It's all a human enterprise, people. The worst people at my college are those that live in little bubbles of narcissistic endeavor. They think their class, their office, their walk to the parking lot, is all there is. They don't see the sometimes messy personal spiderweb of events and things as being a necessary part of ALL of us moving along.
As George used to say, "We live in a society, people."
And the sooner we get that, trust that, live that, the better things are going to get.
Next semester, Ed, try getting out of the office a bit. Stroll and visit your colleagues. Most of us get along. Most of us aren't cowed by the idea that we need to connect personally to make the college work.
And, surprisingly, you might even enjoy it. Some of us are funny sumbitches. And the rest of us, well at least you can drink with us.
Before tenure, everyone thinks that they shit ice cream and the senior people are incompetent boobs without any right to judge them. Then they get tenure and start doing real service, and realize that those incompetent boobs actually have enormous amounts of institutional expertise, the getting of which tends to cut into one's research program. They watch their own research program slow down a bit, and are (usually) appropriately humbled.
ReplyDeleteI beg to differ as Ed had a valid point.
ReplyDeleteThe department that I used to teach in was like a retirement training centre. Most of the staff tended to settle into what was a comfortable routine for them after they got permanent status and didn't do a whole lot while they waited for the time that they could live off their pensions. Unfortunately, some of them had a similar attitude towards their teaching and, if I taught a course that followed theirs, I often had to add the material what my colleagues didn't cover but were supposed to. That added to my work load as it took up time that I should have spent on my course.
Then again, there was little incentive for them to do otherwise. The standards in that institution were so appallingly low that it was as if the only requirements for graduation were being able to spell its name and fork over enough money to pay the fees. Still, that was no excuse.
On top of that, the department was poorly managed. The head who was there for most of my time in that place had a habit of disappearing to work on his own private projects whenever he felt like it. His deputy wasn't much better, spending most of his time shooting the breeze with his buddies or surfing the Internet after dumping almost all of his work on the rest of us. He was the laziest manager I ever knew.
Now, when I started teaching, I wasn't a brash young hotshot rookie. I was in my mid-30s and had several years of experience in industry, a master's degree in my discipline, and professional registration. I knew what was expected of people in the real world and I strove to teach to that level because I remembered how things were for me when I started working with a brand-new engineering degree. Unfortunately, many of my colleagues couldn't have been bothered as "good enough" was considered acceptable.
So, if Ed's situation was similar to what I just described, and I get the impression it might be, no wonder he has such an attitude.
Hiram, I used to take a lot of crap for all the murderious intent I wrote towards snowflakes and/or the scumfucs* in Administration - how I wanted them poisoned, stabbed, sniped, machine gunned, blown to pieces, crushed by tanks, flamethrower-ed, etc. And that's forgetting all the nasty things I said about Alcoholics Anonymous, the Libertarians, Zionism, the John Birch Society, and "kilocycle cop" ham radio operators. Calling posters "nincompoops" will not win you friends. That's all.
ReplyDeleteMerry Christmas.
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* It's a real slang word; it used to only mean fans of G.G. Allen, but has mutated to describe the lowest of the low within the punk rock community: the kind of people who ride freight trains to get to shows, have awful tattoos, constantly panhandle for money, own dogs that will always crap on your carpet. If there was a "Scary Motherfucker Monthly", they would steal it from newsstands.
Oh, dear, Strelnikov. I don't mind a few serious posts from you; it just feeds the unpredictable madman image ("he always seemed so nice and quiet. . ."). But please don't tell us you've officially, permanently, mellowed. 'Twould be a shame.
ReplyDeleteThe postscript, with its focus on esoteric information about a particularly scary subculture of a scary subculture, gives me hope. That's classic Strelnikov, leaving me wondering, just a bit nervously, "how does he know this stuff?"
At Big Corporate Online U, we don't live in society. That's what makes it so much fun. They isolate everyone from each other - you only communicate with your boss or in completely public forums, there is no water cooler - and then, since nobody trusts anyone, you need lots of rules. So everything is being cookie-cuttered and audited and regulated and standardized. And just about everyone is an obedient adjunct. Each of us is an army of one. Together, we are the corporation, but there is no sense of team. I can't complain about some group of people who might judge me. The group is too vague. It is made up of my boss - a specific person whom I know by e-mail and a few phone calls - and anonymous or never-heard-of-this-person-before, bean-counting assessment auditors. It's wonderful. Who needs a society?
ReplyDeleteStrel, you had me at "John Birch Society"...
ReplyDeleteI don't think Ed is so much a nincompoop. He merely has a crushing sense of his own self-worth in relation to his superiors.
ReplyDeleteHe's very upset at the prospect of being judged, but yet he names his colleagues "stooges, popular fops with nearly no ambition", and thinks that he is "the only one who's going after something".
Yes, Ed, these are the people who will judge you, and if you let slip for even a second that you think you are better than they are, they are going to disabuse you of that assumption very quickly. You view your colleagues with derision, and are appalled that this will be somehow held against you? Well, what did you think would happen? That they would warmly welcome someone who abhors them into the fold? They won't.
Your work is important, that is sure. But no one wants "that guy who thinks he's better than everyone else" to get tenure. No one that has to work with him anyway.
Basically, Ed needs to get over himself.
@Stella:
ReplyDeleteEd may well be keeping his opinions about his colleagues to himself but that won't prevent them denying him tenure--they only have to *think* that he has the attitude that he's better than they are.
What would cause that perception? Envy, possibly. Maybe someone has a sense of inferiority or inadequacy. Perhaps Ed reminds some or all of them of a former colleague or supervisor who they feel did them wrong.
If they desperately want to deny him tenure, they'll find or invent a reason. It may not be Ed's fault at all.
@Contingent Cassandra
ReplyDeleteThe Scumfucs are unpleasant, like Manchester skinheads in the late 1970s, but they're not as bad as the narco gangs coming out of Central and South America. I know about these groups because most have connections to each other in a vague way: skinheads know bikers who know drug dealers who work for cartels who have contact with intelligence groups (foreign or domestic), and you can't tell me that certain cults or religions aren't laundering money from criminal organizations. It doesn't all tie together in a neat flowchart, but people have this funny way of running into all sorts of other similar groups and the occasional random person. Some of the religious fanatic groups I've heard about have no contact with any of these other fringe or criminal outfits (like the Skoptsy*), others do (in the 1980s, the Hari Krishnas converted bouncers and used them as enforcers within and without that cult.) It's not a conspiracy; it's just how things operate.
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* A cult of Russian castrates in the 19th-early 20th centuries. Much like the Old Believers and some of the stranger Christians sects in Tzarist Russia, heavily persecuted.
I made the Scumfucs sound like dogshit on the heel of your shoe, but really they are something like latter-day hoboes, just scummier. That's the thing with outsider groups: you hear of one and think it's the sleaziest, most godawful group, and somebody worse comes along....the Hell's Angels used to be the big, scary group - now they're more like a gentlemens' motorcycle group.
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ReplyDeleteMaybe Ed does need to be more humble, but I was in the unfortunate position of being on the tenure track with obviously incompetent people on my committee. I hated it: when I was in the U. S. Navy, I'd learned to dread situations when my fate was being decided by dull minds, and tenure can be a high-stakes one.
ReplyDeleteBut then, doesn’t Ed remember those times in K-12, when he was smarter than his teachers? It happened all the time with me, and I suspect that many CMers had this experience too. Didn’t Ogden Nash advise that, when a pupil knows more than the teacher, that “tact should conceal the fact”?
I got tenure largely because I was bringing in lots of money from my Hubble Space Telescope projects, and involving lots of students in research, about as many as the whole rest of the physics department. I also got brownie points for spending huge amounts of time doing public outreach at the observatory, and for teaching lots of students how to take pretty pictures, two activities that many HST observers and many professors of astronomy at R1s see as beneath them. The Provost was certainly impressed, when I took my poster sporting color pictures of every one of the planets and Pluto into her office. She stammered, “What, your students did this?” She granted me tenure, even though both the incompetents on my committee had voted against me. I passed by the skin of my teeth, since there were only four people on the committee. The competent ones did vote for me, and the Provost’s vote was the tie-breaker.
That was too close. I hope that Ed learns from this. Yes, people skills are important. No one will recommend you for tenure if they can’t stand to work with you, even if you have a Nobel Prize. Unfair? Sure. Welcome to Planet Earth.
@ Strelnikov
ReplyDeleteIt's GG Allin not Allen! Geez! Where I live Hell's Angels are still scary, but they mostly only kill each other and not outsiders...which is why they aren't as scary as they used to be. They have ties to the narcos, and the only group I currently find scarier than narcos is the Lord's Resistance Army - though they don't threaten or kill my friends and their families, so it's a less personal scary.
@ Ed
Probably no one in your department is as scary as any of these people, but maybe you can get to know them and it will be more exciting than you think: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/us/03professor.html
I'd be bummed if I were offered tenure where I work, though, because I don't think I like anyone here.