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Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths, Total Madness (Jerusalem Day Edition)

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I know it’s a little morbid, and possibly a little mean-spirited, but this being “Jerusalem Day,” I couldn’t resist juxtaposing the opening passage of a touristy photo album of Jerusalem I own with some You Tube videos of Jerusalem today.

The Holy Land has always exerted a fascination for people from almost every part of the world. It is, of course, a land like any other, but made holy by its association with three of the world’s great religions, those of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. …

The jewel of the Holy Land is, of course, Jerusalem. It is doubtful if any other place on earth can have been more revered, reviled, destroyed, rebuilt and built over than Jerusalem, but despite this, its magic still comes through to captivate new generations.

“Its magic.” I first read that passage at age 9, and used it as the opening of the sunny, well-received presentation I did as the only Muslim kid in Jewish day camp at the YM-YWHA of Metro New Jersey (now the JCC of Metro West). “Jerusalem, Home of Three Faiths,” is what it was called. Everyone clapped. Then, in celebration of God’s creation and the brilliance of my presentation, we had shabbos: we went downstairs, ate some challah, drank Manischewitz grape juice, and went outside to sing Don McLean’s “Waters of Babylon” by a babbling brook in a grove of weeping willow trees by Northfield Avenue. (I’m really not making any of that up.) Jimmy Carter was President. Sadat had just gone to Jerusalem. The Camp David Peace Talks were taking place. Peace seemed possible. Did I mention that I was 9, and very impressionable?

So here’s Jerusalem today–The March of the Flags on Jerusalem Day 2014, celebrating Israel’s conquest of East Jerusalem in the 1967 War. It’s in today’s news as well.

If the Nazis have the right to march through Skokie, should anti-Arab Jews have the right to march like this through Arab East Jerusalem? Sure–assuming that Arabs can do the same thing in the Jewish Quarter.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that the Nazis never did march through Skokie. The ACLU argued that the Nazis had the right to march through Skokie–and the Supreme Court agreed–but ultimately, the Nazis held their rally in the Federal Plaza in Chicago. I’m inclined to think that rallies like the Nazis-in-Skokie or anti-Arab-Israelis-in-Arab-East-Jerusalem ought to be held at places that involve a buffer between the potentially warring parties. Actually, it’s an interesting question whether a rally that will predictably induce violence–rather than explicitly incite it–ought legally to be required to take place in a location that facilitates more effective policing in anticipation of violence. The antics of the Westboro Baptist Church provide a similar (though not identical) case in point.

In any case, the Jerusalem Day video gives new meaning to the old Offspring song, “Come Out and Play (Keep ’em Separated).”

It goes down the same as the thousand before
No one’s getting any smarter, no one’s learning the score
Your never ending spree of death and violence and hate
Is gonna tie your own rope, tie your own rope, tie your own…

Here’s a rally by the Islamic group Hizb ut Tahrir in the Al Aqsa Mosque compound. The compound is just a few hundred yards (if that) from Damascus Gate, depicted in the previous video.

You have to wonder whether Hizb ut Tahrir really wants to drag the Pakistani military into this. I guess they’ve forgotten that during Black September in 1970, the Pakistanis sided with King Hussein against the PLO,  drove them out of Amman by brute force, and killed thousands of Palestinians in the process (ironically, that’s the video that queues up immediately after this one on You Tube). They also seem to have forgotten that so far, the Pakistani military has started every war that it’s fought, and lost every war that it’s started–including a genocide of its “Muslim brothers” in Bangladesh. I’m assuming that if Hizb ut Tahrir really thinks that the Pakistani military is killing “its brothers” in its fight against the Pakistani Taliban, they’re suggesting by implication that they regard the Taliban as the rightful rulers of Pakistan. Which I guess makes the rest of Pakistan almost literally chopped liver.

I’ve saved the best for Christianity. I was going to insert a video of a speech by Glenn Beck from 2011, but I decided on this gem instead. Incidentally, this video ends at 3:22, not at 5:39, so persevere for three minutes and watch it until the end. The long blank spot that follows the presentation is merely symbolic.

Well, that clarified everything. “For those who are led by the Spirit are the children of God” (Romans 8:14). I guess St. Paul wasn’t kidding about “children.”

What was it Don McLean sang? “We lay down and wept”?

Happy Jerusalem Day!

Postscript, May 18, 2015: Here’s the New York Times’s coverage of Jerusalem Day. You’ll have to read it to the end to understand this mordant passage:

The noise of the marchers thickened, along with the sound of stun grenades outside.

As dinner ended, the younger children raced to the balcony to see what was going on. “Come back!” the women shouted, to no avail.

Sighing, Umm Nidal, in a long head scarf and skirt, joined them. They were the only Palestinians leaning out to watch the marchers; nearby, soldiers stood on a roof.

Seeing the teenager’s rude gesture, the 3-year-old twins Razan and Raghad thought it was a friendly gesture and waved back. “Bye-bye!” they called.

Obligatory End-of-the-Semester Idiocy

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Last semester, it was Taylor Swift. This semester, it’s Scary Psycho Telekinetic Girl.

Honestly, by the end of the semester, I feel like the protagonist of this video and wouldn’t mind having her powers to use on my classes.

The reactions of the customers in the video are classic. I’m inclined to think that you can infer (or at least hypothesize) quite a lot about the nature of their reactions just from the looks on their faces.

The initial reactions are surprise and shock.

The second set of reactions is a warring mixture of fear and curiosity: “get me out of here,” with a bit of “but I’ve got to stay and see this.”

The woman at 1:33 has a look on her face that looks to me like a cross between disbelief and schadenfreude.

Around 1:44, when Telekinetic Girl pushes the chairs away from her (after discovering or re-discovering her newfound telekinetic powers), people start to panic and flee. My favorites are the ones around 1:47. One woman exclaims, “Oh my God, holy fucking shit!” but the emotion she exhibits is a bizarre (but totally understandable and familiar) mixture of panic and amusement. The woman pictured just after her is obviously frightened out of her mind, but insists on whipping out her phone to take a picture of the scene. These bizarre emotional combinations wouldn’t even seem possible if we didn’t see them exemplified right there on video.

Watching these conflicted people, I couldn’t help thinking of a passage in Plato’s Republic describing Leontius’s struggle with a similar-and-yet-differently alluring scene:

For a time he struggled with himself and covered his face, but finally, overpowered by his appetite, he pushed his eyes wide open and rushed toward the corpses, saying, “Look for yourselves, your evil wretches, take  your fill of the beautiful sight!” (Republic, 439c-440a)

Leontius is drawn to the scene because he’s sexually aroused by what he sees–yet knows he shouldn’t be. He knows that the sight of the corpses will trigger the arousal, and therefore both wants to, and doesn’t want to, trigger them. So he dissociates by blaming the desire on his eyes, as though his eyes were agents of their own.

The people in the cafe are drawn to the scene out of a sheer (Aristotelian) desire to understand the scene unfolding before them. I think it’s clear that they can’t take the scene at face value, but also can’t (in the moment) rule out the face value reading. At one level, common sense tells them that they cannot be witnessing a real-life version of a Stephen King film. But fear of the unknown tells them–tells all New Yorkers–“if you see something, don’t say anything; just run away.”

The woman at 1:52 has a facial expression that says: “At this point, I honestly don’t want to untangle what’s going on here; my curiosity is far less important to me than my safety, so I’m getting the hell out of here. Whatever has happened here is so not my problem!”

The scream at the end is totally gratuitous, but exactly how I feel after I get final papers at the end of the term (and start to grade them).

It’s a terrible confession to make, but I really wish I could enact this scene in my classes.

Postscript, May 17, 2015: I don’t know if he’s in on the joke or not, but at 2:00 there’s a guy toward the back of the cafe (white T shirt) who briefly looks up at the commotion, then goes back to his conversation as though the whole thing were an everyday occurrence. Another amusing reaction is the construction worker who stands frightened but transfixed, as though he were on the job and not allowed to leave.

B.B King is Gone: RIP

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Though I’ve been to B.B. King’s Bar & Grill maybe a half dozen times, I regret to say that I never managed to see B.B. King perform there. I don’t even own a single album of his (embarrassingly, I’ve spent years borrowing B.B. King CDs from the public library). But no one can pick up an electric guitar wanting to play the blues (or blues-oriented rock) without somehow doing so in B.B. King’s shadow. I think I can say from first-hand experience that his style was much imitated, but never quite equaled (or in my case, approximated).

He died last night in his sleep at the age of 89. I’ll put more obits in this space as I get the chance. Here’s a nice tribute, with links, via Chris Sciabarra’s “Notablog.”

Poetic Justice for Andrew Jackson

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An amusing letter to the editor of The New York Times by my colleague, Carl Lane:

To the Editor:

Re “Should Jackson Stay on the $20 Bill?” (Op-Ed, May 5): I agree with Steve Inskeep that it’s time to remove Andrew Jackson’s portrait from the face of the $20 bill, not only for the reasons he offers but also because Jackson had no faith in the integrity of the paper money system. Indeed, he destroyed the Second Bank of the United States, which issued the national currency.

The fact that Jackson’s face is on the bill is extraordinarily ironic because it’s inconsistent with his administration’s monetary policy. The honor should go to someone who truly merits it.

CARL LANE
Lodi, N.J.

The writer is a professor of history at Felician College and the author of “A Nation Wholly Free: The Elimination of the National Debt in the Age of Jackson.”

The Saudi-Israeli Double Standard

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When the Israelis did exactly this in Gaza last year, there was plenty of indignation to be heard in and around the academy, despite the fact that the Israeli military action took place during the middle of the summer:

The Saudi escalation over the last few days had drawn sharp criticism from human rights groups as well as the United Nations. Saudi officials told residents of Saada on Friday to leave the area and declared the entire province a military zone.

In a statement on Saturday, Johannes van der Klaauw, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator, said the threats against Saada had “put countless civilians at risk.”

“The indiscriminate bombing of populated areas, with or without prior warning, is a contravention of international humanitarian law,” he added.

Mr. Saleh’s residence in Sana sits in a densely populated area, and near large shopping malls. Several airstrikes hit his compound overnight and early Sunday, slightly injuring a grandson and a brother-in-law of Mr. Saleh’s and two other people, according to people close to the former president who asked not to be named to discuss what happened.

For some reason, when the Saudis do the same thing–bomb indiscriminately within a declared military zone–there’s less comment, at least from the academy (though note the comment of the United Nations, which contradicts the usual pro-Israeli propaganda that Israel is the only country singled out for criticism by the UN). The usual explanation for the scrutiny of Israeli military actions is that as Americans (or Europeans) we’re complicitous in what the Israelis do, given the degree of military and economic support we provide them. But exactly the same thing applies to the Saudis. The degree of support may differ, but the difference makes little difference.

It won’t be easy for the US to distance itself from the Saudis, given our addiction to their oil, and our delusion that their absolute-totalitarian monarchy guarantees regional stability. I doubt we’ll hear anything useful from the academic departments in this country and elsewhere that are funded by Saudi sources. But it’s time to contemplate the idea of some equivalent of Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions from Saudi Arabia, which deserves it more than Israel does. The idea seems to have been contemplated here and there, but not in any sustained way.

So far, the best idea I’ve heard comes from my father:

I won’t do hajj in Saudi Arabia until they turn Mecca and Medina over to a responsible private entity that knows how to engage in crowd control, like the Disney Corporation. I don’t intend to give the Saudi kings my money for any reason, much less in the name of God.

Postscript, May 16, 2015: Some interesting and relevant material I’ve encountered, since writing this post.

(1) “Israel Says Hezbollah Positions Put Lebanese at Risk” (New York Times, May 13):

Effectively, the Israelis are warning that in the event of another conflict with Hezbollah, many Lebanese civilians will probably be killed, and that it should not be considered Israel’s fault.

“The civilians are living in a military compound,” a senior Israeli military official said at military headquarters in Tel Aviv, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing delicate intelligence matters.

The situation mirrors the one that the Saudis are confronting in Yemen (discussed in the original post).

(2) “Israeli Demolition Plan for Bedouin Village Sparks Outcry” (New York Times, May 14):

After years of legal battles, Israel’s Supreme Court last week cleared the way for the government to uproot the nearly 60-year-old Bedouin Arab village of Umm al-Hiran, a dusty hill of ramshackle dwellings without proper electricity or water hookups, and in its place build “Hiran,” a new community seemingly catering to Jews that is expected to feature a hotel and country club.

NB: Umm al Hiran is in Israel proper, not in the Occupied Territories.

At first glance, the Israeli action here seems similar to urban renewal elsewhere (see Matt Faherty’s description of urban renewal in Dharavi, Mumbai, or Martin Anderson’s account of the American version). But scholars like Oren Yiftachel and Maha Samman have argued that the Israeli version involves a systematic form of planning-based “ethnocracy.” Arguably, it resembles our own placement of Native Americans on reservations.

Actions like this, I take it, explain the hostility to Lockean-type conceptions of property on the part of Palestinian political theorists and activists I’ve met: if from an Israeli perspective the Bedouins are “wasting” their holdings, they lose their entitlement to them (cf. Locke’s Second Treatise, para. 31.7-15). Put another way, Bedouin property seems to be regarded as “blighted” in a way that justifies urban renewal with an offer of compensation (cf. Berman vs. Parker [1954]). (Richard Epstein’s discussion of urban renewal is worth consulting in this context: Takings, pp. 178-80).

(3) “Campus Debates on Israel Drive a Wedge Between Jews and Minorities” (New York Times, May 10): a much discussed piece on tensions arising from the successes of BDS on American college campuses. Here are the letters responding to it. Here’s the Public Editor’s discussion. A broader view of the divestment issue. Divestment is voted down at Princeton.

(4) The controversy over Ayelet Shaked, Israel’s Justice Minister-designate, and apparently, a fan of Ayn Rand: Criticism from Ha’aretz. A profile from The New York Times. Electronic Intifada, with a translation of her incendiary Facebook post (later taken down). I don’t know Hebrew, and can’t vouch for the accuracy of the translation; its accuracy has been disputed (by Shaked). [Just to clarify: she didn’t write the post; she re-posted it, with evident approval of its claims.]

(5) Back to the Saudis: The Saudis are unhappy that we aren’t willing to go to war with Iran to defend their kingdom. Meanwhile, the Pakistanis, while assuring the Saudis of their support in principle, have voted not to send troops to defend them against the Houthis. Meanwhile, the Saudis inform us that they expect better of Pakistan. Frankly, I hadn’t expected so much. The (imperfect) text of the Pakistani resolution. For once, I’m proud of Pakistan.

Postscript, May 30, 2015: It turns out that there is a boycott against the United Arab Emirates–or more precisely, against the Guggenheim in the UAE–led by an organization called the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition. This boycott doesn’t seem much different in goal or rationale from the academic-cultural boycotts of Israel that are so bitterly condemned as evidence of anti-Semitism. It certainly contradicts the claim that Israel is unique in being “singled out” for boycott.

I just happened to read about this boycott in an Op-Ed in yesterday’s New York Times, and haven’t had the chance to study it. I’m curious as to whether the author of the the Op-Ed can be construed as supporting or calling for a boycott himself. He doesn’t quite come out explicitly in favor of the Gulf Labor Artist boycott, but he certainly supports its aims. He also seems informally to be censuring NYU, the Guggenheim, and the Louvre; does that amount to a call for a boycott until they change their policies? I’m not sure.

The question is relevant in virtue of the stance taken by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which holds–puzzlingly, in my view–that there is a fundamental difference in kind between the sort of censure that the AAUP makes of institutions that fail to satisfy its strictures on academic freedom, and boycotts of the sort recommended by BDS and (I take it) the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition.

Martha Nussbaum has (to my mind unconvincingly) tried to flesh out the argument in a 2007 article in Dissent, “Against Academic Boycotts.” “Censure,” she claims (by contrast with boycotts), “does nothing to diminish the academic freedom or access of individuals: professors teaching at censured universities are actually helped in their attempt to secure their rights, and in the case of government-directed censure, academics and citizens generally are not affected at all.”

Contrary to Nussbaum, I don’t see how either censure or boycotts violate anyone’s freedom. In claiming that boycotts violate freedom, she seems to be presupposing a rather idiosyncratic conception of freedom; I’d be curious to know which one she has in mind, who has defended it, and where. Both censure and boycotts can diminish access, depending on the (highly contingent) consequences that arise from them.

Again, contrary to Nussbaum, if censure damages an institution’s reputation (which seems to be its purpose), the damage might affect enrollments, which might in turn affect whether or not the institution stays open. Having your institution closed certainly affects an individual’s “access” to the job that they had there.

Once again, contrary to Nussbaum, professors teaching at censured universities are not helped in securing their rights if they think that the censure was unjustified and if the censure damages the reputation of the institution. In that case, rights aside, they’ve been dealt with unjustly and/or harmed.

Finally, in the case of government-directed censure, the censure takes place in the name of every citizen. Some citizens may reject the basis of censure, and are certainly affected by a government that wrongheadedly directs censure in their name. So the case of government-directed censure turns on the justifiedness of the censure. When Narendra Modi was barred from entering the U.S., it seems obvious that the people who invited him here to speak were affected by the ban: they couldn’t hear him speak (at least in person). Likewise in the case of Tariq Ramadan: Notre Dame invited him to teach, but its expectations were adversely affected by his not being allowed into the country. I regarded (and regard) the Modi ban as justified and the Ramadan ban as unjustified, but in both cases, it seems obvious that citizens were affected by them.

In any case, I hope to blog on this and related issues sometime this summer.

Yes, We Have No Smartphones Here

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We’ve been getting a fair bit of traffic the past few days–partly adjunct-driven, partly Faherty-driven–but I’m going to be traveling for the next few days, so I’m going to be slow with responses to comments and comment approvals. And no, I can’t do any of that on the road, because I don’t have a Smartphone. And no, I don’t want one, and no, I’m not going to answer any questions about why I’m the only person on the continent not to have one. I still have a flip top phone, the same one I’ve had for the last decade. I’m not upgrading. Let it go.

Adjuncting: Conversations Worth Having, and Not

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BHL Moderator on Jason Brennan and blog policy:

Jason Brennan deleted Robert’s comments and banned them on his own. Per blog policy, he has the right to delete

Jason Brennan on BHL and blog policy:

There’s no official BHL policy.

Annotation by Matt Zwolinski, responding to a query of mine on blog policy:

How you leap from “I…think it is a good idea to publicly indicate when you have [revised a post]” to the conclusion that I approve of secretly deleting threads “simply so as to make the commenter look stupid while preserving the blogger’s illusion of infallibility” is beyond me.

Baffling, isn’t it? How could anyone “leap” to that crazy conclusion? The Moderator of a prominent blog is asked pointblank whether he approves of one of his bloggers’ deleting whole threads in the name of “revision.” He goes out of his way not to answer the question asked, but makes clear in what he says that it is permissible to delete whole threads so as to preserve the blogger’s illusion of infallibility. When he (or his blog) then comes out and ratifies the permissibility of thread-deletion via a “policy” that no one had ever heard of until he announced it, what are we to make of his previous bafflement at the very suggestion that such a policy might come into existence? Was it really a “leap,” or was it an inference to a conclusion that was obvious to anyone who’d bothered to connect a few dots–and that has now been made explicit by the very people who dismissed it as the ravings of an inconsequential troll?

Reading BHL on the adjunct controversy, I have trouble believing that I’m reading something written by reputable professional philosophers for public consumption. Could the profession be more thoroughly dragged into the mud than by an approach to discourse in which people start the conversation by insulting one another, change whatever claims they’ve made whenever they want, delete whole threads (and whole posts) whenever they want, and ban people in the middle of the conversation for any reason or none? How could anyone expect to be taken seriously on moral grounds after a performance like that?*

Not that the pro-adjunct side of the debate (especially the Twitter-based faction) has been all that elevated, either. Whoever had the brilliant idea of attacking Brennan-smiling-by-the-edge-of-a-lake etc etc. didn’t exactly do adjuncts any favors. What they managed to do instead was to divert attention away from the issues adjuncts actually face, and create the red herring of a class war/pissing contest between a guy who thinks that six months at GEICO gives him permanent credentials as a member of the proletariat, and people who think that a guy standing by a lake can be treated like a character out of a play by Brecht. But that’s the conversation we now have–along with the puerile tweeting about Brennan and Magness’s race, their facial characteristics, and their Mommy issues; the taunting of adjuncts as “losers,” the bad faith career advice, and the “barefoot-in-the-snow” Horatio Alger stories, etc. You’d think that educated people could do better than this.

Obviously, I’m not characterizing every contributor to the debate. But in many cases, the shoe fits.

I’ve been thinking of holding an event at Felician this coming fall on the adjunct issue, called something like “Adjuncting: Ethics, Politics, Economics.” I’m thinking it’ll be a panel discussion of some kind involving adjuncts, full timers, and maybe even some administrators (maybe), airing out issues of mutual concern. I’d like to think that we can discuss some of these issues in a more constructive way than we’ve so far seen. If an event like that is of interest to readers, and you’re in the New York/New Jersey area (or can get there) this fall, feel free to indicate your interest in the combox. If there is interest, I’ll look into the logistics of creating the event. No promises, but I think it’s a conversation worth having, and an event worth doing.

*All quotations current as of May 6, 2015 at 4:19 pm EST. But we’re talking BHL, so don’t expect to read the same post or thread twice.

Postscript, September 28, 2015: Here’s another illustration, from BHL, of the increasingly ludicrous contortions entailed by what for lack of a better term might be called its “editorial policies.” It’s from a post by Steve Horwitz, criticizing a post elsewhere by Sharon Presley. The original version of Presley’s post had cited Horwitz in a way that Horwitz evidently didn’t agree with. Horwitz complained out loud at BHL, prompting Presley to delete the offending sentence. Horwitz responds as follows:

[UPDATE:  Sharon has now edited her post to remove the reference to me and my work without providing any sort of explanatory note that an edit has been made. This is very bad academic and blogospheric manners.]

Yes, very bad.

Later, we get this explanation of one of Horwitz’s claims in the post:

[The first paragraph has been edited for clarity to indicate that Sharon’s piece is critical of EP and inappropriately enlists my work in her cause.]

Right, but that was what Presley was saying back in the day. So maybe the first paragraph should be re-edited for clarity to indicate that Presley’s piece doesn’t mention Horwitz at all. Got that? I’m just waiting for Matt Zwolinski to clarify everything by shrugging his shoulders and saying that he doesn’t see the problem.

Horwitz seems to have missed the fact that the very “bad academic and blogospheric manners” he criticizes here are par for the course at BHL, and have been for years–a fact alluded to four days ago in the BHL combox, but so far unacknowledged by him. At the end of the day, listening to BHL lectures on “bad manners” is like listening to a Donald Trump lecture on hairstyling. The difference is that Donald Trump has the sense to avoid the offending subject. They don’t.

Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness: A Request for Disclosure

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Considering the number of times Jason Brennan has alluded, in the context of public discussion, to his once having worked at GEICO, I think it’s only fair that he disclose the following for public consumption:

  1. When did he work at GEICO, and at what location?
  2. What was his title while working there?
  3. What was his salary?
  4. Did he work there through a temp agency, or was he hired directly by GEICO itself?

If the GEICO job is important enough to bring up that many times, it’s worth clarifying the details by way of answers to the preceding questions.

A similar query is in order for Phillip Magness, who’s also been very autobiographically assertive on the subject. The article linked-to in the preceding sentence alludes to 1.5 years spent as a full-time adjunct (I’m presuming that “1.5 years” refers to the period 2008-2010, corresponding to the position of Lecturer at American University on his CV), then invites us to do some “arithmetic” about the income he claims to have earned during that period, and how he managed to live on it while being otherwise productive.

That’s fine, but Magness’s CV indicates that he received three grants during roughly the same period (2007, 2009, 2011). I regard the 2007 and 2011 grants as potentially relevant even though they strictly speaking fall outside of the 2008-2010 period. To be blunt, a year and a half of adjunct work cushioned by three grants is not quite as impressive as the impression one might get by reading the unadorned version of Magness’s apologia pro vita sua.

Three questions for Magness, then:

  1. What was the cumulative monetary value of those three grants?
  2. Does his CV exhaustively list all of his income sources for the relevant years (meaning 2007-2011)?
  3. Did he, during those years (2007-2011), live in a household with someone earning an additional income?

All three questions strike me as relevant to evaluating the story Magness tells.

One problem with both sides in the adjunct debate is that the most assertive people in it seem more interested in parading selective recountings of their valor or misfortunes than in documenting their claims in a way that demonstrates the credibility of what they’re saying to neutral or skeptical readers. If people are going to start going autobiographical in the Great Adjunct Debate–whether they’re adjuncts recounting their minimum-wage woes, or academic stars recounting their Horatio Alger stories–I think they owe us fuller disclosures than any of them have been making about the stories they tell us. Brennan and Magness clearly think of themselves as exemplars for the rest of the profession. How about exemplifying some disclosure about those stories you’ve been telling?

Postscript, 11 pm: I’m satisfied with Brennan’s answer, but on second thought, I have to say I’m not just puzzled but mystified by the autobiographical claims Magness has made in his increasingly-famous essay, “The Myth of the Minimum Wage Adjunct.”

As someone who spent the last ~1.5 years of grad school as a so-called “full time adjunct,” constituting my only real source of income at the time, I can state first hand that it will not make you wealthy.

So he was an adjunct for 1.5 years, during which time adjuncting was his “only real source of income.” I take it that the word “real” implies that there was some other, secondary source of income. I’m curious what it was.

Later he tells us,

I can also speak to this first hand as it is something I learned to do quickly during my own period as a full-time adjunct ca. 2008-2009. I was not anything close to well off during this period of my career, but with a little basic time management I not only met my teaching obligations but I (1) finished a dissertation, (2) wrote several peer reviewed articles, (3) composed a substantial part of an academic press monograph, and (4) found more permanent employment.

The problem is, his CV lists a Doctoral Research Grant from George Mason University for the year 2009. I can see how the grant might not literally have overlapped with the adjuncting: if he started adjuncting in January 2008, and continued through fall 2008 and then spring 2009, that would be 1.5 years of adjuncting; he could then have gotten the research grant for the latter half of 2009. But I’m speculating. I think we’re entitled to hear the explanation directly from him.

Literal overlap or not, he cannot, on this basis, claim to “speak to this first hand,” where “this” refers to the experience of the average full-time long-term adjunct–which is what the discussion at BHL was about. One and a half years of adjuncting sandwiched between two grants, along with some undisclosed secondary income source, is not long term adjuncting in any sense relevant to the ongoing controversy. And we don’t even know what he did during the summer of 2008, when he was a “so-called ‘full time adjunct’.” According to Magness, adjuncts don’t teach during the summer months (point 5 of his enumerated points), from which it seems to follow that he didn’t. So did he simply go without income during the summer, or is that when the non-real income source kicked in? If so, what was the source? The answer surely has some bearing on the relationship between his personal experiences and the predicament of the long-term adjunct.

Whatever the answers, we’re left with a mystery in Magness’s account that’s worth clearing up. He wants us to believe that he knows what it’s like to be a long-term adjunct, but the story he’s telling is consistent with saying this:

I was a so-called full time adjunct during 2008-9. Of course, I got a grant in 2007, then one in 2009, and I wasn’t an adjunct during the summer of 2008. During the summer, I got a real job–a real job, albeit with an unreal income. Meanwhile, I had established a relationship with the Institute for Humane Studies, which eventually gave me an administrative job as Academic Program Director, a job I cheerfully hold while suggesting all over Twitter that the university’s problems could be solved if only we eliminated all of those useless administrators on the payroll. I realize that very, very, very few long-term adjuncts could get such a job, precisely because it’s sui generis, and I am now the person who holds it. And yet, I won’t hesitate to lecture long-term adjuncts about what bad time managers they are.

Say it ain’t so, Phil.

Who Is St. Paul?

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Another gem from a lunchtime conversation with a colleague, this time from the professor of Religious Studies responsible for teaching “Introduction to the New Testament.” Her vote for Question of the Semester in that class, three-quarters of the way through the term:

So wait, I don’t get it. St. Paul’s teachings are based on…Jesus?

Did I mention that Felician College is a Catholic liberal arts institution that describes itself (yes, oxymoronically) as “The Franciscan College of New Jersey”?

Saint_Paul,_Rembrandt_van_Rijn_(and_Workshop?),_c._1657.jpg (3167×4000)

The Apostle Paul, reached for comment: “Why do they persecute me?”