Tuesday Hatred: Opfer des Intellekts Edition

Adam is going on the market this year, as are several others of my acquaintance, so it’s a good time to revisit an old description of the hateful situation which characterizes the academic job market and indeed the state of academic jobs after one gets one, should one be so lucky. Since I am the sort of self-loathing git who does stuff like this, even while hating himself for it, I’ll give it to you in the, like, original—Jesus.

Das akademische Leben ist also ein wilder Hasard. Wenn junge Gelehrte um Rat fragen kommen wegen Habilitation, so ist die Verantwortung des Zuredens fast nicht zu ertragen. … Aber auch jeden anderen [dh den, der nicht ein Jude ist] muß man auf das Gewissen fragen: Glauben Sie, daß Sie es aushalten, daß Jahr um Jahr Mittelmäßigkeit nach Mittelmäßigkeit über Sie hinaussteigt, ohne innerlich zu verbittern und zu verderben? Dann bekommt man selbstverständlich jedesmal die Antwort: Natürlich, ich lebe nur meinem »Beruf«[.]

And then one begins to laugh, I imagine.

There’s a computer cluster in one of the libraries at Stanford—Meyer. It’s been closed all summer but today, the first day of the new school year, it reöpened. The old iMacs have been replaced with the newest models, all sleek brushed steel-looking things with elegant keyboards. And each and every one of them is running: Windows. I’m not even sure I can work myself up to hating this, since it just seems perverse. That’s expensive hardware; if you just wanted to run Windows (and I can’t seem to discover a dual-boot option for those of us who might not so desire), why not save some bucks?

I hate how hard it is to schedule things without stepping on the toes of other things. For instance, I almost scheduled a workshop meeting for 11/4.