The way to make friends and influence people in your favor is not to guess where battle lines may lie and and attempt to butter up someone who has been in the place longer against whoever you imagine, or even know they disagree with. No matter how much I may disagree with someone or agree … More Yet More Advice to New Faculty
My family will be on the street if I cannot place this manuscript! is the place that primordial research fear comes from and I understand it very well — likely better than you know. Still I want to say that when I started to hear that anti-research drumbeat — you should not be interested in … More Et encore…
I suppose the reason people find research so stressful is that that is what they will be evaluated on. I understand completely. I do not mean to suggest teaching is not valuable. Remember, I even think administration is valuable and in thinking that I truly transgress. I do mean that I am tired of the … More That Research Stress
It seems that the Brontës had two older siblings, Maria and Elizabeth, who died due to poor conditions at the boarding school upon which Lowood (in Jane Eyre) is modeled, after which their father took the other girls out. Branwell had not had to go to boarding school. Of the remaining four, Charlotte lived to … More In the 19th Century
All right, here are the characteristics one must have as a professor, from what I have been told since age three, when I chose my PhD program, but especially since age thirty, when I finished it. A true professor must have: – Boredom with research, dislike of writing, difficulty publishing, yet great activity in these … More What is Hard for Me
So it would be my bad luck to run into one of our newer faculty members last night, who wanted to go on at me further about how bad the freshmen and sophomores are, and I said: Look, I understand your feelings and I share them, but this issue is not something I think about … More On Venting and Spouting
It is agreed, then: research and writing are not hard, if you are trained for them. The much harder aspects of academic work are: – dealing with anti intellectualism from various quarters – dealing with gender discrimination which is much more extreme in certain kinds of schools and also families – the backbreaking labor of … More That Administrative Answer
Tonight I went to class, the studio class I take in the art department, and told the professor for the second week in a row that I was too tired to start a new project, but could only revise old projects, because I was teaching five classes and doing administrative work and had a research … More “You should not be able…”
Hard is the picky work of keeping up with all your (required) course websites, all your e-mail, all your files, all the files and folders in different formats on the computers of which you will likely have more than one. That is true drudgery and when people say research and writing are the hardest things … More Other Hard Work, and Class Resentment from Me
I am starting to get punchy on this topic of difficulty and I declare that plenty of things are actually better hard – the table at which I write, for example. I think people who cannot handle difficulty should just hang it up. The hardest thing for me about academic jobs is listening to the … More Comme c’est dur, cher
coldhearted scientist وداد 