Decided to give another chance to The Nation. Opened the fresh issue and discovered that Putin is great, reasonable, wonderful, and unfairly persecuted by evil Americans. Spit on the magazine but didn’t feel any better.
The Nation seems to be going in the same direction as the nation-state. I need to go stare on the chart of the rouble plummeting to make myself feel better.
With bated breath, I’m staring at the following graph:
I could just stare at it forever because of how beautiful it is.
Does anybody know what the blue line represents?
When everybody was going, “Bring the soldiers back home! Withdraw the troops from Afghanistan and Iraq,” I was saying, “No, don’t. Just don’t. If you don’t have the money to rehabilitate them, you can’t just bring them back and let them deal with the trauma on their own.”
I predicted this was going to happen back in 2008. People are not toys. You can’t move them around like pieces of a puzzle and not expect them to react in any way.
A propos the previous post:
May I also note that it irritates me slightly that the married faculty couples (both in the department) bring one dish, prepared by the female partner. The married men in my department seem largely incapable of turning on a stove or oven; the ones who are married to non-department members always seem to note that their wives made their dish, unless they’ve chosen to bring cheese on a platter, in which case they may have made the purchase.
Is anybody still surprised that students are noticing?
Reader Evelina Anville asks:
Why do you see the student evaluation bias towards males as trivial? It is quite clear to me the bias exists. It’s not impossible for women to get good evaluations of course (mine are quite strong) but in my experience, students are far more forgiving of male professors than they are of female professors. In fact, some people on my campus did some unofficial comparisons and the male professors have (on average) _significantly_ higher evals scores; simultaneously, it’s also quite clear to me that the men aren’t significantly better teachers than the women on my campus.
Since evals tend to be an important part of a candidates tenure dossier, gender (and racial) bias on student evals strike me as an important concern. It’s not the most pressing concern in global politics of course. But I would never call something that can affect someone’s livelihood “trivial.” So I would be interested to know why you are so dismissive of eval bias.
I believe that the period of listing grievances is over. It was a crucial period, it served an enormously important goal, but it’s time to let it go. We need to stop listing grievances and start doing something to change the situation.
Let’s say this bias exists. Repeating a bizillion times that it, indeed, exists doesn’t bring us closer to any important goal.
I don’t want to offend anybody but female academics on this continent mumble. They mumble, they fidget, they smile apologetically and nervously, their hands shake, they bend their shoulders in a servile posture, and they end affirmative statements with a questioning intonation. When I see women on campus behave differently, I immediately know they are immigrants. Or they are from the generation that’s about to retire. There is a lot of research on this. Please consult it before you get angry with me.
American female academics are painfully apologetic for working. They are even more painfully apologetic for having opinions. Sometimes, I get bored during committee meetings and begin to time people who speak. The duration and frequency of female participation in actual discussions is rarely over 15%, even when women constitute the majority on the committee. More often than not, the only female voice we hear is mine. But then we hear a lot of it.
And when the university’s President came to campus, can you guess the gender of the people who got up to ask questions? Right you are, they were a man, a man, a man, a man, me, and a man. After that I left but experience tells me nothing much changed. And can you guess how many women there were in the room? At least half of all workers present, and probably more, were female. And this wasn’t exceptional. It’s always like this. Does anybody think that students are not aware of this?
It’s time to stop concluding that students have noticed this insecurity, mumbliness, self-effacement, and dithering – yes, they have noticed, how shocking – and start doing something about it.
Let’s walk into the classroom, exude authority, have a presence, present ourselves as intellectuals in our own right, and I promise, I absolutely promise that student evaluations are going to turn into a flood of exuberant and adoring praise.
I’m getting so frustrated with these constant discussions of how nobody is prepared to see women as figures of authority, intellectuals, and bosses. I look around and I see the reason why it happens. But it’s not an easy, pleasing answer that anybody wants to discuss. It’s so much easier to stop the conversation right after concluding that the phenomenon exists because the moment we start delving into the reasons for it, we face the need actually to do something about it.
