Monday, July 11, 2005

reason # 405 i'm glad i quit academia

because if some pissy ignorant undergrad decided to go after me because of my reading list i'd be one angry pissed off and BITTER brown professor.

and then someone would fail. jesus. why don't we just let undergrads teach the courses and grade themselves?

via michael berube (his photo makes me laugh...don't know why.)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hate to sound like a Bitter Bob here, but my feeling is that all kinds of institutions, conventions, professions, standards and benchmarks are corrupted in favor of homogenized groupthink.

When I step back (metaphorically) and compare some of the work of today to that of earlier periods, I look at the current stuff and say (sometimes out loud) who MAKES this crap?

Anyone can try this test...consider your own profession/area of expertise. Compare current work to past work, or levels of excellence — especially in light of the tremendous tech advantages we enjoy now — and see if you don't have to hold your nose.

We're all on one wide conveyor belt with a fixed destination..a process ensured along the way by carefully-designed, meticulously-tuned machinery.

A-non

Anonymous said...

uh, right. Yes, I also would like to go back to those times when women worked in home and men brought home the bacon, Jane Austen had nothing to do with imperialism. Oh, wait. that's just my fantasy.

- i can't remember my blogger password. otherwise i'd sign in as deliciousbiting.

Anonymous said...

Now, hold on thar..I was not pining away for the "good ol' days" when men were men and women were property.

with all due respect, a quick re-read of my actual post reveals that what I'm actually saying is that our culture, our professional sphere, our world has been homogenized to a consistent level of crap.

I make no connection or correlation or causality, neither implicit nor explicit, between social advances and the aforementioned crappification.

A-non

Delia Christina said...

i was just reading something about causality and correlation this morning...

ah, yes:

'The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning...The vast majority of correlations in our world are, without doubt, non-causal.'

- stephen jay gould, The Mismeasure of Man, p. 242