Edjukation

Academe quits me “ He doesn't come right out and say it, but he alludes to it.  Too many universities traded out classic humanities for leftist pablum which blames white males for every ailment that a leftist can imagine.  Via Ron First SeMetzger Academe quits me Tomorrow I will step into a classroom to begin the last semester of a 24-year teaching career. Don’t get me wrong. I am not retiring. I am not “burned out.” The truth is rather more banal. Ohio State University will not be renewing my three-year contract when it expires in the spring. The problem is tenure: with another three-year contract, I would become eligible for tenure. In an era of tight budgets, there is neither money nor place for a 61-year-old white male professor who has never really fit in nor tried very hard to. (Leave aside my heterodox politics and hard-to-credit publication record.) My feelings are like glue that will not set. The pieces fall apart in my hands. This essay is not a contribution to the I-Quit-Academe genre. (A more accurate title in my case would be Academe Quits Me.) Although I have become uncomfortably aware that I am out of step with the purposeful march of the 21st-century university (or maybe I just never adjusted to Ohio State), gladly would I have learned and gladly continued to teach for as long as my students would have had me. The decision, though, was not my students’ to make. And I’m not at all sure that a majority would have voted to keep me around, even if they had been polled. My salary may not be large (a rounding error above the median income for white families in the U.S.), but the university can offer part-time work to three desperate adjuncts for what it pays me. A lifetime of learning has never been cost-effective, and in today’s university—at least on the side of campus where the humanities are badly housed—no other criterion is thinkable. [Full] AHEM The Politics and Aesthetics Of Black Queer Formations - Princeton University Ecofeminism - University of South Carolina Prostitution and Social Control: Governing Loose Women - Oberlin College Mad Dogs, Vampires and Zombie Ants: Behavior Mediating Infections - Vassar College Possessive Investment In Whiteness - Stanford University This is Sparta! - Brown University How To Win A Beauty Pageant - Oberlin College How to Rule the World - Bowdoin College  (Limited to a class of One, presumably) Politics of Obesity - University of California, Santa Cruz The Survival of the Whitest: Two Centuries of Racism And Evolutionary Theory - Brown University Deconstructing the Diva - De Paul University ”