Academe’s Extinction Event: Failure, Whiskey, and Professional Collapse at the MLA
31st May 2019
Read it.
Academe, as anyone knows who’s tried to leave it, is like a partner who is wrenchingly hard to quit. When it was good, it was amazing. God, the highs! The horizon of your happiness seemed unbounded. But the partner turned out to be a nut job who demanded nothing less than all of you. Move to a different city every year, they stipulated. Subsist on bread crumbs. Completely debase yourself. They constantly evaluated your “performance.” On a whim, they dressed you up in a sailor suit and beat you.
Christopher DeGroot: It Is the Left That Believes in White Male Supremacy
Cue four predictably middling women academics—Devin M. Garofalo, Anna Hinton, Kari Nixon, and Jessie Reeder—who decided to use Kay’s article as an occasion for punishing him for the crime of being a white man. In “The Humanities Without Nostalgia,” their response to Kay published in The Chronicle Review on May 17, Garofalo et al. claim Kay is nostalgic for the good old days when academe was a function of white male privilege. The irony of attributing (without contextual evidence) such a belief to Kay—a PhD who gave up on academe because he couldn’t find a career in it—while they themselves are all tenure-track professors was apparently lost on these bluestockings.