Comments on: Dead wood: a person, a place, or a state of mind?

By: “Dead wood,” mandatory retirement, and advancement (oh my!) Plus the Isley Brothers. : Historiann : History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 15:49:17 +0000

[...] wield it like a truncheon. You all know what side of this I’m on–for a reminder, see my post about “dead wood” from two years ago. I’ll just reiterate my suspicion that “dead wood” is mostly [...]

By: Privatization: what could possibly go wrong? : Historiann : History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 16:09:35 +0000

[...] “research” than in teaching their students and/or just taking up space as “dead wood!” How do we know university education as it is now actually works, without endless [...]

By: Deadwood « A Crumbling Ivory Tower?

Deadwood « A Crumbling Ivory Tower? — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:21:00 +0000

[...] discussion of deadwood by faculty and administrators as yet another attack on tenure – see Historiann’s blog for more on this [...]

By: Shooting fish in a barrel : Historiann : History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:01:26 +0000

[...] all of our committee work good-bye! (Won’t you miss all of those senior faculty then? “Old farts” with tenure sure are useful for lots and lots of committee work.) But, whoever does the work, Taylor’s suggestions are just collections of fashionable [...]

By: Jim Chen

Jim Chen — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 05:51:47 +0000

Hi Historiann,

Thanks for engaging the tenure discussion that we began at MoneyLaw. I would have commented earlier, but I’ve been far away from my computer.

1. “Mensch” is grammatically masculine in German, but in practice the word covers women as well as men. After all, “Mensch” means “human being.” If you want an unequivocally feminine noun, I recommend “Frau.” It’s hard to reject a word whose meaning is “woman.”

2. As I’ve made clear in my posts (which you were kind enough to link), I don’t favor a one-size-fits-all approach to academic merit. There are valuable people fitting all sorts of different niches in the academy.

3. The real German concept at issue is “Arschlochkeit” (the condition of being an @sshole), which does apply beyond the boundaries of hockey.

4. Speaking of which, I do plan to continue the discussion without using hockey as a frame of reference. MoneyLaw has caught more “Flak” (noch ein deutsches Wort!) over the hockey references than anything else in this series of posts.

5. I agree in the end that the use of “deadwood” as a pejoratives obscures more legitimate criticism of academic employment.

Best wishes,
Jim Chen

By: Historiann

Historiann — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 03:22:48 +0000

Oh, snnnapp, Rad! Oh, no, you di’int! Sir, I believe you are now officially an old fogey. Well, you can have the last laugh on them when you vote against tenuring them!

And Sis: I wouldn’t say that being subjected to that particular set of Old School ideas (sexism) is ever healthy or appropriate, but I think it’s good for departments to offer a diversity of methods and critical approaches (i.e. theory people and not-theory people.) I feel kind of badly for those old-school literary critics: after the mid- or late 1980s, it was all over for them, and they either needed to Join or Die. I certainly can’t begrudge them their crankiness, but it’s unfortunate that many of them may have equated the arrival of theory with the arrival of colleagues who didn’t look or think just like them.

By: Rad readr

Rad readr — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 02:41:49 +0000

I’ll tell you where you can find some dead wood — among the ranks of the jr untenured prima donnas. Who says you shouldn’t have to teach a whole lot and mentor students and be on committees just because you have to do your research? Isn’t the point that you have to be able to do all of the above –and more. Some of these people think they’re too brilliant to talk to undergrads.

By: Sisyphus

Sisyphus — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:37:13 +0000

We have several crusty old profs who refuse to have anything to do with grad students at our R1 — mainly because they have not researched or published anything since “theory” came into the academy and people started arguing we should look at wider canons that included women and non-white people. Their attitude is “Gah, I’m going to teach biographical analyses of Fitzgerald and Hemingway just like I did back when I knew them personally” or whatever.

However, I don’t mind having them around as they put the extra time and attention into working with undergrads, mentoring them, hanging out with them, running the ugrad essay contest, etc. So it’s like they’re working at a SLAC instead of an R1 and students get to see a wide range of approaches besides a range of attention paid them — something that the tenure-track research-machine people have to skimp on. Maybe the rampant sexism isn’t all good but experiencing some real old-school gender attitudes can be an educational experience in itself, heh.

By: Historiann

Historiann — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:26:33 +0000

No–you’re right, Indyanna. I was thinking 60s and EARLY 70s, but didn’t actually type it up that way. I’ve heard it was OK until 1971 or ’72, and then the long, dry spell of the 70s and 80s began. It’s better now than those years, but still very tough competition.

By: Indyanna

Indyanna — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:18:03 +0000

My tiny caveat: Unless I’ve gone totally dandelion, people hired in the ’70s (not me) met far greater competition than anytime since the early 1990s, since they were looking at applicant/opening ratios of 300-400/1. There were, it’s true, still some jobs being filled on a 1/1 basis, with no advertisement, but that system was being overthrown. Sorry to go “Old Man and the Sea” on this, but I’m pledged to contest crisis-creep. The snows really *were* deeper back then. Now the ’60s were different…