Pls read this editorial by @kirstenweld.bsky.social
about how our Provost's plan for "viewpoint diversity" hires further erodes faculty governance at my university. (And never mind "veritas"!)
8 hires--but humanities hiring generally has been frozen since 3/25.
www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...
PS: Oh the Shit You Will Do When You’re Full-Prof????
Oh hell yes, congrats Sheila!!
Flambébé!!
(John Ray Jr. Ph.D., an invention of Nabokov’s, tells the reader that “‘Lolita’ should make all of us—parents, social workers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.”)
De Sade’s Justine, 1964 paperback with girl and terrifyingly anatomical candelabra illustration (no info on illustrator, alas).
“There is not a page that does not show Sade’s sickness as clearly as it does his genius,” etc - LT Woodward, MD
As for Woodward’s “Sadism” book, with money Freud quote as implicit endorsement: “The instinct of destruction … is placed directly in the … sexual function. This is true sadism”
“Who else wants a big-pay job as an ACCOUNTANT” while reading about how Justine decides to answer a mysterious summons?
The grad students voted for Lolita as our final American Novel text. A favorite show-and-tell among my used bookstore finds is this real-life John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., one L. T. Woodward, M.D., in this intro to Sade’s “Justine.”
[Bonus: a mail-in postcard to acquire about a career in Accounting!]
Yes!!
Things like letters of recommendation, non-double-blind review, and solicited applications appear generally to reinforce the tendency to confer prestige & support where they're already concentrated.
Finding ways to counteract this tendency can add to the diversity of excellent, well-supported work.
Because the concentration of prestige (and growing influence of central figures) is an almost universal tendency in social networks of all kinds, academics and agencies can and should look for ways to consciously democratize fellowship support, prizes, etc. /..
"Finding that 'worthy candidate' when there are so many potential winners often involves using shortcuts to assess excellence or potential for greatness."
Great piece. I write a bit about this phenomenon, the Matthew effect, in academic culture in the conclusion to my forthcoming book. /..
Two hummingbirds in nest
Two bees in prickly pear flower
Double buddies
…great points that grad education produces people rather than dissertations, that failure and friction are essential elements of learning, and that our systems for evaluating academic achievements are bad at prioritizing people over outputs, but we shouldn’t accept that we have to be.
I’ve been curious about how LLMs are changing things in the sciences, and was really glad to see this terrific piece of writing, which focuses on graduate education…
Cover drop! Extremely excited to have this incredible sculpture, Marisol’s Love (1962), on the cover of Relatability, out later this year press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...
🤩
It’s truly wild how many folks in the contemporary U.S. lit field have great-looking books out this year. It’ll be a tall stack of reading to keep up with…
I’ve been looking forward to this one ever since seeing Ted’s inspired riff on criminality in Highsmith, where upwardly mobile white criminals can be played as a delightful surprise (vs the racialized criminality in Richard Wright).
We the Platform is available for preorder with the discount code CUP20 if you order directly from the press! cup.columbia.edu/book/we-the-... A thread on the argument below:
And pace Woloch’s great reading of one sentence, I felt like psychological depth was unusually widely distributed (to the extent anyone, including Marcel, has it). Overall’s a fascinating study of social network dynamics, will likely write on it at some point.
Second, I'm surprised that so many of terms of the readings of Proust I’ve admired (Sedgwick, Deleuze, Benjamin, Hagglund, Kittler, etc) are spelled out nearly explicitly in Time Regained… in passages on writing for inverts, the novel as self-examination, signs, the novel and cinema, etc...
Except perhaps Marcel, for whom relentless self-examination seems ironically never quite equal either to moral introspection or a convincing self-awareness, a fascinating tension. I see why so many folks eventually reread...
Temps: Retrouvé
On finishing Proust, first, the characters are at once oddly ethereal projections, centered on Marcel’s impressions of them, at the same time so many of them undergo profound and compelling transformations .../
Driving daughter to Saturday drama class, tried to avoid protest traffic by routing around posted meeting areas, and still encountered an almost-2-mile-long wall of easily thousands of sign toting middle age normies along Speedway, an awe-inspiring sight.
Dunning-Kruger illustration, x axis Wisdom, y axis Confidence, an early peak in Confidence without Wisdom is “Mount Stupid”
Thinking belatedly about DOGE AI use and genAI’s effects on cognition and culture, it seems like there’s an overwhelming tendency toward the Dunning-Kruger Effect’s uninformed overconfidence that I think we’re already seeing at scale…
It is clear that the slopification of social life will only enhance the relevance and material value of real thought. For institutions that have the strategic vision and courage to recenter the core mission of the University, and to guarantee for students that if you come here we won’t bullshit you and won’t let you bullshit us --that we’ll work hard, together-- that is a business opportunity.
Also tried to emphasize, to close, that any institution of higher learning that's genuinely interested in remaining relevant, enduring through volatility, and growing its capacities —that is, leading— should be betting all the chips on reinvestment in the core functions of liberal arts education.
This is great, and I hadn’t seen this Georgetown student journalist’s memorable formulation that the problem for critical thinking in scene-of-learning-AI is that it “deprive[s] us of ever being unsure”
I played to my strengths when serving ad a dept administrator and set up a scheduling template with pivot tables 💪💪, etc.
Omg congrats and good luck!! Excel may be a v niche req in English land, for the record-keeping and scheduling folks…( I once encountered some astonishing records for ext review, one record per sheet, Excel grid used as loose formatting aid)
Reminds me of the departmental Excel lore I bet Heather will appreciate one day…
Read thru the post and those first two “questions” 💀💀🤣