farewell to academe

[Justin Schwartz]

Some time after I was canned, one of my former grad students confided that 
the grad students at Ohio State regarded me as a holy terror because I 
expected them to actually do and think carefully about an ungodly amount of 
really hard reading, and subjected them to Socratic grilling in class. 
Interestingly the undergrads in the smaller classes liked this. In 300-500 
person classes, it was not appreciated. I don't think these high standards 
hurt me with my colleaguesa s much as being left wing and impolitic did. It 
may have inhibited student mobilization on my behalf. --jks

The reason they didn't like me as a TA was b/c I actually expected
>them to come to section prepared to intelligently discuss the assigned 
>reading.
>The problem w/having such lofty expectations of the undergrads, noted the
>department chair in his vaguely menacing letter to me, was that department
>budgets were dependent on student enrollments, and best not to upset the 
>little
>racket the department had going on. It may or may not be pertinent that the
>said department chair was a card-carrying member of watered-down cultural
>studies "market populism." Spoon-feed the students unchallenging
>pseudo-radical claptrap about how "transgressive" watching TV can be, thus
>lightening your workload so you can compose some bullshit article for a
>po-mo journal that only your colleagues can or will read. One thing that
>hasn't been explicitly pointed out in this whole discussion is how the
>various trends that have been mentioned are the most difficult to bear for
>conscientious and committed leftist academics.
>
>John Gulick
>
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