January 10, 2012, 10:48 AM ET

The Résumé Reader

There’s an identifiable human type out there—I don’t know what others call it, or how its particularities manifest themselves in academe or the rest of the world, but in the art world, I call it the “Résumé Reader.” Say I’m at an art opening for a friend’s exhibition and I see someone I know. I smile, walk over to the person, and offer the usual, “Hey, nice to see you. How are you?" With a non-Résumé Reader, what follows is the ordinary stuff—something like this: “Hi, great to see you, too! I’m doing OK. My classes are going really well—I have a couple of really interesting students. Plus I’m lucky because I’ve got a course off, so I’m getting more studio time this semester. I’ve stretched up some big canvases to work on. I’ve been feeling pretty good—swimming again regularly. Anyway, how are you?” Thereupon follows a chat—some pleasant... Read More

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January 9, 2012, 11:58 AM ET

S#@t Straight Politicians Say... to Gay People

"S#@t people say" is now a cultural meme, or at least a Youtube meme. Whether it's S#@t My Dad Says or S#@t Girls Say or S#@t Black Girls Say or, my own personal favorite, S#@t White Girls Say... to Black Girls, it is now impossible to avoid the formula of S#@t X Party Says. Today's theme along the meme is "S#@t Straight Politicians Say... to Gay People." And this has been an excellent week in the homophobic s#@t category. Let's start with our favorite homophobe, Rick Santorum, whose very name conjures up a cultural fear of anal sex and its aftermath. This week Santorum hit a high note of homophobia by once again confusing gay relationships with orgies. When asked about his opposition to gay marriage at a New Hampshire College Convention, Santorum replied

What about three men? If you think it’s okay for two, you have to differentiate for me why you’re not okay with three. Any two...

Stupid S*&t Liberals Write About Conservatives

This week's award goes to Corey Robin. I really hope that I'm not the only one who finds Robin's Review cover essay completely offensive. Maybe there are even a few wives, secretaries, and factory workers (of every political stripe) who will find this a little condescending: Despite the very real differences among them, workers in a factory are like secretaries in an office, peasants on a manor, slaves on a plantation—even wives in a marriage—in that they live and labor in conditions of unequal power. They submit and obey, heeding the demands of their managers and masters, husbands and lords. Sometimes their lot is freely chosen—workers contract with their employers, wives with their husbands—but its entailments seldom are. What contract, after all, could ever itemize the ins and outs, the daily pains and continuing sufferance, of a job or a marriage? Throughout American history... Read More

January 9, 2012, 10:04 AM ET

The New-Semester Checklist

No more late-night movies or TV. Forget the fact that you’re telling everybody else in your household that you’re up working late, because we know the truth: no more half-movies once remembered being watched when you are supposed to be doing other things. The semester is starting and you need to get back to your regularly scheduled programming, literally and figuratively. Get your DVR ready, or TIVO, and do it now. If you’re teaching at 8 a.m. or even 9 and do not have the privilege of being air-dropped directly onto your campus in a net bag, you need at least an hour to negotiate either public transport or to find parking. Doing the sleepy-time math, this means you need to get to sleep before midnight. If you’re under 40, maybe you can get away with staying up until 1 a.m., but no later. Of course, if you are over ...

Social Conservatives and the Media Elite

If you want to get an idea of how social conservatives are going to be treated by the media in this election cycle, look no further than Saturday night's ABC debate. George Stephanopoulos's endless exchange with Mitt Romney about whether he favored a ban on contraception and whether he would consider it constitutional if a state voted to ban it may have seemed like a puzzling digression. In fact, Mitt Romney probably reflected in his flustered answer the puzzlement of the whole audience at this line of questioning. What state was trying to ban contraception again? But presumably Stephanopoulos thought he was showing some great fissure in the Republican party. It's true that Rick Santorum doesn't favor contraception but the vast majority of his constituency--even the pro-life ones--are not against contraception. Does Stephanopoulos really think this is going to be the deciding issue--or... Read More

January 9, 2012, 06:35 AM ET

Between a Rock and a Sublime Place (Part 1)

The academic life sometimes feels like the Labor of Sisyphus, whether pushing one’s own career rock up a steep hill or teaching pretty much the same thing, in one form or another, to new crops of students. Nonetheless, and despite Camus’s gloriously counter-intuitive suggestion that Sisyphus was happy, some of us really are happy in proportion as we are fooling around on genuine hills, and the steeper the better. (How’s that for a forced segue from the world of Higher Ed to that of Higher Mtns?) There are three primary ways of doing real-world, non-metaphoric mountaineering, depending on the nature of the terrain to be encountered: rock climbing, ice climbing, and glacier travel. Rock climbing is the most basic, requiring the least equipment. It is a union of primal elements: human skin, muscle, bone and (mostly) nerve on the iconically hard fundament of all things real; namely,... Read More

January 8, 2012, 09:09 PM ET

Pannapacker at MLA: Alt-Ac Is the Future of the Academy

By William Pannapacker

SEATTLE

Alt-ac is the future of the academy. That’s what Elliott Shore, the director of libraries, CIO, and professor of history at Bryn Mawr, observed yesterday on the second of two panels at the MLA convention on alternative careers for humanities Ph.D.'s led by Sara Steger and Bethany Nowviskie. In the last 10 years, Shore observed, the number of tenure-track teaching positions has plummeted from one-third to one-fourth of the total. What’s left: thousands of poorly compensated adjunct teaching positions. One speaker, Donald Brinkman, who works for Microsoft Research said: “I left the humanities because I didn’t, like, want to be poor my whole life.” But for people with extensive humanities training who want to remain in the academy but don’t want to work as adjuncts, the alt-ac path is an option that more of them are exploring. That can ... Read More

January 8, 2012, 04:43 PM ET

2 GOP Debates in 15 hours: Santorum and Evangelicals Coalescing

ABC NEWS hosted a halting debate last night at St. Anselm College. It was followed by a far better Meet The Press event this morning at 10:30. Neither gathering, however, provided much to roil the normally tranquil weekend news cycle. Still there were a few noteworthy developments and one likely scenario is coming into focus for those who follow religious politicking: Romney, Hard to Floor: In this campaign the former governor of Massachusetts has shown himself to be a superb defensive debater, a virtuoso of the rope-a-dope technique. Consider the counterattack he executed this morning. In the late rounds, he found himself isolated, one-on-one, with the former Speaker of the House. This encounter with Newt Gingrich was frightening and this is because Newt Gingrich is frightening. And he is furious. The former Speaker had just been asked to reflect on Romney’s negative campaign ads ... Read More

January 8, 2012, 01:04 PM ET

Parents, Cuddle Your Children

Reading Nicholas Kristof’s column, “A Poverty Solution That Starts With a Hug,” in today’s New York Times, about the “landmark warning” recently issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics saying “toxic stress can harm children for life,” I was struck once again by the deep insecurity, not to mention impoverishment, of the modern mind. No matter how obvious the observation, how eternal the topic, how great the works of literature that have tackled any given theme, or how insightful the philosophers who have studied a matter, the modern mind cannot fathom reaching a conclusion without relying on scientific studies. Kristof notes that “two decades of scientific research” have led scientists to conclude that when parents abuse alcohol or drugs, or threaten or beat their children, or even when they never cuddle their crying children, or read or tell them stories, the... Read More

January 8, 2012, 12:27 PM ET

Stuff White Politicians Say... to Black People

If you haven't seen Franchesca Ramsey's "S#@t White Girls Say.. To Black Girls"* yet, take a look. It is a very funny and very powerful piece about the sort of accidental racism that happens. From "Can I touch your hair?" to "This is soooo ghetto," it perfectly captures the painful banality of racism. But with the GOP primaries coming to their seemingly inevitable conclusion of a Romney (perhaps Romney/Santorum) ticket, it is time to consider how not funny a video of "S#@t White Politicians Say... to Black People" would be. Opening scene would be Newt Gingrich's extremely bizarre and accidentally racist tirade against "poor" children not knowing the value of work. Calling child labor laws "stupid" and outlining his plan for the forced after-school labor of poor children as janitors in their schools in order to become productive citizens, Gingrich tentatively felt his way through the ... Read More