Monday, December 17, 2007

Assaholic

I meant to get to this last week, when the news turned up on the Chronicle forums, but grading and some actual job market prep got in way. Anyway, it turns out the asswipes deleting the academic job wikis were doing so for "political" reasons. Interesting, you say. What could their reasons be? What entrenched injustices are revealed by the blinding glare of their radical critique's spotlight? What revolutionary vision of a new and better academy can they offer us? Good questions, all.

But here, via Sisyphus, is their "political statement":
This edit is not malicious, but is rather our own attempt to make a political statement against the current misguided importance placed on academic job searches.

Please be so advised.

Oh my fucking god, that's stupid. Listen, fucktards, when you write a manifesto, it's supposed to, you know, explain your views. Marx and Engels did it, and so did the Port Huron Statement SDS guys. Jesus, even the Unibomber filled a few pages. But what the fuck does this explain? Why is the "importance placed on academic job searches" misguided? The importance placed by who? What the fuck are we supposed to be "so advised" about here? That all y'all are fucktards?

15 comments:

James Rocha said...

Perhaps it's misguided because the job search only determines our careers, our hometowns, our colleagues, our general level of well-being, and our general sense of self-worth. But after that, I'm not sure what we get out of our academic careers and lives!

Hopeful Philosopher said...

Sounds about right..

Bobcat said...

The only reason I can imagine for deleting the wiki: by not having a wiki, people won't be wasting as much time checking the wiki, measuring themselves against others, etc.

However, even if this is right, and I'm by no means convinced of that, it's still amazingly paternalistic.

Chris said...

I like how deleting the wiki is referred to as an "edit".

Anonymous said...

I'm not going to entirely reject the possibility that they're just deleting the wiki to fuck with us, and putting a silly statement of principle up to fuck with us more.

Anonymous said...

We will not be silenced! Forget trashing university (employment) websites, or sabotaging the APA, AAR, or other professional organizations' websites that publish job information. Forget crashing the Chronicle's website or HERC websites. Them's small potatoes. We're gonna muster ALL of our hacker powers to mess with your wikis, one of the most difficult styles of site to delete/edit/destroy!

And next time, we're going even MORE big-time. We're gonna create a MySpace page and invite you all to be our friends! HAHAHA! That will show you!

Anonymous said...

Curious how the problem is with the misguided importance attached to academic job *searches* rather than academic jobs themselves. It's as if departments are getting positions just so they can go have themselves a jolly old search.

Anonymous said...

I actually know some philosophers who would do something like this for "political" reasons. When I heard about the vandalism, their names immediately popped into my head as possible culprits.

Anonymous said...

'fucktard' is my new favorite word!!

Anonymous said...

Although their move is stupid, I must admit that when it first happened I thought it probably was being done out of frustration with the system and not by some malicious teenage kids. Often exploitation incindiates such acts.

Anonymous said...

So, what is everyone's view about the Eastern APA this year? I have interviews in 3 different hotels; one which is almost a mile away from the Marriot Waterfront. I have a feeling that it may be a disaster. Many people think that they will be interviewing at the Mariott, but this is not to be assumed. Also, there are travel considerations.

Anonymous said...

I'm sure it's easy enough to get a cab from the Marriott to the Renaissance Harborplace Hotel, which is 0.8 miles away. I've got one hour between an interview at the former and an interview at the latter, and I think this will give me plenty of time to get there, relax, gather my thoughts, and freak out anew.

Anonymous said...

'Fucktard' is also my new favorite word.

Anonymous said...

I like "Fucktard" as my new favorite insult, and "Fuckalicious" as my new favorite....

Kalynne Pudner said...

Whoa. I'm just now going back through these old posts to see what hilarity I missed before I discovered Brian Leiter's blog. "All y'all are..."??

Now y'all have seriously endangered your anonymity. Only a born'n'bred Southerner knows how to properly construct the universal second person plural. Hot damn! Y'all might be my windowless-office mates already.