When it comes to the less reputable quarters of academia, you’re a cold-hearted, cynical bunch. Oh, don’t deny it. Some of you chuckled wickedly at that mistress of limpid prose Dr Caroline Guertin and her Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics. Some of you managed to turn the infinite nuance of artistic theory into bawdy comedy. Others somehow found amusement in Professor Sharra Vostral’s musings on the politics of menstruation and her discovery that the humble tampon is “an artefact of control.” 

I mean, really. You people are such heathens.

It’s with some trepidation, then, that I share the latest find by TDK and Mr William Briggs – Stuff Academics Like, a compendium of curios from our Towers Of Learning. One of its regular features is the Guessing Game series, where readers are invited to ponder a list of imposing conference papers and lecture titles in order to fathom which of them is the imposter. Below are a few contenders from a recent list, only one of which is officially hokum. Feel free to take a shot. 

Binary Poetics and Ecology in Battlestar Galactica. 

The Support Belt Fetish: An Example of Psychoanalysis.

Antagonistic Corpo-Real-ities.

Turtle Times: The Cross-Generational Cult Text of Turtles Forever and Gendered Readings. 

Not sure? How about,

The True History of His Beard: Joaquin Phoenix and the Boundaries of Cinéma Vérité.

Or,

Exemplarity – The Real: Some Problems of a Realist Exemplarity Exposed through the Channel of an Aesthetic Autopoeisis.

Or could it be,

Alan Ball’s True Blood Antics: Queering the Southern Vampire…?

Nope. They’re all actual contributions to the broadening of our minds and the swelling of the culture.

The imposter, of course, is,

Guattari and the Onomatopoeic Imperative: Decentering the Archaeologies of the Speech-Act.

Which is obvious now that I’ve pointed it out. Oh, there’s more.

Mary Grabar on Wisconsin and the activist curriculum.

Despite all the accoutrements of 1960s protests – the drumming, chanting, human chains, sit-ins, sleep-ins, teach-ins, and teach-outs inside the Wisconsin capitol – the issue is the retention of political power through Big Education. Unions are necessary to maintain this power. The professors are using their classroom bully pulpits to shape “change agents” who will protect their jobs by picking up bullhorns and sleeping on the floors.

More on those “change agents” and their big, warm hearts here. For an overview of eroded academic probity, see Horowitz and Laksin’s One-Party Classroom.

Jeff Goldstein on incestuous funding circles.

The ‘collective bargaining’ being ‘busted’ here is a money-laundering scheme that has union leaders taking money from the taxpayers that the taxpayers can ill afford (and can’t themselves ‘bargain’ on), giving it to teachers in raises and benefits, collecting it back in forced union dues, and then funnelling that money back to the Democrat party at a rate of 96%.

And Stephen Hayes and John McCormack note the Wisconsin saga’s strange inversions.

The absurdity of the Democrats’ outrage was too much. They weren’t merely wrong on a procedural point. They were accusing Republicans of “making a mockery of democracy,” operating like a “banana republic,” and, in former labour secretary Robert Reich’s words, conducting a “coup d’état.” All the while, Democrats were hiding in another state trying to prevent a newly inaugurated senate from holding a vote on vital state business. But in the end, senate Republicans had found a way to vote. The Assembly passed the bill on Thursday. Scott Walker signed it into law on Friday. And that is what democracy actually looks like.

From here, inversion seems to have been a recurrent theme of events in Wisconsin. As when activist doctors invoked the virtue of “public service” while handing out fake sick notes to absentee teachers, thereby leaving the taxpayer with a multimillion-dollar bill for work not done. Maybe that’s the “social justice” we hear so much about.

One charming detail of the protest was this comment,

Walker doesn’t HAVE a college degree. ‘Nuff said. 

A theme eagerly seized upon by other brave defenders of The Working Joe. Strange how readily supposed egalitarians resort to class condescension.

 As usual, feel free to add your own.

Made of oak, walnut and aluminium, a box that turns itself off.

Big Man Japan. // Space Hoppers in Venice. // You Are Listening to Los Angeles. // Time lapse antennas. // Cassini meets Saturn. // Esoteric sausage. // Know your spiders. // Cells. // Water. // The world of pizza boxes. // Marmite products rated. Marmite cashews? Why was I not told? // Bridges seen from Google Earth. // Little street dramas. // Dogbrella. // 1920s Egypt, in colour. (h/t, Coudal) // National Public Radio, for people who are “more educated, fair and balanced than conservatives.” // All the cool kids will want one of these. // Big caves in Vietnam. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus) // Bill Bailey’s rather nifty guide to the orchestra.

John Rosenberg wonders whether female students really need “stereotype inoculation.”

New research summarised in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Online, People Learn Best from Virtual ‘Helpers’ That Resemble Them,” argues that women and minorities prefer instructors of their own race and gender even if those instructors are not real people but artificial, computer-generated “‘helpers’ or virtual agents that pop up on a screen and guide people through a program.” Most people might think it odd that one of the clearest effects of our mania for “diversity” is that people are increasingly race- and gender-conscious and thus estranged from people who don’t look like themselves, but it’s not odd at all. It’s entirely predictable.

As I noted here, there are some who seem to believe that the way to get past small differences in physiology is to continually fixate on small differences in physiology.

Speaking of which, John Leo spies a willingness to cater to other, less highbrow educational needs.

A course on sex taught by psychology Professor John Michael Bailey recently featured a naked woman being worked on by a man wielding a sex toy… The 600-student course, which for some reason is one of the largest at Northwestern, features all kinds of sexual expression and guests that include swingers and convicted sex offenders. The optional, after-class sex-toy demonstration, Bailey said, “helps us understand sexual diversity” – possibly the first time a state-of-the-art vibrator demonstration was stuffed in under the campus diversity umbrella.

Tom Paine quotes Oscar Wilde on socialism and selfishness.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live; it is asking others to live as one wishes them to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type… It is grossly selfish to require of one’s neighbour that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions.

Which reminded me of this from the Devil’s Kitchen: 

A racist is a stupid, ignorant bigot but at least he cannot, and will not, try to force me to believe what he believes and force me to pay for the implementations of his beliefs. Socialists do. So, socialism is worse than racism.

Update:

James Panero on the wrong kind of transgressive art.

For the administrators and students at Pratt, the problem isn’t political art itself, says DeQuattro, but the nature of his politics, which are conservative.

Update 2:

Russell Nieli on Jonathan Haidt and academic fiefdom.

We are a tribal moral community… We have sacred values other than truth; we have taboos that constrain our thinking; we have almost no moral/political diversity; and we have created a hostile climate for graduate students who don’t share those sacred values. 

Feel free to add your own.