Every piece of academic commentary I’ve read this week has seemed to be going around in circles so fast that it was about to disappear up its own arse.
Folks are mad at a faculty member who said that increasing the amount of hours taught by adjuncts would decrease the number of full-time positions offered in their department. With friends like this, do adjuncts need enemies? commenters wanted to know. I guess it makes sense, if you think the goal is to retain the most people possible in adjunct positions…
Somebody wrote a whole essay about how they were perturbed by the comments on an article that claimed trying to avoid microaggressions stifled academic discourse. In particular, they wanted to know how comments agreeing with the premise could be stifled, lest they be experienced as microaggressions.
Someone else is baffled about why republicans keep saying higher education is about to fail, especially since that rhetoric makes states decrease their funding to higher education, making it more likely to fail.
Either we’ve entered the silly season or I have reached peak cynicism, but writing satires of higher education seems less and less necessary every day.
