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This website is the first to appear after you do a google-search for Why professors are assholes.
Dear curious reader,
Please let me know if you want to talk about why professors are assholes. Me and many of the readers of this website, aspiring academics in various fields, would be more than happy to share our thoughts.
Sincerely,
Petya
Dear curious reader,
Please let me know if you want to talk about why professors are assholes. Me and many of the readers of this website, aspiring academics in various fields, would be more than happy to share our thoughts.
Sincerely,
Petya
9 Comments:
Hilarious factoid about your site. :)
It's always interesting to see where grad students channel the loathing side of their love/hate relationship with academia. Professors have been targeted here, in this entry, but I like to blame entire disciplines for their short-sightedness and internal orthodoxies - even mine, anthropology.
I feel like during the professionalization process, scholars' fields, which the scholars themselves have created and contributed to, take on lives of their own, becoming these monolithic, uncontrollable educational entities. We think we're in control of our area of interest, when we're actually being controlled by it. (I mean, come on, we're all aware of things we can and can't do within our disciplines. Such rules are usually clearly outlined, understood and enforced.) The fact that we don't always seem to recognize this process fully further reinforces the dictates of academic disciplines, since we begin to think that it's out of our hands - that there's nothing we can do about it.
Writing this I realize how similar all of this sounds to Bergerian notions of externalization, objectification and internalization. (What can I say? I read the Sacred Canopy this year, and it rocked my world.) Still, some of good 'ol Peter Berger's ideas can help us understand our own alienation, and how we help these fields become the subcultures that they are.
Unfortunately, to implement change within them, it takes a very special, charismatic and well-respected person or group of people. And even more unfortunately, those people aren't us, the grad students. We have to at least play the game until we defend our dissertation before we can even begin to start thinking of changing the game's rules. And even then, tenure is required, because without tenure you're still stuck in the game, albeit with more flexibility in having to actually follow those rules. By the time you can shake things up with the authority you need, you're so tired of the whole damn game that you just find yourself drifting into complacency. Either that or you do say what everyone's actually thinking (but rather die than to admit to) at conferences and other gatherings, but it's slanted as witty, quirky, ballsy, etc. by everyone else, because they're so entrenched in the game - so indoctrinated - that they recognize it's "out of line" for them to say that. Even though they would all like to, and in fact dream of that day when they can.
Wow - I had no idea I was going to say all of that. Well, there, I said it, and I'm not going to take it back. :)
The above post was me, Brooke, by the way...
meanwhile, i get hits for "boobs russia" and "pictures cemetery sex".
hooray for me :-)
hehe...funny? sad? both?
I can tell you why they (not all but many) are assholes. It is because they are often pre-occupied with the own research and have no inherent desire to assist much less mentor graduate students. The marginal effects of their insatiable need to feel like a mental colossus is highly correlated to their lack of social and interpersonal skills. That being said, I would like to point out that Ernesto Calvo is a brilliant political scientist, a wonderful professor, and a damn good person.
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