"postmodern wanker"

Hey! When the Evening Standard first opened a comments site-I was edited for using the word "wanker" when referring to a poster in Iraq in regards to the human shields which said- "Go Home Wankers".

Frig was allowed to abound which virtually means the same thing.

The Brits were always running to the moderators...how un-American...

I was put on a 24 hour time-out for asking one of the Brits What's bigger than a duck?

[Ok-so it was after I was warned not to call the East German Brit ex-Pat who called American soldiers Death Merchants a goose stepper... But come on it was after multiple- Bush is an ape, warmonger...]

Ow, this story is good! And yes, the post modern wanker as well.

Years ago, I was shocked to see how quickly online discussions routinely descended into madness, with otherwise sane people attacking each other like tigers. I know some people find the world of weblogs highly polarized, but something about the mechanics of weblogs facilitates more productive conversations. Why is that?

No doubt part of the problem is the medium but perhaps part is the messagers.

To be awfully cynical, it sounds like the members of the department are racists, but good modern racists, who have been trained to see racism in others, and accordingly accuse others of being bad racists.

And the simple answer to what happened here is that these folks have way too much time on their hands. It's the complex answer too.

Well, at least they're not accusing one another of infantile leftism or bourgeois tendencies.

I guess we'll find those accusations on the tenured faculty blog.

SMG

Kind of reminds me about the saying about academic disputes--- that they are particularly vicious, because the actual stakes are so very, very small.

I've always thought conservative complaints about discrimination in academia were baseless, but this is really shocking. Someone in the department insisted that they not hire a conservative professor, which sparked a vicious debate about something else entirely. The suggestion that the department discriminate on the basis of political opinion was not even controversial.

Kind of reminds me about the saying about academic disputes--- that they are particularly vicious, because the actual stakes are so very, very small.

Well, when you consider that most of these people spend 7 years getting a degree that earns them somewhat less than a 50/50 chance at finding a job in the field, then another 3-5 trying to earn tenure, the stakes (within the group) become much higher. It's not the overall societal impact, it's the competition that makes it vicious.

The funniest aspect of this exchange is its relevance to the oft-commented "is there anti-conservative bias in academic hiring" issue. Specifically, as far as I can tell:

1) Every thread participant - every single one - agrees that it would be horrible to hire a conservative for a rennaissance lit or minority lit participant.

2) Some go so far as to say that ensuring that noone hire conservatives will promote "diversity."

3) The fight is about whether everyone has been sufficiently PC while going about the otherwise noble purpose of preventing conservative hires.

It's worth pointing out that this graduate student's basic good sense is indicated by his choice of pseudonym, which he took from Daniel Pinkwater's Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, the greatest young adult novel of our time.

The funniest aspect of this exchange is its relevance to the oft-commented "is there anti-conservative bias in academic hiring" issue. Specifically, as far as I can tell:

1) Every thread participant - every single one - agrees that it would be horrible to hire a conservative for a rennaissance lit or minority lit participant.

First, it is a story about a discussion on a listserv, not a transcript of every post. Selection could be a factor. Impossible to tell without access to the list itself, and all "Alan" tells us is that it is supposedly on the West Coast somewhere.

Second, a little careful reading shows us that:

She feared that a reactionary candidate would be hired for the Renaissance job, and warned us that the department's conservative professors might hijack the other search by hiring the "Clarence Thomas of Minority Lit."

So it would seem that a) there are conservative professors in the department, and b) they have some control over the hiring process and c) the students are concerned with conservative bias in the hiring process.

But we wouldn't want a little actual reading to get in the way of anyones foregone conclusions.