Tenure-track people in my department: We need to overhaul the major. Let’s add new survey courses.
Also tenure-track people in my department: Who will teach these new surveys? We are too busy.
Lecturers with decades of teaching, research, and course design experience plus oodles of graduate degrees and extremely nimble, adaptable brains: [raise hands]
Tenure-track people: They don’t have any expertise; we need to train them. But we’re busy.
Part II of recent absurd stuff in meetings:
Just received the peer review feedback on an article that was accepted for publication in an academic journal.
One reviewer scored my draft 60/100, but had no suggestions for improvement.
The other scored it (I first wrote “me,” then remembered I am not my article) 94/100 and included multiple, thoughtful revision recommendations.
PS The article was partly about Camus’ theory of the ABSURD.
Higher ed instructors who are unwell have to cancel class or beg their friends to cover for them for no pay, out of the goodness of their hearts. There are no paid substitutes to call upon (at least not at my institution or at any that I know of). There is stigma attached to canceling more than one class in a row, or canceling more than once or twice per semester. I frequently see ill professors (coughing, running a fever, in pain, etc.) conducting class because they don’t want to be seen as slackers by their supervisors and/or their own students.
I really would like to teach a course (or more) in a brand-new department on campus.
I want to bring my decades of experience, training, and finely honed pedagogical skills to this new venture, but it’s been hard to “on board.”
For example, the committee running the new department discussed adding a course that I regularly teach (exclusively, I may add, except for one semester in the past five years), but I was unaware of this. No-one informed me or asked for my input. However, they *did* review a course syllabus as part of their decision-making process–one that was not mine, and not impressive to them. I have no idea where they dug it up.
I may never have known this if I hadn’t reminded a member of the committee that I really, really wanted to teach in the department if possible. When I found out about the discussion regarding the unimpressive syllabus, I sent my latest syllabus. The response was something like: “Oh, this is good. We’ll get back to you.”
Campus Fundraising Campaigns:
When your employer asks you for money.
$$$???$$$
Street stencil, San Francisco. Courtesy of EndlessCanvas.com.
Sure to be an ongoing list:
Married couples never sitting together (for fear of looking like a voting bloc?).
Long-winded digressions from the agenda at hand.
Mass confusion over voting rules.
Thinly veiled aggressions.
Everyone acting like this is all normal.
I teach a mythology course at my university: ALL THE MYTHS in one semester. Rather, my students *hope* that I will let them talk about ALL THE MYTHS, especially the ones they think they already know (um, Greek). Despite frequent reminders that we don’t have time for ALL THE MYTHS, they try to sidetrack the course about 10X per class period so they can talk about their opinions of ALL THE MYTHS, especially the ones they think they already know.
They actually don’t know much about mythology. They don’t want to learn new myths. They don’t want to learn new things about familiar myths. They just want to retell the same old plot lines that everyone else knows, too. In other words, they babble a lot without saying much that’s interesting.
That’s why I showed them “The Burkean Parlor”:
We’re part of an unending conversation about mythology, I said. You need to listen (read) what’s been said already, and then pose a question or add a thoughtful comment of your own.
They just want to know why Zeus was such a ‘ho.
Yes, I did make them:
All of Twentieth-Century English-Language Poetry (one semester)
All of World Mythology (one semester)
Everything You Need to Know about Academic Writing (one semester)
Thanks for joining me and Sisyphus as we roll boulders up academic mountains, only to have them come crashing down again (repeat ad nauseum)!
The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. — Albert Camus
Academia Absurdia 