THAT GUY AT METAMEAT MADE US ALL FOLLOW HIM TO A NEW SUBDOMAIN AND HE DOESN’T EVEN DO ANYTHING WITH IT
Gentle souls, even if we gave over the rest of our lives to defending each other it wouldn’t be enough. Tomorrow I am teaching my de facto last class—the semester still has some limping to do but I’ve structured things so as to turn the students out on their own, with presentations and such, while I resume my usual fretful occupation of licking my own amygdala.
Every copy of Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus is always checked out of every university library. The academics take it home and water it with their thin tears.
I’ve decided to take the next two semesters, i.e. the whole of 2008, off from teaching, which I can do because the state university system is not quite yet entirely bankrupt. This year I want to finish a dissertation draft fulfilling the minimum requirement of being a scholarly document typed on the right kind of paper, so that if I then decide to jump off the academic fertilizer barge I can at least meet the benchmark of being The Guy In The Office With A Ph.D. and my grandparents, all four of them still alive and in good health, might not disown me from shame. Otherwise I can start teaching again and try actually to be a good teacher, go to conferences, revise the dissertation with appropriate performative footnotes, drown every protest in the barrel of worse alternatives.
Everything else is about the same. One thing I dislike: having used this class as an excuse for so much, when I gave it so little.
