I have to say that I miss the ignorance of grad school. A time when you were away of the idiocy of the administration, but were usually ignorant of the faculty. That time has ended. Unfortunately. This semester I have had to work with a woman who has no place in a classroom, who is so un-intellectual and academically dangerous that I actually cringe when I think about her poor students. I have seen a knock down drag out fight about textbooks and a snippy hissy fit about curriculum work when I would not have been surprised to find someone peeing around the catalog so that their “knowledge” would be marked and guarded.

I wish I could say that I was prepared for this crap, that I am not idealistic and insane, but alas, this is not so. I assumed that most people in academia liked their jobs, that they cared about the department, the school, the discipline, I was wrong. I was actually amazed at a few things: 1) that people are so lazy that they resent doing their jobs 2) that even if someone else does not want to do something, they don’t want anyone else to do it either if they consider it their; 3) people who go to bad grad school have a constant need to discuss their dissertation and reiterate to anyone who might be listening that they in fact have a PhD.

Wow, so this is what I gave up my 20’s for? I am keeping myself from a bridge by sheer force of will here. I am on this committee that wants to change a book for a multi-section course, required by almost all majors. The discussion? Why should everyone have to use the same book? Should we not be trusted to teach to objectives with books of our choosing. It turns out not so much. Or rather it turns out that people are so lazy they shot down the idea because, are you ready for it? They do not want to have to change their syllabus. They do not want to figure out which books they want or how to use them. In other words they do not want to do their jobs. Have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous?

By all means I think we should keep outdated anthologies because God forbid someone, anyone wants to change what they have been doing for 15 years.
Tomorrow: Trying to revise a curriculum from 20 years ago. Questions asked: “why do we need to change this?