NB: This smack contains smackage directed at senior faculty members. My apologies for the senior faculty members who may be offended, but as far as I know, none of y'all are the ones staring at my boobs.
Holier-Than-Thou Hiring Committee: You guys can suck it. I looked you all up, actually. YES! I remembered your names and I looked you up and all of you guys have been tenured since roughly the last Ice Age and none of you has published anything in a peer-reviewed journal in the last 10 years. NOTHING, you have published NOTHING and yet you wonder why your department at second-string school gets very little funding from your research-oriented administration. Did the department send the B-team, or what? I know that it's your prerogative to treat me like the plebe I am, but it's also MY prerogative to do a leeeeetle research.
Let me hone in on you, Sartorially Challenged Senior Sam. I hate wearing suits. I hope you know that. The only thing that could have made that outfit MORE torturous would have been shoes that didn't fit. I was practically wearing a suit of armor...no, a hairshirt might be a more apt metaphor, under that thing, and you're sitting there in a PAIR OF FUCKING JEANS and a polo shirt interviewing me and, as previously mentioned, ogling my (minimized) junk. The TSA is less visually invasive than you, buddy.
Absent-Minded-Annie: NO YOU CANNOT TAKE THE TEST that you somehow missed not once, not twice BUT THREE TIMES. WTF, Annie? At this point, I'm not sure that a note from your doctor, your rabbi, your priest (all three?), your dean, your whatever is going to fix this mess.
Read My Grant Roger: No, I will not read your grant application. First, I am on the grant decision committee. Secondly, I specifically (and repeatedly) have said in class that this semester, I am NOT consulting students on grants due to Reason 1. As it is, you little flakes want to talk about your plans to save the world so I may need to recuse myself anyway because while some of you have good ideas...some of you want to use the tears of amputees to make single-origin salt to sell to wealthy tourists and that, my friends, is f-ed up.
Bee Girl: The dance that bees do is not a language because they do not consciously decide to do it. The bee comes into the hive and something in his bee brain absolutely compels him to do his dance. He can't just decide, "Oh, today I'm going to do Martha Graham" or "Hmm, today feels more like a Twyla Tharp day." NO! He HAS NO CHOICE. That is why his dance is not language. Now, zip it, because FIVE questions about the bee dance ARE REALLY GODDAMN DISTRACTING particularly when nobody except you said ANYTHING about bees.
Awful Accident Agnes: I'm really sorry that you were in a terrible accident. Your friend got drunk, lied to you, drove your car, then crashed it with you in it. THEN, she tried to drive it away and got stopped by a police officer...you were trapped between the seatbelt and the airbag and the dash and it was really bad. HOLY FUCKING SHIT, that's really bad. But...um...I'm cool. All I need to know is you had an accident and here is your doctor's note.
Eish.
On the Search Committees:
ReplyDeleteThere is no A-team....check out "Universities to Fear" on Academic Jobs wiki. These guys fall asleep in presenatations, they fight amongst themselves (sometimes on conference-call interviews!), they are deliberatly offputting to inteviewees they don't like, and they make racist comments when candidates tour campuses! They could get away with this in the past because there were "too many" grad school graduates; now with an economy in crisis they act a little better, but they still fight you tooth and nail over travel re-embursements and mailing acceptance or rejection letters (even a 5-word email is too much for some of these people.)
http://www.academicjobs.wikia.com/wiki/Universities_to_fear
I think that the same people who meet over cocktails for the student academic petitions get involved in the search committees; they can go to Philadelphia and get loaded at Tatooed Mom's or Dirty Frank's.
Should be "presentations", "deliberately". I like hyphens so that should have been "tooth-and-nail."
ReplyDeleteI would like to memtion that some of the schools listed in "Universities to Fear" either have undated complaints, or complaints from the last decade, some all the way back to the 1990s.
Most of what's on that wiki is unadulterated bullshit anyway.
ReplyDeleteHow do you know? I assume with all wiki stuff that there is some bias (as in all media.) I can't be certain with all of them, but I checked up on a Southern university on the list and it seems that the AJW picture of the place is pretty accurate.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to hear about the bullshit. That wiki gives me indigestion, and something on it (I don't know what) made a friend go into some kind of horrible panic attack thing.
ReplyDeleteClearly, those two things are our problems, but still. I feel like that wiki is the "rate my professor" of academic employment.