Meritocracy, Lottery, Game: Notes on the Academic Job Market

I’ve been puttering around on Twitter this afternoon thinking through my sense that framing academic job searches as a “lottery” might actually encourage, rather than combat, the cruel optimism involved in the process. The commonplace description of the market as a “lottery” has emerged in response to the framing of academia as a “market” or even as a “meritocracy,” both of which suggest some rationalistic evaluation of a candidate’s value vis-à-vis the other candidates, with the “best” candidate ultimately being selected. The market/meritocracy framing is naturally a source of anxiety for academic job-seekers, to which the lottery framing is experienced as a relief (especially for those who have been through one or more cycles without finding tenure-track employment): not getting a job isn’t “failure,” it’s the arbitrary outcome of a random and capricious system. That the applicants-to-job ratio for the most desirable jobs is now in the many-hundreds-to-one undoubtedly fuels this pervasive sense that all you can do is hope your name is the one that gets pulled out of the hat.

But the lottery framing, despite its comforts and its useful provocations, also has its limits, including some conceptual problems that may cause more harm than good in prospective job seekers. Some of this can be seen from the thought experiment of simply taking the lottery idea seriously. People use the idea of the lottery as a critique of a logic of merit and moral desert — but, perversely, nothing could be more fair than random allocation by lottery. (This contradiction is why many people who call the academic job market a lottery in practice describe something more like an anti-meritocracy: only the worst, least-deserving people get picked.)

In reality, academic jobs aren’t really distributed at random at all, but according to a network of preexisting conditions that are both “earned” and unearned; some of these conditions look a lot like “merit” (that’s great that she got hired, she does such good work!) while other parts of it look a lot like “privilege” (of course he got that job, he’s wealthy, white, and able-bodied from an Ivy). While of course it is impossible to predict the outcomes of any individual person on the market — in no small part because there are now so few jobs that no one, no matter how talented or privileged, is a “sure thing” — it’s nonetheless obvious that some people have skills, advantages, resources, and networks to draw on that others don’t, and that academic job market outcomes reflect these inequities. To the extent that the academic job market is a lottery, then, it’s a cosmic one, as much about the luck of birth and brain chemistry and the quirks of your personal history as anything else.

It just as surely isn’t absolutely irrelevant what you do on in your job letter or application materials, as it would be if the academic job market were a lottery; in fact an entire industry has now sprung up around giving panicked Ph.D. job applicants advice on how to perfect their applications. Again, in a market this bad there are no sure things and no silver bullets, but there are still things in preparing your application (and in building your teaching and research profile more generally) that can be done better or worse. On the other side of the search committee people are making decisions based on what they think will improve their situations in their departments; as an applicant you can make appeals to those people in ways that are more or less likely to be successful.

So as a job market applicant you start with a base of resources and strategies that give you better or worse “chances” than others. This is then all filtered through the genuinely random matrix of whatever departments happen to be hiring in your particular subfield in a given year, repeated each year until the candidate is either hired for a sustainable job or else quits the profession. This kind of truly blind luck now structures the process to such an overwhelming degree as to threaten to swamp resources and strategy altogether (hence, again, the appeal of the lottery framing) — after all, there’s probably no amount of preparation or pedigree as good as having your advisor’s best friend in the world on the search committee, especially in a world with so many qualified applicants where the number of jobs has constricted this tightly. But it’s a mistake to think that because the market is conditioned by luck it’s reducible to luck, or absolutely irrational in some maximum sense. There’s a lot about the way the academic job market functions that is quite rational, including (yes!) some genuinely meritocratic elements along the way.

If the rejected thesis is that the academic job market is meritocracy, and the failed antithesis is that the academic job market is a lottery, my suggestion today was that perhaps the proper synthesis here is conceptualizing the academic job market as a game. Outcomes in games are structured by resources, strategies, and luck; games involve competition between parties with differing capabilities, using different strategies, interacting with a set of rules that may not make sense, much less be desirable, rational, or fair. In RISK you array your given armies from an arbitrary starting position as best as you can, and then you start to roll the dice. In poker you play the hand you draw as best you can, given your strategy and skill level and the odds of success. In many games navigating the ruleset — working the refs — is itself the crucial part of the competition; in other games, cheating is allowed, as long as you do it right (like our corrupt search committee filled with advisor-BFFs).

With the people I was chatting with I passed through a bunch of games on Twitter, including Settlers of Catan, Dungeons and Dragons, Oregon Trail, even beloved-catastrophe-machine-of-my-childhood Fireball Island. But I’d propose tonight that the game the academic job market is most like may be Scrabble. Players in Scrabble have preexisting resources (a vocabulary, which is built out of everything from the socioeconomic profile of your childhood home to deliberate, calculated memorization of the official wordlist), a tile-placement strategy (play the biggest word you can each time vs. limiting your opponent’s options vs. holding out for bingos or bonus tiles, etc. etc.), and blind luck (even the best player in the world can draw IIIEEUU.) The rules in Scrabble are fair, but totally arbitrary, with letter distributions and relative values that make little internal sense, tons of legal words that should be disallowed, and tons of disallowed words that should be legal. For some players Scrabble is a game of pure intellect; for others it’s the art of the bluff.

The game framing has, I think, a couple of advantages over the lottery framing for discussions of the academic job market. First, it’s simply a more accurate representation of how the academic job market works — no small thing. Second, it suggests the genuine importance of starting position and strategy in pursuing academic jobs without tipping us back into meritocracy, because games don’t reflect some transcendent value or essential “merit,” and because no matter how “good” you are or think you are you still need to know the rules and get some good rolls of the dice if you hope to “win.” (TINY UPDATE: I make this point a bit more strongly in the comments, I think: One of the things that I think is most valuable about the “game” frame for the academic job market is that you can do everything right in a game and still lose.) Third, games call our attention back to probability and prediction as they manifest in the academic job market; there are always outliers, upsets, and million-to-one lucky breaks, but all the same we can look realistically at a person’s poker hand and evaluate whether they should raise, see, or fold. Sometimes we find ourselves in gaming positions from which we just can’t win, and there’s no amount of either luck or “merit” that can save us. Likewise, calling the academic job market a lottery totally erases the real costs of entry, because lottery tickets are cheap and there’s another drawing every few days — while re-understanding it as a game reminds us that the process takes a long time, takes a lot of work, is a competition but not a fair one, doesn’t say anything meaningful about your ultimate value as person, and it isn’t worth continuing if it makes you miserable. You might as well go ahead and enter a lottery, why not; you only play a game if you’re going to get something out of the experience.

If I had an overarching piece of meta-advice for job applicants I think it would be to try to analyze the academic job market and your position within it as a player in a game: know the rules, understand your position, figure out how to get the best possible outcome from your current position and then make your next moves accordingly. That could mean staying on the path you’re already on, it could mean doubling down on a risk you think might pay off, it could mean “folding” and finding another line of work entirely. Maybe it means forging new alliances with other players; maybe it means changing the rules, finding loopholes, knocking over the table. For the would-be grad student, it could mean that the only winning move is not to play. But apprehending the academic job market through the lens of games, I hope, might push us back from the conceptual errors of both meritocracy (it’s just about working really hard and being the cream of the crop) and lottery (there’s nothing you can do, it’s all just random) towards a recentering of pragmatism, agency, and strategic thinking. The idea, in any event, seemed to be worth writing up, if only to think about it some more.

Tuesday Morning Links!

* Marquette University, with a generous grant from the Templeton Religion Trust, is pleased to announce a request for proposals on the topics of “The Self, Motivation, and Virtue,” Approximately ten research proposals at $190,000 each will be funded through this initiative. The grant competition has four primary aims…

* If you’re going to MLA and are a graduate student or contingent faculty member, don’t forget to apply for travel support.

* We are ruled by maniacs: West Virginia Plans To Frack Beneath Ohio River, Which Supplies Drinking Water To Millions.

* The Great Death: Earth lost 50% of its wildlife in the past 40 years, says WWF.

* California’s Ongoing Drought Linked To Climate Change.

* Perhaps the job market news isn’t so bad, and graduates are right to think college mostly worked for them. Arum and Roksa then turn to the high share of young graduates still living with their parents. At 40 percent, it’s twice the rate of the 1960s. Another third of recent graduates live with friends, and 70 percent of young graduates get some money from their families — as do 75 percent of all 18-25 year olds. But again, is this really the fault of college? Further, how do we know that these living situations are bad? Are these graduates really adrift, or are they showing self-discipline by cutting expenses in a bad economy? There is one clear tie to college: we know that this generation is servicing students debt of a size that their parents can barely imagine, and that this may be dampening home buying. We also know that the reigning “new economy business model” promises them neither job security nor stable income growth. So rather than missing the “markers of adulthood,” these cautious at-home students are more likely hitting them. They are the markers of Great Recession adulthood — house sharing, public transportation, deferred buying, and reliance on family.

* The Score: Why Prisons Thrive Even When Budgets Shrink.

* Late last year I started a series called “The Thick Blue Line,” based on documented, widespread, and ongoing police impunity in the United States. At the end of each month (here are the first, second, and third installments) I compiled national “no charges against police officer” cases verbatim from reported incidents.

* How to read Star Wars, by way of David Fincher: I always thought of Star Wars as the story of two slaves [C-3PO and R2-D2] who go from owner to owner, witnessing their masters’ folly, the ultimate folly of man… I thought it was an interesting idea in the first two, but it’s kind of gone by Return Of The Jedi.

* The sad decline of Barack Obama, American exceptionalism edition.

* Paranoia and the Zimmermans.

* Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us.

* NYU and Empire.

* German universities are now tuition-free again. “Only the super-rich benefit from the fees and loans system, in which 17-year-olds must sign up for massive debts in adulthood.”

* Student Organizing, Student Government, and the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

* UMass police helped keep student’s addiction secret. Crazy story.

* The Hidden Costs of E-books at University Libraries. I hate this trend.

* Steven Salaita: U. of I. destroyed my career.

* BREAKING: the banks regulate the regulators, not the other way around.

* BREAKING: North Carolina Governor Doubts Value of Some Degrees.

@gerrycanavan @insidehighered huh, he's targeting the fields best equipped to identify and call him out on his bullshit, what a coincidence

— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) September 29, 2014

* DC Comics still aggressively making it impossible to support anything they do.

* ‘Time-Outs’ Are Hurting Your Child. Well, that was the last thing that wasn’t.

* The CIA Still Redacts How Much It Paid for PCs in 1987.

* Teachers are among the most dedicated, passionate and hardworking professionals – a few of the qualities that make the best Uber partner drivers.

* Movie quotes by way of iOS 8.

* Confessions of a former internet troll. It used to be about the art, apparently.

* Data in everything: Statistician Creates Model To Predict What’s Next In Game Of Thrones.

* And Jon Hamm will be on the Black Mirror Christmas special, which is the best news I’ve heard in years.

Next Week @MarquetteU: Pop Culture Dinner #1 on Dan Harmon’s ‘Community’

Next Thursday, October 9, from 5-7 PM we’ll be meeting in Marquette Hall 105 to discuss the unkillable comedy series COMMUNITY, recently cancelled on NBC only to be saved by Yahoo!’s new online streaming service. Famously starring Marquette alum Danny Pudi in the point-of-view role, the series was also created by Marquette drop-out Dan Harmon, who left the university after one semester. From this we can undoubtedly conclude that the series is based on Marquette.

We’ll watch an episode of the show while we eat pizza and then talk about some of the reasons for its niche popularity and cult status, as well as some of Harmon’s ideas about narrative and mythic structure, his other projects, and his controversial public persona. It will be just like that one episode of COMMUNITY where Abed takes a semester class on trying to figure out who was the boss on WHO’S THE BOSS, except we’ll solve it all in just one night.

The Facebook event page is here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/365896143575444/

All are welcome! Send any questions to gerry.canavan@marquette.edu.

Monday Morning Links!

* David Mitchell on how to write: “Neglect Everything Else.” I’m already doing it!

* Capitalism turned California into a desert. You’ll never believe what happened next.

* Will the Pacific Northwest be a Climate Refuge Under Global Warming?

* The rise of bottled water here in the States shows how a public institution can be demonized and replaced by a much more expensive privatized solution.

* Mistakes Parents Make With Financial Aid.

* In between the time Shane Morris suffered what seemed to be an obvious concussion and the time he was carted off the field, Brady Hoke made him play football.

* But the broader problem with these optimistic, utopian tales is that they rationalise the pathologies of the current political and economic system, presenting them as our conscious lifestyle choices. Against the Sharing Economy.

* BREAKING: The American health care system is the absolute worst.

* Education Gibberish Generator.

We will triangulate innovative paradigms in data-driven schools.
We will mesh hands-on methodologies for our 21st Century learners.
We will aggregate intuitive guiding coalitions through the use of centers.

* Inside the Starbucks at Langley.

* Brooklyn Postal Worker Hoarded 40,000 Pieces of Undelivered Mail. The kicker: “Brucato admitted to hoarding the mail since 2005 and has been suspended with pay until the case is settled.”

* The Golden Age of Television Is the Golden Age of American Divorce.

* The PEN Panel on Sex and Violence in Children’s Literature.

* David Simon’s Next.

* Hobbit 419.

In view of this, I received your contact through a friend and counselor, an ingenious wizard, who noted you as a Burglar who wants a good job, plenty of Excitement and reasonable Reward. And I and my twelve companions have agreed to give you 10% of the total gold and jewels that the dragon Smaug now rests upon if you can join us on our long journey. When you have agreed please tell us the place where you dwell and send one hundred pence so that we might travel to you.

* Google Derek Jeter Truth. Wake up sheeple!

* What went wrong on Alien3.

* Some thoughts on Harry Potter as a dystopia.

* And lots of smart people didn’t like this piece, but I thought it was bracing: How to abolish labor within 5 years in five simple steps. I think it helps that I read so much SF.

Weekend Links! Some Especially Really Good Ones This Time I Promise

* ICYMI, some single-serving posts from the last few days: How to Grad School and KSR’s The Lucky Strike. You may have also noticed that I’ve put a link to The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction pre-order page. Please alert all interested parties and institutional book-orderers!

* Hyping a project I have nothing to do with: you should also check out the Science Fiction BFI Film Classics series at Palgrave Macmillan, with monographs on Alien, Brazil, Solaris, Dr. Strangelove, and more.

* The final frontier of Star Trek fan canons: what if the Abramsverse universe is the Prime timeline? Read all the way to the end for some nice metacommentary on the project.

* According to a financial plan obtained by Crain’s Chicago Business, UChicago faces operating deficits of $5 to $30 million a year through 2018, and “ratings agencies could downgrade the university’s credit by as many as two notches.” In comparison, the pay increases detailed above would constitute 8 to 50 percent of the projected deficits, and the eight administrators’ overall pay would constitute 20 percent to 120 percent of the deficits.

* Unpacking the Myths of Financial Aid.

Why would the university award aid in this way? Couldn’t it just adjust the ratio of merit aid to need-based aid? Unfortunately, the “high tuition/high aid” model only “works” when it’s organized like this. That’s because, for many university administrators, financial aid is not so much a form of charity as it is an instrument for maximizing tuition revenue.

* The liberal discourse on gentrification has absolutely nothing to say about finance or prison, the two most salient institutions in urban life. Instead, it does what liberal discourse so often does: it buries the structural forces at work and choreographs a dance about individual choice to perform on the grave. We get tiny dramas over church parking lots and bike lanes and whether 7-11 will be able to serve chicken wings. Gentrification becomes a culture war, a battle over consumer choices: gourmet cupcake shop or fried chicken joint? Can we all live side by side, eating gourmet pickles with our fried fish sandwiches? Will blacks and whites hang out in the same bars? wonders Racialicious. Liberalism and Gentrification.

* In Philadelphia, education reformers got everything they wanted. Look where the city’s schools are now. How to Destroy a Public-School System.

* Democracy is not, to begin with, a form of State. It is, in the first place, the reality of the power of the people that can never coincide with the form of a State. There will always be tension between democracy as the exercise of a shared power of thinking and acting, and the State, whose very principle is to appropriate this power.

* Once more unto humanitarian intervention.

* …disaster relief and the “disaster narrative” is central to the development of the American welfare state.

* This is a very provocative critique of framing consent as a legal category: You Can Take It Back: Consent as a Felt Sense.

If you accept the premise that someone’s experience of sexual violation “counts” as rape, regardless of whether they granted verbal permission beforehand, then in order to avoid being accused of rape you’ll have to shift your mindset from, “I’d better make sure I was told it was okay to do this first,” to “I’d better make damn sure this person isn’t going to wake up tomorrow and feel like I raped them.” The latter is a standard requiring much more communication, understanding, and compassion from the people involved than the former, especially in situations with near-strangers like one-night stands, hook-ups, or play partners you might meet at a club.

I don’t know anything about the author, and I think from an argumentative perspective the writing of the piece could definitely be stronger, but all the same it’s an idea I’ll be thinking about a while. There’s a thought experiment in a later post that is illuminative: trying to identify the precise last moment that one can “withdraw” consent.

* “Presenteeism afflicts all business sectors, but some more than others.” The Case for Staying Home from Work.

* An evaluation of course evaluations. This is an above average meta-evaluation for sure; you could really tell how much he cared about the material.

* The women I pretend to be: on working in a male-dominated industry. #4, the Victim, is especially disheartening:

I remember one particularly bad day at a games conference. The event was, as is typical, about 10 percent female. At the start of the day, one of those “I’m just really touchy-feely” men put his hands where I had not invited them when we were crushed together in a crowded corridor. Then, in a talk, one dude took it upon himself to give a very detailed and enthusiastic account of a “rape game” he’d invented—where you had to stare deeply into the eyes of the “other player” while describing to them how you’re going to rape them, until they tell you to stop. It was genuinely traumatizing to hear the glee in his voice as he talked about it. Shaken, I went to sit in a quiet, empty room to regain my composure. A well-built man at least a foot taller than me came in, sat between me and the door and said: “You know, I messaged you on OKCupid but you never messaged me back.” By this point I genuinely felt too afraid to tell him to just fuck off. So I played nice and smiled and apologized.

* New Media watch: the rise of the podcast network.

* The case against the Supreme Court.

* Those benefitting most from the secure property rights might be forgiven for conceptual ignorance – introspection being a scarce commodity amongst the wealthy – but the vociferous and cynical denial of the asymmetric benefits of securing property rights, both intra- or inter-generationally, whether due to some combination of attribution bias, feigned religious belief, or simple greed is less excusable. In a new gilded age, the idea that the rule of law is vastly underpriced by those who benefit most should be anything but contentious.

* Corey Robin on the emerging “right to be forgotten.”

* Mentally Ill Inmate In Solitary Confinement Died Of Thirst, Autopsy Finds.

* With Red Mars finally actually happening, Y: The Last Man is my new I-can’t-believe-they-haven’t-made-a-series-of-this-yet text.

* That’s they’re actually making The ExpendaBelles is the actual literal end of culture. Mark it down.

* Provocation: It’s not crazy for Mitt Romney to run for president again.

* Peace in our time: Marvel and the Kirby estate have settled.

* SMBC on proof by induction.

* The only link from this list you really need: There’s A Life-Size Game of Mouse Trap in Milwaukee.

* And has any social media network gone from hype to big backlash as quickly as (Vermont’s own!) Ello? Any faster and the entire social network would be goodbye-cruel-world manifestos…

How to Grad School

1. Know how bad the job market sucks and why.

2. Find out what can get you one of those precious few jobs.

3. Prepare for the academic path to blow up in your face.

Short and sweet and bleak bleak bleak, this is probably the best “how to grad school” advice piece I’ve seen yet. It’s not very well-suited to our clickbait media ecology, but abiding by these three principles is really the only way to do it.

Be serious. Be realistic. Be detached. Keep your options open. Don't panic. Walk away when working in academia starts to hurt #vitaepitches

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 9, 2013

Go to grad school at a program w/ good placement if you have passion, seriousness, livable stipend, little or no debt, and an exit strategy.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2014

‘The Lucky Strike’ at Strange Horizons

This week Strange Horizons reprints my favorite Kim Stanley Robinson story, “The Lucky Strike” (podcast), though for my money it’s really worth getting the PM Press edition that pairs it with his great “A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions” essay.

Thursday Night Links!

Being a collection of things I may or may not have forgotten to include in today’s Thursday links.

* Postcolonial Catan. The English version of the piece starts about halfway down the page.

* A defense of Contemporaneanism. Typical tripe from the rearguard forces of retro-Contemporaneanism. Search my blog archives for a definitive rebuttal.

* Athletics forever! New Rutgers report reveals subsidies for athletics are not declining as originally forecasted.

* In short, when institutions invest in pools and climbing walls, they are catering to the needs of their least motivated, and least needy, clients — good for the colleges’ bottom lines but the opposite of society’s priorities. I’d need a lot more evidence even to grant these were “good for the colleges’ bottom lines.”

* The sky was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel, and the clocks were striking thirteen: Ms. Bolender was three days behind on her monthly car payment. Her lender, C.A.G. Acceptance of Mesa, Ariz., remotely activated a device in her car’s dashboard that prevented her car from starting.

* Dialectics of Obamaism: Campaigners said the Pacific Remote Islands reserve – because of its sheer scale – would cement Obama’s conservation legacy. However, they noted that Obama had dramatically scaled back the reserve following opposition from the commercial tuna industry. I dunno, that seems to cement it pretty well.

* Making use of PSID data for 1984, 1989, and 1994, we examine race differences in patterns of asset accumulation. Our results indicate, as expected, that inheritances raise the rate of wealth accumulation of whites relative to that of African Americans. But, while whites devote a greater share of their income to saving, racial differences in saving rates are not significant, once we control for income. Though our results may be period-specific, we also do not find evidence that the rate of return to capital is greater for whites than for African Americans. Simulations suggest that African Americans would have gained significant ground relative to whites during the period if they had inherited similar amounts, saved at the same rate, had comparable income levels and, more speculatively, had portfolios closer in composition to those of whites. And thus.

* All in all it’s a good time to be rich.

* BREAKING: They looted the public pensions but good.

* What we need now, more than ever, are technologies and organizations that are not only equally useful, but also more desirable than the status quo. Too often, leftists engage in a strange kind of doublespeak—on the one hand, we describe an insidious marketing machine that can produce want-product binaries with ruthless efficiency and efficacy, and on the other offer up restricted diets and buggy open source software as alternatives. How do we expect to win the hearts and minds of future generations?

* CCSF Accreditation Case Will Proceed to Trial.

* Inside the Koch Brothers’ Toxic Empire.

* H.P. Lovecraft Stories Retold As Goofy One-Page Comics.

* F.B.I. Confirms a Sharp Rise in Mass Shootings Since 2000.

* I don’t know that the state really needs to fight every case: Pennsylvania Attorney General Blames Woman For Her Own Rape.

* U. of North Texas Took $75-Million Extra From State, Auditor Finds.

* And you think things are bad now: Venture Capitalists Are Poised to ‘Disrupt’ Everything About the Education Market.

* But it’s not all bad news: Bill and Ted live!

Thursday Links!

* Some seriously great news for my particular demographic: Kim Stanley Robinson’s acclaimed Mars Trilogy is colonizing TV.

* Flooding risk from climate change, country by country. Meanwhile: World’s Cities All Becoming Teeming Hellscapes.

* A brief history of mana: How an Austronesian Concept Became a Video Game Mechanic.

* A History of The Lord of the Rings in Video Games.

* LARoB considers the criminally underrated Chronicles of Pyrdain and the night genre was born.

* Age discrimination and adjuncts. I still think this is a seriously underreported story considering how dramatically it would change the landscape of hiring in higher education if it were to prevail.

* While surely a simple economic determinism would be distorting, it should still be clear that the epistemic and cultural divide between the “hard” sciences and the humanities cannot be easily disentangled from a noticeable financial divide.

* How For-Profit Universities Make a Killing By Exploiting College Dreams.

* Udacity has moved on to a new scam: nanodegrees.

* Angry Letters to the One Member of Congress Who Voted Against the War on Terror.

* “Reluctant Warrior Bombs Yet Another Country.”

* FSU chooses a politician as its new president despite major opposition from faculty and students. From the archives: FSU to phase out academic operations.

* Head’s up, math geeks: big discovery about prime numbers.

* Chimpanzees Raised by Humans Have Social Difficulties With Other Chimps.

* Listen, it’s about yardage: FiveThirtyEight provides the cheat sheet necessary for me to interact with other Wisconsinites.

* ESPN suspends Bill Simmons for repeating ESPN’s own reporting about the NFL and drawing the only possible conclusion.

* 15.4% growth of Harvard’s endowment brings the total to a cool $36 billion, assuring Harvard’s continued existence for another year. And thank goodness.

* I think I’ve discovered a way to precrastinate my procrastination, which means I’m always so late I never bother to get off the couch.

* Science proves no one is allowed to have any fun: Researcher shows that black holes do not exist.

* Fraternities finally look in the mirror and confront the enemy within: drunk female guests. Should we ban frats?

* What it’s like to be struck by lightning. What it’s like to lose your memory at 22.

* Please don’t ever drive and text.

* And if you want a vision of the future, imagine Mitt Romney running for president, forever.

Tuesday Links!

* UT President just comes out and says it: tenure is over.

Rather than debate these issues as an all-or-nothing matter, we should implement our system in a way that looks to the purposes tenure serves. In fact, we already do that. American higher education, including UT, has been using an increasing share of non-tenured faculty. In this sense, American higher education has been de-tenuring itself, that is, unleveraging itself, for the last 20 years. My point here is that we need to do this in a purposeful way that is aligned with our large-scale teaching and research goals in ever more detailed ways. We need to use tenure when it is most needed: where competition is the keenest and where research is more central to the enterprise. It is less necessary where those two features aren’t present. Again, my point here is not that I have the answer. My point is that we can’t shy away from an issue even as sacred as how we use tenure. We need to lead the way by implementing everything we do in light of the purposes we claim it promotes.

* Meanwhile: There’s still no STEM shortage.

* For-Profit Colleges as Factories of Debt.

* Isn’t everybody equal now? Can’t women be obnoxious too? Wesleyan Rules That Fraternities Must Accept Women.

* The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel tries to make sense of Wisconsin’s ever-changing voter ID rules.

* I’ve simply never understood how “divestment” was supposed to work as a tactic against climate change. The only thing that threatens to shake this conviction is the fact that Slate agrees.

* Better march harder: Worldwide Carbon Dioxide Emissions Reached Record Levels In 2013.

* Yes we can! U.S. Ramping Up Major Renewal in Nuclear Arms.

* Elsewhere in Obama doing a heckuva job: The US just started bombing Syria.

* Police shoot teenage special-needs girl within 20 seconds of arriving to ‘help.’

* What Reparations in America Could Look Like.

* I taught in one of the many social-service organizations known in the nonprofit industrial complex as “re-­entry.” Re-entry’s primary goal is to induct people back into the workforce once they are released from prison or are mired in the bureaucracy of one of the state’s “community supervision” programs, which include jails, probation, parole, or ATIs (alternatives to incarceration). In practical terms, re-entry provides “services,” broadly construed, to economically disenfranchised people who are targeted by the police and as a result are under some form of surveillance by the carceral network.

* Inside Higher Ed debates whether and how you can try to address male pathologies in the classroom without reentering maleness pedagogically.

* Glengarry, Bob Ross.

* What it’s like to have a stroke at 33.

* On this week’s episode of Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver takes a look at the Miss America pageant and asks, “How the f*ck is this still happening?”

* 11/23/63 is coming to Hulu as a series. I feel like I run a link that says this at least three times a year.

* The past isn’t done with us: A Brazilian man whose parents were African slaves could be the oldest living person ever documented after receiving a birth cerficate showing he turned 126 last week, it was reported on Tuesday.

* The past isn’t done with us, part two: Star Trek 3 might reunite William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy.

* I’ve had dreams like this: Camera falls from a plane and lands in a pig farm.

* Somebody’s stealing my bit: There’s a new university course focusing on the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

* And they say America is a country no longer capable of achieving great things: Rhode Island Man Manages to Get Four DUIs in 30 Hours.

Good Morning, It’s Monday Morning Links

* Paradoxa has put up Mark Bould’s introduction to issue 25, on “Africa SF.” My article on Octavia Butler’s Patternist series is in this one.

* Discovering Cuban SF.

* “Sharing economy” companies like Uber shift risk from corporations to workers, weaken labor protections, and drive down wages. Against Sharing.

* Run the university like an insane person’s idea of a spa.

At Auburn University in Alabama, for example, students can soak in a 45-person paw-print-shaped hot tub or scale a 20-foot wet climbing wall before plunging into the pool. Designs for North Dakota State’s facility, on which construction is scheduled to begin next year, include a zip line that students can ride out over the water, a 36-foot-diameter vortex of swirling water and a recessed fireplace on an island in the middle of the pool that students can swim up to. A small “rain garden” is planned to mist lounging students.

* Meanwhile: The ruins of the latest horrible trend in academic misspending.

* Colleges’ Pursuit of Prestige and Revenue Is Hurting Low-Income Students. Why Neoliberal Labor Practices Harm Working Students. Professors on food stamps: The shocking true story of academia in 2014. edutech woowoo, now and forever.

* Marc Bousquet remembers when #altac was a trap.

* Trend Piece.

First, statistic plucked from academic journal where the writer didn’t pay to pass the paywall. Also, a biased survey from a company with countless vested interests. It’s official: the above trend is slightly more common than you thought.

* How to Tell if You’re in a MFA Workshop Story. How to Tell If You Are In an Indie Coming-of-Age Movie.

* 9 college freshmen dead in alcohol-related incidents in first weeks of new school year.

* Better Teachers Receive Worse Student Evaluations.

* King Richard III was probably hacked and stabbed to death in battle, according to a new study.

* What the 17th Century Can Teach Us About Vaginas.

* The second Harmoncountry tour will come through Chicago. November 1.

* When superheroes fight cancer.

* Where are animals in the history of sexuality?

* Neoliberal Mothering and Vaccine Refusal.

* If Dataclysm has a central idea embedded in it, it’s that it’s okay for the tech industry to scrape your data off every last surface you touch.

* From what you have heard, was the shooting of an African-American teen by law enforcement in Ferguson, Missouri justified? 55% say yes.

* Cat performance review.

* And everyone is mad at Adam for making what seems to me to be the most obviously true observation about protest marches: they don’t work.

Going to be sweet watching @adamkotsko eat crow tomorrow when the climate march brings about full communism.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 21, 2014

Heroic age of protest marches was an extremely specific period of decolonization and anticommunism AND were accompanied by riots + violence.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 21, 2014

It's at least worth asking why this is supposed to work in our movement, even before one notes it plainly doesn't.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 21, 2014

I would say the huge size of the climate march is an opportunity to ask whether protest marches are the way forward.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 21, 2014

Did it have to be twice the size it was? Ten times the size? What’s the number where elites suddenly have to listen and reverse course?

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 21, 2014

One of the hardest challenges climate change poses to liberal orthodoxy is its demonstration that liberalism has no answer to this crisis.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 21, 2014

CUT TO: The aliens simulating this period in our history. ALIEN 1: They can’t be this stupid. ALIEN 2: It must be broken. Try reseting it.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 21, 2014

Center for the Advancement of Saturday Links

* Some unexpectedly big news at President Lovell’s inauguration today: Marquette will be developing a new Center for the Advancement of the Humanities as a result of a multimillion dollar gift from an alumna.

* The Science Fiction Working Group at the University of Florida.

* Cost of living map: What is $100 worth in your state?

* Does Louisiana have a future? Bobby Jindal says it’s an open question about which reasonable people can disagree.

* A generic college paper.

* Supergirl is coming to CBS.

* Working With Quentin Tarantino On The Django Unchained Sequel, Django/Zorro.

* Couple Who Let Homeless People Sleep On Their Porch Threatened With Daily Fine.

* Pennsylvania High School Suspends Student Editor For Refusing To Print The Word ‘Redskins.’

* Nightmares: In 2010, a teacher’s aide and the assistant principal at Sparkman Middle School in Huntsville, Alabama carried out a plan to use a special needs student—a 14-year-old girl—as “bait” to catch another special needs student who was sexually violent. The plan failed, and the 14-year-old girl was raped in the school’s bathroom. Earlier this year, that assistant principal got promoted.

* More horrors: Fraternity Allegedly Used Color-Coded System to Roofie Girls.

* It’s been [hastily switches sign] 0 days since the last fact-free trend piece on paying for college through sex work.

* Meticulous Visual Recreation Of Moon Landing Shows It Wasn’t A Hoax. OR SO THEY WOULD HAVE US BELIEVE

* How to Get Into an Ivy League College—Guaranteed.

* Why we can’t have nice things: Ohio Supreme Court: It’s OK To Strip Mine State Wildlife Areas.

* And 9/19/1984: Never forget.

Friday Links!

* Inauguration Day at Marquette.

* Chess! Catch the fever!

* I am novelist David Mitchell, AMA.

* Retaliation against unionizing adjuncts at Mills College?

* UC regents award 20 percent pay raises to fix executive ‘injustices.’

Heralding what the University of California regents promise will be a new era of pay increases at the public university, the governing board gave 20 percent raises Thursday to their three lowest-paid chancellors – with some regents expressing regret that they could give so little.

* Who’s Paying the Pro-War Pundits?

* The Promise of Socialist Feminism.

* Jersey represent: A New Jersey borough council candidate dropped out of the race on Wednesday after reports surfaced that he mooned patrons at a local diner while yelling racial slurs, according to NJ Advance Media.

* Thomas Frank remembers Occupy.

* Also at the Baffler: U2, Apple, and the Strip-Mining of Punk Rebellion.

* 75 iconic photos from the 21st century, nearly all of them keyed to violence or war.

* The Earth could have 11 billion people by 2100. Looks like the good news on overpopulation was premature.

* 30 Photos of Wisconsin That Will Make You Want To Move There. Catch the fever!

* “That first scene, where he’s in the temple and he’s replacing that statue with a bag of sand – that’s what looters do,” Canuto says, grinning. “[The temple builders] are using these amazing mechanisms of engineering and all he wants to do is steal the stupid gold statue.”

* Teacher Who Learns More From Her Students Than She Teaches Them Fired.

* The New Way Insurers Are Shifting Costs To The Sick. You incorrigible scamps!

* Harvard is better at admitting low-income students than the University of Wisconsin.

* Innocent People In New York Who Can’t Afford A Lawyer Are Pretty Much Doomed.

* Texas court throws out ‘paternalistic’ ban on ‘upskirt’ photos. Ludicrous outcome.

* Elsewhere in the rule of law: Judge: Hobby Lobby Decision Means Polygamous Sect Member Can Refuse To Testify In Child Labor Case.

* SMBC: Do You Ever Fear Death?

* I too have now played all of season two of The Walking Dead and I too can confirm it’s totally great. I’m going to use it in my video game course next semester for sure.

* Student evaluations: still terrible.

* I can’t wait to find out if we’re going to send ground troops back to Iraq or if we’re very reluctantly, with all due caution and great care, going to send ground troops back to Iraq.

* What could possibly go wrong watch: arming Syrian rebels to fight ISIS, who are also Syrian rebels, but listen, this is all going to turn out great.

* I only pray we can construct the border wall across the Great Lakes in time.

* They say we don’t believe in the future enough to embark on generational projects anymore, but they’re going to try to clean the bathrooms at the Port Authority.

* The kids are a little bit frightening: A Milwaukee teen charged in a string of armed robberies last week told police he was trying to do as many crimes as he could before he turned 18 on Sept. 11.

* Scotland will stay.

* What Europe Would Look Like If All the Separatist Movements Got Their Way.

* And Slate covers the exciting return of Vermont secessionism.

Thursday Links!

* In case you missed it from the weekend: a CFP for a Science Fiction Film and Television special issue on “Star Trek at 50.”

* Call for submissions: Accessing the Future.

* Today’s twenty-first-century political weirdness is the Scotland referendum on independence. The Guardian. MetaFilter. The economic case. Schroedinger’s Kingdom. John Oliver. Why Scotland thinks it can survive as an independent country. I’m Guardian editor Matt Wells. Got questions on Scottish independence? Ask away!

* Alison Bechdel, certified genius. Some professors won too.

* Postdoc of the year: “The Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University invites applications for its 2015-2016 Postdoctoral Fellowship program. The successful candidates will couple their own research and publishing agenda with their contributions to the Center’s Collective Memory Project, a wide ranging oral history of the George W. Bush Presidency.” Friend, do I have a story for you.

* “Debates about the future of the humanities frequently revolve around the suspicion that the humanities might not have one.”

It was Kenneth Burke who said academia is like a party where you arrive late, slowly join the conversation, then declare the end of history.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 16, 2014

* Chris Ware is serializing a novella in the Guardian: “The Last Saturday.”

* Unpopular opinions watch: Carceral progressivism.

* More Weird Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About The Original Star Trek.

Roddenberry believed there was no chest hair in the future.

The dream never dies.

* A day in the life of a data mined kid.

* This Is What Happens To Transgender Kids Who Delay Puberty.

* The Time I Spent On A Commercial Whaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective On The World.

* World War II and the creation of the paperback industry.

* Cruel optimism watch: Are More MLA Faculty Jobs on the Way?

* Reporting rape at UNC.

* The madness of crowds: Wealthy L.A. Schools’ Vaccination Rates Are as Low as South Sudan’s.

* Despite all evidence to the contrary, blaming black culture for racial inequality remains politically dominant. And not only on the Right.

* Hamburg wants to be the best city in the world in 20 years.

* Burlington nipping on its heels.

* Calvinball in Wisconsin: the rules on voting just changed again.

* Lone Wolf returns!

* Study: 30 percent of former NFL players will get dementia or Alzheimer’s.

* Don’t look now, but the US prison population is growing again.

* The University of California is just literally a hedge fund now.

* What Are the Real Odds That Your Birth Control Will Fail? Pretty frightening.

* A King Kong prequel, because we haven’t even come close to hitting bottom yet.

* Do Animals Cry?

* BREAKING: Naomi Klein Is Right, Unchecked Capitalism Will Destroy Civilization.

* In decades of public debate about global warming, one assumption has been accepted by virtually all factions: that tackling it would necessarily be costly. But a new report casts doubt on that idea, declaring that the necessary fixes could wind up being effectively free. The price is too high!

* BREAKING: Immigrants aren’t stealing your jobs.

* A feminist history of Wonder Woman.

* Every panel of Watchmen, sorted by average lightness, ascending.

* Understanding the Tortoise and the Hare.

* Because you demanded it: “Play It Again, Dick,” the weird quasi-Veronica-Mars nega-sequel, is finally here.

* Necrocapitalism in the Anthropocene: Govt may do away with tribal consent for cutting forests.

* Why we can’t have nice things: Thievery marring Little Free Libraries.

* Anti-monuments in Milwaukee and beyond.

* May 2015 can’t come fast enough.

* And no one could have predicted: Apple releases U2 album removal tool.

SFFTV Special Issue CFP: “Star Trek at 50”

Science Fiction Film and Television seeks submissions for a special issue on “Star Trek at 50.”

Since its premiere on September 8, 1966, Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek has become shorthand for liberal optimism about the future, even as the franchise’s later entries have moved towards increasingly dark depictions of aging (ST II-VII), war (DS9), lifeboat ethics (VOY), and post-9/11 securitization (ENT). This internal tension has now culminated in the rebooted “Abramsverse” depiction that — while nominally directed towards reinvigorating the franchise by returning it to its youthful origins— has seen the Spock’s home planet of Vulcan destroyed by terrorists (ST) and the Federation itself corrupted by a coup from its black-ops intelligence wing (STID).

SFFTV invites fresh approaches to Star Trek media in the context of its amazing longevity and continued popularity, with possible emphases on:

* revivals, retcons, and reboots

* canon and canonicity

* Star Trek and/as “franchise”

* fan cultures, fan productions, and fan sequels

* Star Trek ephemera and paratexts

* lost episodes and unproduced scripts

* parody and pastiche (Galaxy Quest, Star Trek XXX, “The Wrath of Farrakhan,” etc.)

* spinoff media like video games and comics

* Star Trek and politics

* Star Trek and science/technology/invention

* Star Trek and race

* Star Trek, sex, gender, and orientation

* Star Trek and disability

* Star Trek and aesthetics

* Star Trek and aging

* Star Trek’s influence on other works or on the culture at large

* Star Trek and other Roddenberry productions (The Questor Tapes, Earth: Final Conflict, Andromeda)

Articles of 6,000-9,000 words should be formatted using MLA style and according to the submission guidelines available on our website. Submissions should be made via our online system at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com:80/lup-sfftv. Articles not selected for the special issue will be considered for future issues of SFFTV.

Any questions should be directed to the editors, Mark Bould (mark.bould@gmail.com), Sherryl Vint (sherryl.vint@gmail.com), and Gerry Canavan (gerrycanavan@gmail.com).

The deadline for submissions is September 1, 2015, with anticipated publication in Star Trek’s 50th anniversary year.

—

Science Fiction Film and Television is a biannual, peer-reviewed journal published by Liverpool University Press. Edited by Mark Bould (UWE), Sherryl Vint (Brock University), and Gerry Canavan (Marquette University), with an international board of advisory editors, it encourages dialogue among the scholarly and intellectual communities of film studies, sf studies and television studies. We invite submissions on all areas of sf film and television, from Hollywood productions to Korean or Turkish sf film, from Sci-Fi Channel productions to the origins of SF TV in Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers or The Quatermass Experiment. We encourage papers which consider neglected texts, propose innovative ways of looking at canonical texts, or explore the tensions and synergies that emerge from the interaction of genre and medium. We publish articles (6000-8000 words), book and DVD reviews (1000-2000 words) and review essays (up to 5000 words), as well as archive entries (up to 5000 words) on theorists (which introduce the work of key and emergent figures in sf studies, television studies or film studies) and texts (which describe and analyse little-known or unduly neglected films or television series). Science Fiction Film and Television is hosted online by Metapress and is accessible at http://liverpool.metapress.com/content/121631/. Online access is free to existing subscribers.