Sunday, April 14, 2013

Surprise! Grad School Sucks! Now STFU and Get Back To Work!

Point: Rebecca Shuman

By the time you finish—if you even do—your academic self will be the culmination of your entire self, and thus you will believe, incomprehensibly, that not having a tenure-track job makes you worthless. You will believe this so strongly that when you do not land a job, it will destroy you, and nobody outside of academia will understand why. (Bright side: You will no longer have any friends outside academia.)

Counterpoint: Karen Gregory
You’re Fucked, and You’re Probably to Blame.
 Yes, things suck. I make no bones about that, but these screeds overlook the work that students are doing to organize, agitate, and resist the restructuring of higher education. And this oversight raises the question...did you then get involved in your union, in an activist group, in an education alternative (like the Free University), or in a conversation with your students? When did you start realizing that a career in academics also means addressing the very conditions of our labor? What have you done besides comparing the kind of tenacity it takes to be a graduate student today to being a willful smoker who smokes “four packs a day” and hopes to not get cancer?

My contribution to this insipid debate: I think they're both right, and they're both full of horse shit. Rebecca Shuman is right that graduate school sucks and you will hate yourself for failing to get a tenure track professorship even though it's statistically almost a certainty that you will fail. Karen Gregory is likewise correct that Rebecca Shuman is wallowing in her own steaming pile of self-pity, and she should STFU and deal with the fact that it is, in fact, a meritocracy, if a flawed one, and she failed on her own merits, not because the system is rigged. But, more importantly, Karen Gregory is blaming the victim, and is completely full of shit if she thinks that activism and organizing by grad students is going to have even the slightest effect on the commoditization of higher education and the resulting decline in quality and jobs in academia. I was a union organizer in graduate school. I organized the SHIT out of grad students. Guess what? It still sucked. And in the end, we may have gotten cheaper healthcare, but we didn't change The Academy at all.  We weren't in it for that, we were in it to make our lives suck just a teeny bit less.  No amount of singing protest songs is going to change the fact that our society is evolving, that engineering and data are on the rise, and erudition and the storing and reproduction of factoids in a mushy mass of cells is no longer the sine qua non of human achievement.  The Academy is gone.  It's never coming back.  It's being replaced by Year of Code and Open Courseware and all sorts of amazing open self-directed self-didactics.  Hard sciences will always be a mainstay, and will continue to require enormous amounts of cheap graduate student labor powered by coffee and hope.  But college as a Place of Learning, as opposed to a Place of Credentialing while Drinking, is not coming back.  Give it up.

Sunday, November 11, 2012

Rectal epistemology

A selection of results obtained from Googling "you wouldn't know if it crawled up your ass", presented without any further commentary (except to note that an exceptional number of these came from YouTube comments):
  • You wouldn't know [heavy metal] if it crawled up your ass wearing snowshoes in a blizzard.
  • You wouldn't know a first rate interviewer if it crawled up your ass and spit out Glen Beck[sic].
  • You wouldn't know a truth if it crawled up your ass and tickled your tonsils.
  • YOU WOULDN'T KNOW A STORY IF IT CRAWLED UP YOUR ASS, CAME OUT YOUR NOSE, LAY ITSELF IN YOUR ARMS AND CALL YOU MOMMY!
  • You wouldn't know a fact if it crawled up your ass and gave you bad breath.
  • You wouldn't know cool if it crawled up your ass and fucked you.
  • You dipshits wouldn't know good commentary if it crawled up your ass and blew your fucking fartbox apart.
  • You wouldn't know what butthurt looks like if it crawled up your leg and sodomised you with a rusty cheese grater.
  • You wouldn't know what a fact was if it crawled up your trashy ass and died.
  • You wouldn't know a good idea if it crawled up your ass and chewed off your balls.

Okay, I take it back, I will provide one piece of commentary, in the form of my contribution to this genre: "You wouldn't know [insert topic about which the subject knows nothing here] if it crawled up your ass wearing a tutu and danced the Nutcracker."

Monday, August 1, 2011

It's all in the swagger



If I need to explain what this is to you, you shouldn't be reading this blog.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Happy Passover!

Since we had our seder last night, some friends requested Diana's superb chicken recipe (nobody requested my brisket recipe, though. Sniff.) Reproduced here:

I used Rub with Love Chicken Rub http://store.tomdouglas.com/products/rub-with-love-chicken-rub. If you don't want to order it, you can make a reasonable substitute with 1/4 cup brown sugar, 4 tsp smoked paprika, 4 tsp coriander, 4 tsp garlic powder, and 2 tbsp chinese five spice powder.

Clean and rinse the chicken. Coat liberally with olive oil, then season with spice rub and salt and pepper. Place the chicken breast side down in the roasting pan. Roast for 15 minutes at 350 per pound of chicken. 2/3 of the way through the cooking time, flip the chicken breast side up and coat again with olive oil. Use a meat thermometer to test for doneness- the chicken can be removed from the oven when the temperature reaches 145 in the thickest part of the chicken (between the drumstick and the thigh). Allow the chicken to rest, tented with foil, for 15 minutes before cutt

Friday, April 1, 2011

On This Day In History

For a few years at Princeton and U of I, I was in the habit of making posters for fake talks and hanging them around the physics department on April Fool's Day. Some of my favorites included:

Applications of Non-Linear, Non-Homogeneous, Non-Solvable Partial Differential Equations

and

Theoretical Biophysics Colloquium
Insane in the Membrane:
Insane in the Brain?
Prof. B. Real
Cypress Hill University

Sunday, March 20, 2011

The Journal of Universal Rejection

http://www.universalrejection.org/

This is so brilliant that I'm actually sad I didn't think of it myself.
"The founding principle of the Journal of Universal Rejection (JofUR) is rejection. Universal rejection. That is to say, all submissions, regardless of quality, will be rejected."

I may dig up "Quantify vs Quantitate" and submit it, but right now the Intarwebs have forgotten it, and I'd need to go back through my old archives to find it.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

This Shit Just Got Real


Because I know you've missed me.