It's academic now...

This morning which should have been afternoon except for the blessing of daylight savings time Carmen asked me a question that I am sure comes up around your breakfast table from time to time.

"Where did the expression "Ye gods and little fishes come from?"

I pondered this for a moment and replied, as is my wont, "How the %^$& should I know!"

Then we both ran off to the Machine and googled it.

No definitive answer. But there is a very British, and VERY academic article on the Oxford Journal web page. I read it out loud to Carmen in my plummiest voice and we discovered that it is also howlingly funny.

Just read it.

bloody scholars

How to get input, academic style.

A couple of years ago our administration here at AppState, as it likes to be called, rammed a new general ed reform down our throats after some very careful consultation with us. No, that's actually the term they used.

I read this little article today about the National Park Service consulting the public after their plans for the security of the Washington Monument with a distinct feeling of deja-vu all over again.

Read 'em an weep, if you are a fellow faculty member.

for some strange reason the administrator who inflicted this reform on us immediately left for a better paying job somewhere else. Before the foo-foo hit the rotary device.

I shouldn't complain: the admin has done much worse than this. Recently.

PhD humor

from Andrew Sullivan, from this place. It's somewhat autobiographical for Clemens.

Modest Celebration for Strunk and White

If you have anything to do with writing -in English, anyway- then you are familiar with Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. It is celebrating its 50th birthday. Or anniversary. Or whatever you celebrate for a book. Mark Garvey has written a tribute to it in The Wall Street Journal (Yes, occasionally I read the red-state rag). You should read it.

Strunk and White perennially remind writers to observe common rules of punctuation and syntax; to be mindful of structure and prefer succinctness to flabbiness; to aim for prose that is concrete, active and clear; and to be sensitive to current word usage. The last chapter of Elements, "An Approach to Style," caps the book's argument beautifully by offering a handful of sensible truths about how writers might achieve a style and voice all their own.

Garvey also points out how odd it is that The Elements of Style, invariably referred to as 'Strunk and White', gets up the nose of snooty academics. Not me, of course. I have it setting on my shelf.

I should read it someday.

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Uhhh...

I suppose I should explain my lack of posting right through the election (and for the record, I was quite happy with the results). It was, simply put, a perfect storm of work that hit me. Suddenly in a very short period of time I found that I had to:

1) create my promotion and tenure file for promotion to full prof. Something I have been unwilling to do for the last 7 or 8 years.

2) bring myself up to speed on a complex series of regulations, deadlines and duties as newly appointed chair of the Honors Program for the History Dept. I think the Dept chair appointed me to this to teach me to actually complete and turn in my request for committee assignments. And since this one means that students may suffer if I don't work hard at it ... well, you can see my dilemma.

3) Write a 50 question multiple choice exam, which I hate using (though it's a snap to grade).

4) Prepare various documents and minutes for the Big Conference in Georgetown where I am executive secretary

5) Read through countless application files for various job offerings here at the University since I am also on the Dept Personnel Committee (which is much worse than you may imagine).

6) Pack and get ready for the Conference in Georgetown - including doing some arcane research into the origins of the Society.

7) Remember to actually put the luggage IN the car before Carmen and I left for Georgetown (long and embarrassing story )

8) Walk the dog

You know, much more of this and this will start feeling like a real job.

You might call it Mora's revenge.

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What professors really think

Well, some of us at least. I don't agree with everything in this farewell letter by a disillusioned academic, but I also wouldn't say any of the observations he makes are untrue. Anyway, see what you think.

Views from the Designated Adult

That's what I call Rich Lowry, the hand picked successor to Bill Buckley as editor of the National Review. Whenever he talks about partisan politics he descends into incoherence (in my view) but when talking about straight forward policy analysis can make some honest sense. He is one of the few denizens of "The Corner" who can actually be invited on national TV and I don't think it is solely because of his young good looks. Here he is today:

The Bush years will be remembered for the cruel triumph of realism over illusion.

One of the era’s great illusions was spun by President Bush — that the force of freedom was so irresistible, it would prevail in a place like Iraq even in the absence of law and order. Bush himself eventually realized his mistake. The second illusion — fed by anyone who possibly could get rich from it — is bursting now.

"The cruel triumph of realism over illusion." A great motto for an historian.

it's a shame my university's administration decided to drop the history requirement for freshmen. In academia, illusion can indeed triumph over realism ... for awhile. Hmm. What a conservative thing to say.

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Iraq and an academic fiasco

Only my high respect for the decision making process in high ranking academic hires causes me to believe every word of this story: the America University of Iraq hired its chancellor without even checking out his past employment record:

The university’s lofty aspirations, as espoused on its Web site, make the selection of its first chancellor all the more puzzling. Owen Cargol, who took the helm at AU-Iraq in 2007 and resigned in late April of this year, had a checkered past that could have been revealed to university organizers with a simple Google search. The sexual harassment scandal that brought down Cargol at Northern Arizona University in 2001 was well publicized, in all of its explicit detail, but apparently never came to the attention of the U.S. officials who trusted Cargol to help reshape the Middle East.

Well, he did last a whole four months at that Arizona job (which, btw, paid $180k per annum).

I won't go into the nature of the scandal, since you can read them here. As for the mind numbing stupidity of the original hire as chancellor at Northern Arizona U, check this out.

I'll content myself with Cargol's own assessment of himself:

"I have overcome most, if not all, of my inhibitions and self-doubts. For sure, I am a rub-your-belly, grab-your-balls, give-you-a-hug, slap-your-back, pull-your-dick, squeeze-your-han, cheek-your-face, and pat-your-thigh kind of guy. I am optimistic, outgoing, physical, affectionate ... and sensual kind of guy.

I have said it over and over: anyone, and I mean any.one., who comes within the baleful shadow of the Bush administration ends up looking like a fool if not actively malevolent.


Well, there is an opening for a university administrator in Kurdistan if anyone is interested. I'd apply myself except that I don't think I can talk Carmen into living in an Islamic country in the middle of a civil war. And, I might not be what they are looking for anyway.

The poor academics

Now being an academic has turned into a put down for Obama over at the National Review quoting Michael Barone. I hadn't realized we had become so pernicious.


Well, OK - I did but I just don't like to admit it.

Curriculum Reform: How NOT to defend it

"John Lavine, the dean at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism (my alma mater), is facing scrutiny over a series of anonymous quotes in an alumni magazine story he authored defending the school's controversial curriculum overhaul." This is the start of a delicious little tidbit over at National Review written by Guy Benson. Benson gives the good dean's response"

He defended his use of anonymous quotes by drawing a distinction between a news story and a "letter" to alumni in a magazine. "I am not about to defend my veracity," he later said.

I added the emphasis on a statement that should be emblazoned on Lavine's forehead.

ps: Only someone who works within a 200 yard radius of my office will understand the true humor of this item. For the rest of you: sorry.

"Getting Iraq Wrong"

That's the title of a column by Michael Ignatieff, former Harvard professor, now a member of the Canadian parliament. Also a journalist for The New York Times Magazine. Why I've linked to it because it is not so much about why he got Iraq wrong but about the nature of political judgment and how it differs from personal judgment and from academic judgment. He feels he is in a position to make those distinctions now that he has been a politician for a few years. He even quotes Machiavelli (well, what political scientist doesn't). Here's a bit of his distinction between politics and academia.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting. They have to work with the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the even smaller number that happen to be applicable to real life. In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources.

I find this idea very interesting. But then, I am an academic.

Professors, Sex, and Reality

Just in case you were wondering what I do with my life as a university professor (and I know I work for a real university because it says so on the front gate, and on my business card) I have to tell you that it is a lot less cinematic than you see on the cinema. Take my word for it.

If you don't, read this.


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More on Books from the WSJ!

This time about America's long and not often smooth relation with the Arab world, from The Wall Street Journal:

1. An Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania by Peter Markoe (1787).
Written as a spoof to convince Americans to form a more perfect Union by convincing them there was an Arab spy haunting Philadelphia! It worked.

2. Sufferings in Africa by James Riley (1817).
The story of an American shipwrecked off Africa, captured and tortured by Arabs, finally escaping to tell the tale (and writing a best seller). Having been a slave himself, Riley included an impassioned call for the abolition of slavery. Young reader Abraham Lincoln took it to heart.

3. Valley of Vison by George Bush (1847)
Bush called for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, which would be freed from Ottoman hands by American military force! In 1847! A truly visionary exhortation by an ancestor and namesake of two of our recent presidents who ... manfully support a Jewish state in Palestine.

4. The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain (1869)
The book that made Twain a national treasure - and a small fortune. Twain did his best to present the Arabs (and everyone else he met) in the worst possible light. Alas, the American romantic vision of the Arab world remained mired in the Arabian Nights (pre-Walt Disney and Princess Jasmine version). OTOH, his views on Germans gained some currency around 1917.

5. The Arabist by Robert Kaplan (1993)
Kaplan goes on a tear ripping up the academic experts on the Arab world - who have, now that I think on it, been wrong about most things, with the possible exception of our decision to invade Iraq. Anti-academic polemic at its best, or at least most heart felt.

That's it folks - the conservative reading list on America and the Arab world! Some good stuff here, though I could come up with my own list with a slightly different slant. Fiasco might head it up.


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The Virginia Tech Slaughter

There are times when it is a positive good not to have a television set and the last few days have been one of them. Just reading about what happened is bad enough. I don't have any useful observations about this horror, though it touched the Clemens family in more ways than one. It all comes down to theodicy, I suspect.

My older brother Jesse went to Virginia Tech, back before it was known as VT. The Corps of Cadets was still nearly the sum total of the student body. Like my brother, they all expected to go into the army as 2nd Lts, and most assumed they would serve in Vietnam. There were no more than a handful of female students. He is very upset about the whole thing over on our family blog. It is one of the few times I have seen him actually write down an opinion about anything!

When I was a grad student at Florida State, my friend Budweiser worked on a local political campaign with a very kind, decent woman who devoted countless volunteer hours to causes she thought important. Her husband was a professor at FSU who had a graduate student from Hong Kong. The student flunked his prelim exams for the doctorate three times and was booted from the program. This meant he would have to return to his family in Hong Kong as a disgraced failure.

Instead, he walked across the street to a gun shop and attempted to buy a gun. The shop owner thought the guy was acting so irrationally that he refused to sell him one. The student simply walked up the street to the next gun shop and bought one there. Then he went back to his professor's office, shot and killed him and then blew his own brains out. We didn't know quite what to make of it then, either.

Now I am a professor and occasionally have come into contact with students who have concerned me, and one who genuinely frightened me. There was, just as in this case, nothing that could really be done. I certainly cannot say what the administration at VT should have done, but I can say this, after several talks with my own university administration about disciplinary problems, and watching problems my colleagues have had: Administrators are absolutely gutless when it comes to drawing a line for student behaviour. It is axiomatic here that if you have a problem with a student, the administration will not back you up.

I have no reason to think that my university is unusual in this regard.

Some Hard Questions for my Profession

In The American Scholar Thomas Mallon has some tough questions about the future of the humanities. Here's one:

How can the contemplative mind survive in the multitasking, ADD-inducing world of digitization? Are we willing to face the downside of this great electronic boon? Do we really want students reading electronic texts of the classics that are festooned with more links than a Wikipedia entry? Aren’t a few moments of quiet bafflement preferable to an endless steeplechase across Web page after Web
page?

For the other nine, click here.

Procrastination time is coming to an end...

... so why am I spending time blogging? (Anactoria, are you out there?)

Because I have a paper to write. By 1 pm on Saturday when I have to stand up in front of a group of history professors from around the country and read it.

But I am making progress. Just today I checked the conference program on the computer to see exactly what I am writing on: "Chariot Warfare and its Effects on Europe." That's a mistake btw, it should read "Chariot Warfare and its Effects on Eurasia" - no sense limiting the topic. And I've checked out the book I am going to shamelessly plagiarize ... no, make that brilliantly reformulate ... for my paper.

And while I don't know much about chariot warfare in the late Bronze Age, I know a great deal more about it than the guys who will be there this Saturday. Unless Robert Drews shows up - then I'm dead.