In 1869, Nietzsche was appointed professor of classical philology at Basel University. Like most junior faculty, he was bedeviled by meager wages and bore major responsibilities, such as teaching fourteen hours a week, Monday through Friday, beginning at 7 am. He also sat on multiple committees and covered for senior colleagues who couldn’t make their classes. He lectured to the public on behalf of the university. He dragged himself to dinner parties. Yet within three years he managed to complete The Birth of Tragedy, a minor masterwork of modern literature, which he dedicated to his close friend and “sublime predecessor” Richard Wagner.
Wagner showered the book with praise, but a vitriolic, painfully-memorable and yet authoritative critical reaction by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff (1848-1931) — a scholar who was to become one of Germany’s leading philologists — immediately dampened the book’s reception, not to mention Nietzsche’s class enrolments in Basel.
Apparently Thus Spake Zarathustra is in some ways a response to this poor reception. One of the things I dislike about professors is the way in which those in good positions or situations preach at, and berate those who are not — and in the case of certain assistant professors I have to deal with, the way in which the male ones just have to punch at any female ones who do not fawn on them or sleep with them, no matter how helpful or supportive we may otherwise be.
There is something really unseemly about all of this kicking down, though, as we put it in Danish — the desperate need to berate someone like Rebecca Schuman precisely because, in another market or in a more burgeoning field she would be up and coming, because she is not leaving quietly, because she is saying things you do not want to hear, because she is talking back to you.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Even if you (not you, but the ones who preach) are acting in good faith, please don’t assume that every work situation is identical and resembles yours.
D-d straight.
People seem so very concerned to maintain their narratives of perfection (or whatever it is) that they are very upset if anyone goes off script. It is sort of like the way my university’s administration is trying to get us to toe the corporate line, actually, by continually repeating the same sentences and not recognizing any other sentences except parroted back versions of their own.
Making lunch I realized my whole tenure problem was the same. I had this book mss. with revisions I didn’t like, a title I didn’t like, and a schedule I knew was unrealistic, with Minnesota. I had questions: how much did I have to write to that title, if I didn’t do the revisions *exactly* as directed how bad would that be, and what if, despite best efforts and intentions, I didn’t make the deadline — an especially important question if I were going to do revisions not of my own choosing, that I was willing to do for the sake of the press but wouldn’t do for the sake of the work or for the purpose of selling the mss. elsewhere?
Totally legitimate questions, and hardly frightening, but nobody would answer. All they would do is repeat rote platitudes they had learned somewhere — write daily, don’t fear success, doubting is procrastinating, and so on.
There is something of all this preachiness in that, they are all related.
And: I wanted to say this on Facebook, but I am prattling there entirely too much:
One of the things that irritate me about faculty who just will not stop preaching at students, adjuncts, and other contingent educators in the most condescending way they can is that they keep replaying this tape, as it were, about how to be the kind of graduate student that gets on the tenure track at an R1 and the kind of tenure track person that gets tenure there. It is all very well if one is in a field where there is that kind of work within reach, and the speech is acceptable and even nice if nobody else has already given said contingent educator certain basic information. It is, however, ridiculous to insist upon in fields where there is no work. Perhaps said faculty just have some really immature need to prove to themselves that the world is just, everyone received solely on their merits, and all those who did not get jobs, did not deserve them.
I agree. But I will add that even in fields where there are more jobs, it is also a disservice to perpetuate the myth that a job at an R1 is what you should aspire to, and anything else is second best. I always wanted a teaching position, because it suits my personality. Others have different aspirations, and that’s fine too. You’ve seen my syllabus, and I don’t consider my work less accomplished or less scholarly because I don’t have a few books under my name.
Good God. No, I did not have this news, but I Facebooked the IHE piece.
On the preaching R1 faculty, one of their big lacunae is the assumption that R1s are the hardest places to get tenure. This is simply not true. When publishing is #1, and you have R1 resources and teaching *range* & load, you have command/control over the whole situation.
Have you seen Jeb Bush “essay” in IHE? Scary.
And even scarier: Mitch Daniels (former governor of Indiana) as the new president of Purdue.