So… it’s been a minute. I apologize for my absence. Season Three of NECo. had to take an early season hiatus for restructuring and mental health. I’m fine. We’re fine. I’m coming back next week. I’ve got some exciting essays in the works. But…the world? Kind of on fucking fire. Even in my wildest nightmares, I never imagined a more morally corrupt existence. Sure, there were signs. Reagan. Clinton. Clinton again. Bushes. But Kamala was a cop and laughed funny, right? So this is better?
And maybe in the pre-24-hour news cycle, pre-doomscroll days, the evil was simply less accessible, so it felt less present. No, it’s inescapable, like we’re being asked to wear the burden of what we’ve let the world become.
Everything is a fucking grift, man. Timothee Chalamet sucks. Tweens are getting Botox.
I’ll admit, it’s difficult to find hope, other than in my students or in my partner/friends/family. The culture is fueled by avarice and contempt, and manifests in a corrupt everyfuckingthing. I mean, The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, the supposedly left news media suck now, how much more suck will the David Ellison era usher in?
I’m kind of going off on tangents here. I’m tangenting. I guess the takeaway is this: It has to get better, it has to take a turn towards not this, because this? This is pure heartbreak day in, day out.
Imagine if the Dems hadn’t Bernied Bernie? Where’s that timeline at?
GoT
We’re rewatching Game of Thrones. I wasn’t that into it when it ran originally from 2012 to 2017. I’m not a fantasy guy. Or an incel. So it’s not really my thing. But the scope and breadth of the production, from the storytelling to the world-building, is impressive.
Some early rewatch takeaways:
Seriously, George RR Martin and all the writers are incels. Their imaginations of love and hate manifest in the same way—a hatred of women in unrelenting cruelty and violence. I worry that the show may have influenced a generation of DOGEbros. And whatever a Clavicular is.
The current administration must have watched the show and thought: We can do this! But instead of dragons we have drones, and instead of Cersei we have DonDon, and instead of the Iron Bank we have Peter Thiel, and instead of Little Finger we have Venture Capitalists, and instead of Jon Snow we’ve got Chuck Schumer. Stephen Miller is in both Game of Thrones and our world. Look for him. He’s there.
It’s funnier than most comedies.
They fucked up the final season so bad it’s a crime.
But, maybe the castration thing is something we can explore legislatively?
GEESE
Still don’t get them. The band, not the beast. Candice says we hear differently after 30… something about cartilage and hostile architecture? The kids can hear high-pitched tones I can’t. Maybe that explains it?
SNL UK
So, the new UK version of the US cultural institution, after one watch anyway, is quite good. Still a little rough around the edges, but it seems like they’re more inclined across the Atlantic to criticize institutions as part of their humor, versus one Trump cold open followed by five sketches, Ashley Padilla plays someone’s mom. The swearing helps. That swearing is still prohibited by the FCC, but Jesse Watters isn’t a crime.
ADJUNCT STUDY
Came across this the other day:
Researchers at the Mid-Atlantic Consortium for Contingent Labor Visibility (MACCLV) (hereafter ‘the Consortium’) have released a ten-year study concluding that adjunct professors may, in fact, be ghosts.
“[The study] began via happenstance,” said lead researcher Dr. Anne Warren, a PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the Southern Methodist University of California at Detroit A&M. “I was trying to reach out to a professor who had made an impression on me as an undergrad, after receiving my doctorate. I couldn’t find them anywhere on the internet, with the exception of a Study.com profile that linked to an expired Myspace page.”
A simple excursion of intended gratitude led to a startling discovery. “We couldn’t find adjuncts listed on any departmental websites, anywhere in the country,” said Warren. “One system didn’t list any faculty at all. We even visited departments on our own campuses, but we couldn’t find any proof of adjuncts’ existence.”
Warren assembled a team of academics from across the country and disciplines, including Philosophy, Educational Administration, and Parapsychology. They began by comparing the number of course sections offered on each campus to the number of full-time faculty, and found an overwhelming disparity. “It seems that only 32% of classes had assigned faculty. The rest were designated TBA, TBD, or simply ‘faculty.’”
Next, they approached the administrations and human resources departments for employee data, though most attempted to clarify that adjuncts were not invisible, but rather “non-essentially visible” under current budget models. Though payroll records from the 78 schools showed intermittent materialization of labor costs tied to enrollment fluctuations or sabbaticals, administrators claimed they could not find a correlation between those numbers and contingent faculty.
The Consortium collected thousands of hours of security footage of non-tenured and non-tenure-track faculty entering college facilities, though there are no records of those individuals in any college’s badge access logs. Suggestions of adjunct existence came primarily from students, who reported receiving thorough, timely feedback on assignments from professors without email addresses, molding Starbucks cups in bullpen cubicles, and letters of reference from professors who didn’t seem to exist. Ultimately, no concrete evidence was found. “We checked dozens of campuses, all summer,” said Warren. “We found some unpaid parking violations attributed to ‘non-existent lecturers’ and HR documents about research funding that noted, ‘except for adjuncts,’ but little else.”
Part of the research included Learning Management System (LMS) and Outlook data across the 78 schools. The Consortium found that LMSs were accessed at impossible hours and that emails were sent on weekends from purported adjunct accounts. Further, the Consortium found syllabi—featuring inclusive, holistic classroom practices—updating themselves, innumerable open educational resources (OER) in place of outdated textbooks, and out-of-office auto-responses that had never been utilized.
The apparition of faculty memory was a constant in the Consortium’s findings. Interestingly, students’ recall of contingent instructors could not be more different from that of administration and full-time faculty, with countless stories of entertaining lectures and committed instruction. “I had this one prof,” the study quotes one student saying, “who got me really interested in poetry. But when I went to register for a class with them the next semester, there weren’t any. I couldn’t find their name anywhere. I asked my advisor. I’m waiting to hear back.” Hundreds of other students reported meaningful, sustained engagement with these entities, though senior faculty at each school dismissed such claims as anecdotal.
Faculty within the study claimed to have once been adjuncts themselves and have close friends who are adjuncts. But, nearly universally, the same faculty claim that the positions no longer exist. “I haven’t seen an adjunct in years,” one tenured faculty member at a New England state school is quoted as saying. “I just assumed it was a temporary phenomenon.”
Some administrators doubt the existence of adjuncts based on their “egregious claims,” the Consortium found. “One woman said she had two PhDs, a strong record of publication, and taught over two hundred students each semester in eight sections at three colleges for $350 per credit hour. Preposterous. All of it. That’s barista money. And where would they find the time for committee meetings and compiling action items for the provost? Utter nonsense.” When confronted with a list of over two hundred unassigned courses, the same administrator replied, “Those are taught by grad students… for exposure.”
The study conceded that adjuncts may exist but have been deemed cost-inefficient to acknowledge by administrations. Ultimately, however, Warren and her team insist that adjuncts are ghosts, campus rumors perpetuated by stories passed down through generations of undergraduates. “If adjuncts truly exist,” the study concludes, “then surely there would be documentation of classroom evaluations, recommendations for promotion, and commendations for service. But we found none, and no one responsible for looking seemed particularly concerned.”
Fascinating stuff. I’d share with my colleagues, but they can’t see me.
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