpretations do.

[…]

Postcolonialism, the dominant theory in the social sciences today, is inspired by the Marxist-Leninist theory of imperialism, in which the conflict between the capitalist and proletariat classes is allegedly exported to the exploitation of colonized countries. By this means, the theory goes, oppression and poverty take place in colonies instead of in relation to the metropolitan working class. Postcolonialism posits that all of the problems in societies around the world today are the result of the relatively short Western imperial dominance and colonization. For example, British imperialism is blamed for what are in fact indigenous cultures, such as the South Asian caste system and the African tribal system. So too, problems of backwardness and corruption in countries once, decades ago, colonies continue to be blamed on past Western imperialism. The West is thus the continuing focus on anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist sentiment. Your children will learn that our society is evil, and the cause of all the evil in the wider world.

[…]

Social justice theory teaches that the world is divided between oppressors and victims. Some categories of people are oppressors and other are victims: males are oppressors, and females are victims; whites are oppressors, and people of color are victims; heterosexuals are oppressors, and gays, lesbians, bisexual, etc. are victims; Christians and Jews are oppressors, and Muslims are victims. Your sons will learn that they are stigmatized by their toxic masculinity.

[…]

“intersectionality” is an idea invented by a feminist law professor. It argues that some individuals fall into several victim categories, for example, black, female lesbians have three points in the victim stakes, as opposed to male members of the First Nations who receive only one point. Further, on the action front, members of each victim category are urged to unite and ally with members of other victim categories, because sharing the victim designation is the most important status in the world. This leads to some anomalies. Black victims of racism are urged to unite with Arab victims of colonialism, even though Arabs have been and still are holders of black slaves.

Female victims of sexism are urged to support Palestinian victims of “white” colonialism, even though Palestinian women have always been and continue to be subordinated to men, and are subjected to a wide range of abuse. Your children will learn that to be accepted, they must assume victim status or become champions of victims, and ally with other victims.

September 4, 2018

Grad school mafia

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Andrea Long Chu recounts her experience as a teaching assistant to Professor Avital Ronell, and the disturbing psychological world inhabited by grad students at New York University:

Structural problems are problems because real people hurt real people. You cannot have a cycle of abuse without actually existing abusers. That sounds simple, which is why so many academics hate it. When scholars defend Avital — or “complicate the narrative,” as we like to say — in part this is because we cannot stand believing what most people believe. The need to feel smarter is deep. Intelligence is a hungry god.

In this way, Avital’s case has become a strange referendum on literary study. Generations of scholars have been suckled at the teat of interpretation: We spend our days parsing commas and decoding metaphors. We get high on finding meaning others can’t. We hoard it, like dragons. We would be intellectually humiliated to learn that the truth was plain: that Avital quite simply sexually harassed her student, just as described. Sometimes analysis is simply denial with more words. Sometimes, as a frustrated student in a first-year literature course always mutters, the text just means what it says it means.

My department has been largely silent since the news broke. Faculty members have said nothing to us. Upset and ashamed, my fellow graduate students and I speak with one another cautiously. We heal, or don’t, alone. People I know are afraid to make any public comment, even on Facebook, where they are friends with older, richer scholars who might one day control their fates. Even I, who have by extraordinary luck options outside of academia, fear what being vocal will bring.

A culture of critics in name only, where genuine criticism is undertaken at the risk of ostracism, marginalization, retribution — this is where abuses like Avital’s grow like moss, or mold. Graduate students know this intuitively; it is written on their bones. They’ve watched as their professors play favorites, as their colleagues get punished for citing an adviser’s rival, as funding, jobs, and prestige are doled out to the most obedient and obsequious. The American university knows only the language of extortion. “Tell,” it purrs, curling its fingers around your IV drip, “and we’ll eat you alive.”

Avital conducts herself as if someone somewhere is always persecuting her. She learned this, I imagine, in graduate school. No woman escapes the relentless misogyny of the academy. The humanities are sadistic for most people, especially when you aren’t a white man. This is understood to be normal. When students in my department asked for more advising, we were told we were being needy. “Graduate school should destroy you,” one professor laughed.

The irony is that those who survive this destruction often do so at the cost of inflicting the same trauma on their own students. Avital, now a grande dame of literary studies, who Reitman alleges bragged to him of a “mafia”-like ability to make or break the careers of others, still feels persecuted. She makes it the job of those around her to protect her from that persecution: to fawn, appease, coddle. The lawsuit against her reads as a portrait, not of a macho predator type, but of a desperately lonely person with the power to coerce others, on pain of professional and psychic obliteration, into being her friends, or worse.

August 13, 2018

Publish, perish … or cheat

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Vancouver Sun, Douglas Todd tells the story of a Canadian academic who’s risked his career to expose what most of us would consider widespread cheating in academic publications:

A determined B.C. economics professor has journeyed into the heart of a dark world where academics seeking to advance their careers have had hundreds of thousands of their articles published for a fee in journals that either deserve suspicion or are outright phoney.

In academia, where the admonition to “publish or perish” is not an empty threat, it is often difficult for scholars to have their research published in legitimate journals, let alone top ones. But it’s becoming increasingly common for academics to get articles produced in questionable journals, just by forking over $100 to $2,500 Cdn.

Derek Pyne, a Thompson Rivers University economist who was granted tenure in 2015, is among the global academics who are exposing the deceptive journals, sometimes at a risk to their careers. Experts say these journals are chipping away at scientific, medical and educational credibility — and wasting the money of the taxpayers who largely finance public colleges and universities.

Pyne’s pioneering research has been cited by The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. On June 23, The Economist, in a piece on blacklisted journals, praised the B.C. scholar, remarking: “This is an area in which data are hard to come by. But one academic has been prepared to stick his neck out and investigate his own institution.”

His dedication to truth, however, has not gone well for Pyne, who might be turning into one of the most noted professors at Thompson Rivers University. He has been at the public Kamloops institution since 2010, specializing in economic and mathematical theory related to education, religion, trade and crime.

On July 17, however, Pyne was suspended without pay. That’s after being banned on May 17 from the picturesque campus on a Kamloops hillside.

H/T to Claire Lehmann for the link.

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