Worst Professor Ever

Note from WoPro: I am still sick, but Dr. $hiraz has sportingly offered to give her view on academic life — and you thought I was making her up.

Dr $hiraz here – today I’m substitute blogging for Worst Professor Ever (or WoPro as I call her). It is interesting living with WoPro, because I am on the tenure track and am still invested in the career that she is transitioning out of and the academy that *cough* she is not so fond of. I know WoPro from the horrendously sadistic graduate program we were both in (yes, I know I just ended two sentences with prepositions – give me a B-). I jumped ship to a program that didn’t eat its own young and she persevered and stayed in the field. Anyway, my experience with the academy has been in many ways different from hers (my colleagues are almost all sane, for a start), but I also appreciate the humor and candor with which she approaches the ivory tower and recognizes many of the problems of sexism, exploitation and harassment that she talks about here and in her book (forthcoming and sure to be read by many more people than my excellent piece on sixteenth-century alpaca mating habits).

The Ivory Tower looking a little darker than usual.

She might say I’m still owned. Maybe it’s true. I appreciate the opportunity to teach courses on fun and crazy topics and the freedom from the 9-5 work day and immediate oversight. I’m not so crazy about the insane stress that is the tenure track and spending my whole summer on a book three people will read (hi mom!).

Anyway, WoPro can speak from outside the academy, which gives her the license to be nothing like The Chronic (aka The Chronicle of Higher Education), but she invited me to contribute occasionally, and so here’s my voice from the inside. (I pretty much refuse to read The Chronic because the behavior in the comments/discussion is so repulsive – about the standard of the message boards of the internet that are inhabited exclusively by men who live in their mothers’ basements and spend the rest of their time online pretending to be 14-year-old girls to chat with other men pretending to be 14-year-old girls, except with fewer calls for “Tits or get the fuck out.”).

WoPro might be showing you how to escape, but if you are considering the long haul, here are some tips for the tenure track. They are supposed to be humorous. Maybe. (I could post grad school survival tips, but there is already this (just remember, it’s OK to eat the dead passengers when you crash into a mountainside).

So, for those of you still in the academy, what are your survival tips?

(By the way, if you want to make image macros, which I find an excellent means of procrastination, especially at about 2am, you can use I Can has Cheezburger’s builder and then just screencap the pic after you hit preview if you don’t want to submit it. Or you could hit submit and confuse the hell out of people looking for pictures of funny cats.)

OK, so, the first three (why are these all medication/ self-medication related?)