University Diaries
A professor of English describes American university life.
A professor of English describes American university life.
October 9, 2008 - 1:32pm
Start here: The more highly corporatized the university, the more corporate in their attitudes the faculty. Especially faculty imports from the corporate world -- people who aren't really professors, but who, usually for reasons of vanity, play them on campus.
I mean, if you want to understand the origin of catastrophes like Emory University's Charles Nemeroff, you need to understand his mental world.
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October 4, 2008 - 2:06pm
Universities are winsome, dappled, pathetic things.
Their two main constituents, students and professors, are cute and idealistic. They worry about Darfur and solar power and whether we can be said to reason autonomously.
Other important university constituents, like proud parents and alumni sports boosters, are also adorable in their excitement about things like intellectual cultivation and school spirit.
September 25, 2008 - 11:08am
Suicides, especially the suicides of sensitive writers we love (Virginia Woolf, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace), are a serious body blow. They anger and demoralize us. They make us brood.
Even if he'd left a tightly argued, thousand page suicide letter -- with endnotes -- we'd find what Wallace did mysterious, unaccountable.
Yet if suicide is a million miles away from our experience, it's also luridly intimate.
September 12, 2008 - 9:26pm
I'm sitting on Leslie Whittington's bench. Born 1955.
You can only follow one or two stories, and of course UD - a George Washington University professor who has spent research time in Australia - has followed Leslie's. She was a Georgetown University professor, on sabbatical, on her way - with her husband and daughters - to a research appointment in Australia. She was almost the same age as UD.
September 7, 2008 - 11:06am
The fiery debates about Sarah Palin's capacity to lead - the quality of her intellect, the nature of her academic and political preparation - focus national attention on a theme dear to UD: Higher education. Why do we call it higher? Does it matter whether one has this rather obscure, somehow elevated, experience?
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