Friday, March 21, 2008
(12:00 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Friday Afternoon Confessional: Oh cruell fact
I confess that my productivity this week has been low. Even my Netflix watching has fallen by the wayside -- my time-wasting has focussed solely on the internet. I confess that I'm starting to see my internet habit as a "dangerous supplement" to get me through those times (thankfully less and less common) when I am lacking in social activities.I confess that I've gotten back into the habit of reading Atrios. I confess that I have become much more emotionally invested in Barack Obama than I ever expected to be -- if he loses the nomination, I may be as angry as when Bush won in 2004. I confess that I have wasted a lot of time worrying over the New York Times election guide and searching through daily opinion polling.
I confess that though I'm completely cavalier about most intellectual property issues, I am ambivalent at best about all the "etexts" of scholarly works that are making their way through certain nearby corners of the blogosphere. I confess that I suffer from a disconnect between my knowledge of the actual situation in academia (labor exploitation, unstable and capricious publication systems, etc.) and my knee-jerk conservatism on most academic practices: reading conference papers out loud is good and should be continued, blogs shouldn't directly "count" for one's CV, etc., etc.
I confess that now that I think of it, maybe it's not a disconnect at all -- what does it matter if tenure is easier to get, for instance, if there are ever fewer tenure-track positions? Wouldn't that end up making the job search and tenure process even more arbitrary? And if we could back away from the neoliberal model of the university and return to a more traditional model, wouldn't that automatically increase the audience for what is now a "glut" of academic overproduction? (After all, a comfortably tenured professor with a reasonable course load would have more time to read journals and monographs than an overworked adjunct.) Focus on the base, not the superstructure!
I confess that taking a nap, however brief, after six o'clock is a bad idea.
