feeling esoteric on this friday night. feeling a little obscure and arcane
Well then.
Hitting the archives on a friday night for some godforgotten tomes with the lads
Tag: academia
Seriously, it kills me when I see people hold scientists up as pinnacles of logic and reason.
Because one time the professor I was interning for got punched in the face by another professor, because mine got the funding, and told the other professor his theory was stupid.
This same professor told me to throw rocks to scare the “stupid fucking crabs” into moving so we could count them properly.
SCIENCE
thank you
this is one of the best comments this post has recieved
I have witnessed:
Two professors hiding around a corner and snickering, “Shhh, here she comes!” While a female professor approached and, when she finally found them, she proceeded to scream while pointing from one to the other, “You! I called your office but you weren’t there! So I tried to call YOUR office to figure out where HE was but YOU weren’t there!”
Two grad students standing outside a closed and locked door yelling, “Come out of the damn office. You haven’t left for days. If you didn’t have a couch in there I’d be concerned as to where you were sleeping!”
A religious studies professor apologizing for being late to class because, “security stopped me because I’m dressed like a hobbit”
Watched a professor snort the results of my experiment to determine if I had the right final compound.
Two archeology professors toss priceless fossilized teeth back and forth in an attempt to figure out who is smarter by “guessing the type of tooth and species of animal before it lands”
Multiple fully degreed individuals throw dry ice at one another in an attempt to be first to use the lab/get that piece of equipment/or change the iPod song.
A genetics professor build furniture out of stacks of paper and planks of wood because she is that far behind in grading papers/responding. One of the impromptu furniture pieces housed a fish tank.
I could go on but I think that covers the larger portion of the insanity…
Every time it comes around on my dash, it gets better.
– I have had a professor buy a huge fuckoff bottle of rum during fieldwork in Costa Rica and let the undergrads get wasted because “you’re not underage in Costa Rica and we’ll be up all night with the bats anyway!”
– Same professor hung a bat from her headlamp and wore it as a decoration for an entire night.
– A whole swarm of older women – and these are women with PhDs and world-renown bat experts, the bigwigs – all, to a woman, go to the formal charity dinner at an international research symposium in Toronto in late October dressed in skimpy Batgirl costumes. Because Halloween was that weekend, you see.
– At a different conference, a professor get blackout drunk and pass out on the side of the road.
– “Yeah, we have to say we did it properly for the grant but to be really honest, Miracle-gro works better.”
– Teaching lab: we had liquid nitrogen for a demo, and after class the professor, the other TA, and I spent a good two hours freezing and breaking things in it.
a chemistry class begins with 30 students nine months later just six of us left sitting on tables dipping paper into contaminated chemicals to see what happens when we burn it teacher making idle suggestions while he marks our work
“go to the fume hood thing, yeah now put some potassium in chlorine” can i burn the results sir? “fuck it sure whatever its tainted anyway”
The prof I’m working for just asked me if I knew how to pick a lock, and when I responded “yes” she replied, “see, this is why I hire the former delinquents instead of the suck-ups. You’re actually useful.”
I then let her into her office.
“Security stopped me because I’m dressed like a hobbit.” I would bet anything this has happened to Dr. Medievalist.
Semi-related non-academic anecdote: The concert hall security guys tried to throw out our violone player in between performances this spring because they thought he was a homeless guy. Despite the fact that he was wearing concert black… and carrying a violone. There is no more obvious instrument.
One of my English Professors admitted that sometimes “you just have to do a soliloquy” and would phone up the main office of the department on the internal phoneline to recite a Shakespearean monologue at them. No greeting, no warning, just “To be or not to be”.
every time i read this stuff i think about how upset vulcans would be to meet earth’s greatest scientific minds
I am a professor and nothing even half as interesting as any of this has ever happened in my vicinity. I feel cheated.
Newsflash: academics are people. And very strange people, at that.
My semi-famous advisor rather indiscreetly asked one of my fellow grad students at a conference dinner if he knew where to buy weed (or “grass,” as he calls it; he’s old and European). Some other grad students and I later smoked weed with said advisor (and no, it wasn’t legal at the time). My department has a yearly talent show and sometimes the professors participate. One of them break-danced; another passed a basketball around his middle while his wife (also a professor) poured a beer into his mouth and he chugged it.
A bunch of early modernists laughing about how it would hurt to have the sun formally in your mind
“That would be a good dissertation project” = “I sort of care but not enough to figure it out for myself”
“That would be a good paper title” = “that would be a good name for a band”
Fun times in academic philosophy
I missed the visit days for prospective graduate students in my department a couple weeks ago because I was in California, so I was surprised and alarmed to receive this e-mail from the Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) last Tuesday:
“As you may have heard, a prospective student made a number of inappropriate sexist comments in conversations with graduate students during the visit last week. I am writing to let you know that I have written to the student in question, to point out that I find the comments that have been reported to me to be highly inappropriate, and that such comments are serious violations of norms that we all are committed to upholding. I added that I would take issue with such comments being made in our department not only by prospective students, but also, and especially, by people who are members of our department, such as the department’s graduate students.”
Of course, I immediately asked some people who I thought might be in the know for all the gory details. In conversations with various grad students in the department last week, I found out that he did all of the following:
- He remarked to a female grad student on how easy she must have it in the department because she’s a woman.
- He told a female grad student that he was glad to see that most people in the department work on “real” philosophy rather than feminist philosophy.
- He speculated that a famous professor in our department was probably only working with a specific grad student because she’s an attractive woman.
- He saw two grad students listed on the website with the same Chinese last name and assumed that the woman must only have been admitted because she was married to the man. (The kicker: not only are they from different places – the woman grew up in China, the man in Canada – but the man is also flamingly gay.)
- He was told a story about how two Asian-American women, as first-years, walked into the grad student bar and a male student loudly remarked, “Mmm, China.” (Incidentally, one of the women is Korean-American.) He was not horrified, and in fact seemed to think this was perfectly normal.
Part of the reason I was feeling so shitty last Thursday is that I got involved in an argument between a male grad student who works on philosophy of law and a bunch of other grad students about whether we were treating the prospective student unfairly by talking amongst ourselves about how terrible he is, which would probably lead the grad student community to be inhospitable or even hostile toward him if he were to come here, without adequate proof of his misdeeds and without giving him an opportunity to show himself to be better than we thought, or at least redeemable. This was obnoxious not least because law guy is a guy – and he acknowledged that he can’t know how women feel about the sexist remarks, but he is South Asian and said the prospective made a remark to him that might be construed as racist, but he was giving him the benefit of the doubt. He also kept going on about “procedural justice” (which he said he’s a big champion of in his research as well) – which sounds an awful lot like the “due process” that opponents of the Me Too movement like to scream about – and insisted that it applies with regard to “the court of public opinion” as well as more official channels like the decision whether or not to rescind his admission offer. An implication was, of course, that he wasn’t sure whether he could trust the testimony of people who reported the sexist and racist behavior, most of whom are women. Because what “due process” so often means is “you can’t believe women – they’re overly emotional and misinterpret things and/or they’re crazy and they lie.”
Anyway… the DGS e-mailed the prospective to tell him that kind of behavior was inappropriate and would not be tolerated in the department, the prospective responded by indignantly denying everything (you know those hysterical women!), the DGS told him he was looking into rescinding the offer, and the prospective wisely decided to go somewhere else – namely, Oxford, where he’s been doing a B.Phil (a glorified second bachelor’s degree that’s special because it’s from Oxford), and where they seem to be OK with this kind of shit.
Big, existential sigh. @fuckyeahrichardiii, @writernotwaiting
Me reading academic papers: incoherent nonsense. Bullshit. I could write better than this in my sleep
Me writing academic papers: this sentence is 206 words long and contains 19 commas & a semicolon, fuck you
You either die with a bachelors degree or you stay in college long enough to watch yourself become the villain.
@fuckyeahrichardiii have you seen this? I think you need to. Also @philosopherking1887.
Depends on who/what I’m writing about, honestly. My sentences mostly get ridiculous when I’m writing about Kant. An undergrad professor of mine called it “the contagion of the object of study.”
A professor who taught me when I was an undergrad and who is now at another university and running the search for a postdoc there (let’s call him W) e-mailed me this afternoon to tell me that he’d given the postdoc to another candidate, whom we’ll call B. I actually already knew that, because B (who is my age) is dating a professor in my department, H, and he told me when I saw him at the department on Tuesday and he asked about my job situation. Incidentally, W was dissertation advisor both to H and to B’s dissertation advisor, C; H and C were in grad school at the same time (and are kind of frenemies… or rather, H is jealous of C’s professional success). So H is kind of dating his intellectual niece. And they work in the same subject area. Which just kinda strikes me as a little off… but whatever. Academia is full of incest.
Anyway, the point was that W sent me the following e-mail:
This message is to deliver the news that the [name of fellowship] Postdoctoral Fellow for next year will be [B].
This was a very difficult decision for me to make, and in no aspect was it more difficult than that I won’t be able to offer the postdoc to you. I have several other highly deserving finalists to whom to deliver this same news, but I am telling you first in order to get over with the message that will be the most painful one for me to write.
Whenever I do these searches, and become aware of the highly qualified people who don’t yet have jobs, it makes me sad and angry and makes me wish I had more of these postdocs than just the one. If by any chance you do get a job, please tell me. And if you can think of any way I can help, please get in touch right away.
Which is very nice and all, but… if it was that hard for you, you could have just given me the fucking job.
I just turned in an application I’d been procrastinating on (because I’ve been depressed as fuck) right under the wire – it was due at midnight EDT.
I feel like these days I’m just scraping through life by the skin of my teeth. Like, I manage to get things done, but not easily or with good time management or even particularly well.
The academic job market is a truck and it has run over my spirit.
this is a little too real
You can now call me Dr. Phil
because I defended my dissertation on Tuesday. I don’t officially become a PhD until the university bigwigs put their stamp on it sometime in April, but I’ve now done everything *I* need to do.
The defense itself was a bit challenging because one of my official readers needed to Skype in and his microphone wasn’t working. So in order to ask questions he had to call my phone, and when I put it on speaker for everyone in the room to hear him we had to turn off the sound from the Skype connection to avoid godawful feedback noises. I swore a few times during the defense, which might have been a first, but I only swore about the technical problems, and I kept it to “shit” and “crap.”
For all American grad students who get tuition waivers.
This is extremely important for you to be aware of. Please spread the word.
Source: Twitter
Right now, I don’t think I know anybody who wouldn’t quit if this passed. Schools would lose their TAs and RAs en mass.
This would also make it impossible for disabled grad students – I can’t have roommates because of celiac (I tried, it didn’t work out), and so 2/3 of my paycheck goes right back out as rent. And I make even less than this guy per year – I make 25-28k/year in one of the worst CoL places in America. This will wreck the ability of people to go into research. This will make it even worse for people with medical expenses who want to go to school.
Well, Republicans wanted to destroy universities, right? Because they’re bastions of liberal and leftist thought (reality having a well-known liberal bias).
The way universities could possibly get around it is to change the way it looks on paper: instead of (officially) comping tuition, they’d waive it. But I don’t know exactly how the accounting works on that end, or whether that would be possible especially at public universities.
Loki is the Philosopher King 