I am so glad other people are writing interesting things and posting them on the open-source, non peer-reviewed world wide timewasting web today! Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to click the following links and enjoy the wisdom, mystery, and pathos of it all:
- Wisdom: once again from GayProf (we call him “Code Talker”), a handy-dandy translation guide for the comments on your teaching evaluations. (That is, unless you still don’t have access to them because your university foolishly went with an on-line system that is even less fair, thorough, or reliable than the old scan-tron forms!)
- More Wisdom: Go read Squadratomagico on the importance of outside reviewers’ letters in tenure cases.
- Mystery: Someone is chopping off the tails of horses in Elbert County, Colorado. (Is there a secret gang of mortifiers of the flesh down there looking to weave hair shirts? Could be…)
- Pathos: More men getting pink slips than women in this economic depression. ZOMG the workforce may have a majority of women! The good news is that because it’s men out of work, people will respond to this as a real emergency, lest “[a] deep and prolonged recession . . . change not only household budgets and habits; it may also challenge longstanding gender roles.” Well, that’s quite unlikely, as the article later notes:
When women are unemployed and looking for a job, the time they spend daily taking care of children nearly doubles. Unemployed men’s child care duties, by contrast, are virtually identical to those of their working counterparts, and they instead spend more time sleeping, watching TV and looking for a job, along with other domestic activities.
. . . . . . . . . .
Historically, the way couples divide household jobs has been fairly resistant to change, says Heidi Hartmann, president and chief economist at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.
Do tell! Anyway, I’m off to find those tail-scalpin’ scalawags, for probably only 80 cents on the dollar. Ride hard, but don’t put your horses away wet, friends.
Historiann 
“from GayProf (we call him “Code Talker”)”
I prefer to think of myself as the “Student Whisperer.”
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Squadratomagico didn’t mention the cliques problem plaguing academic department. The infighting between cliques affects negatively tenure cases by making tenure decision less predictable and and ad hoc.
In the harder sciences the two main factors are number of publication is “good” journals and funding. Schmoozers tend to attract more money than non-schmoozer of equal quality. The number of publicans causes proliferation of garbage papers and encourages short term research topics.
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Hi, koshembos–that certainly can be an issue. I think the focus of her post was on what the tenure candidate can do to try to exert some kind of influence–clearly, if one has nutty colleagues, that’s something that one can’t probably exert much control over! (Speaking from experience, of course.)
There is coming to be more of a ranking of journals/assessing of journal quality in the humanities as well. I remember that several years ago, a memo came down from central admin. asking the History department to rank the top 10 journals in history.
As if.
Well, the chair asked us all to submit a list of the top 5-10 journals in our individual sub-fields, and amazingly enough, all of the journals that I’ve published in made the list! Who’da thunk it? (Just kidding–but these cynical bureaucratic exercises bring out the cynical careerist in me.)
Also: I think you mean “publications,” not “publicans” in your last sentence, but I like the typo that suggests that it’s casual drinking in the local pub that leads to “garbage papers and…short term research topics.” All so true!
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