Seven years of SLACing (and new Barbies!)

Seven* years ago, having accepted a tenure-track job offer and realizing that my ability to give graduate students advice would be greatly diminished by working at a small liberal arts college, I started this blog by bragging about my job market success. Over the years, some things have changed (I finished my dissertation, started my first job, then started my second; I started a corresponding Facebook page) and some things have not (I still use the same now-ancient theme for the site, I still occasionally think I’m clever, I still like giving people advice).

As I said on the site’s fifth birthday, I originally thought that five regular readers would make writing this worthwhile. Now, I’m closing in on 100,000 total views. (Don’t scoff. Not everybody can be like Conditionally Accepted with their hundreds of thousands of views and getting called up to the big leagues!) Even though I’m not writing about grad school and the academic job market nearly as much these days, I hope that people are still finding my career musings worthwhile. Since WordPress now distinguishes between “visits” and “views,” once in a while I will notice that somebody new has discovered the site because the daily “visits” will remain constant while the “views” climb, which is always nice.

When the blog was three years old I posted lists of the most popular posts and my favorites. (Those lists of favorites still make up the “good places to start” section of the blog – maybe I should update that…) It is harder to remember which posts were my favorites now that I’ve written over 700 of them, but the post that brings people here in the most ironic fashion is probably the one in which I talked about Kanye West and Taylor Swift at the 2009 VMAs, quoting one of the twitter responses in the title. Over the years I have seen quite a few people arriving at the blog by searching for the title of that post, but I don’t think that an analysis of racism is what they’re typically expecting to find. Take that, racists!

In other news, today Mattel announced that Barbie now comes in three body types: petite, tall, and curvy. I have no doubt that Mattel purposefully shared this news on my blog anniversary in an attempt to bury it (like when companies release bad news on Fridays). Clearly, the two posts I’ve written comparing Barbie to Lammily and their nearly 400 combined views are the reason for this change. Take that, Mattel!

Given the huge effect my blog is having on racists and toy manufacturers, it is clear that similar influence on sexists, classists, and college administrators is not far behind. Yes, I think it is safe to say that my work here is nearly complete. Maybe this will be my last post!

*If Prince didn’t work so hard to keep his songs off of the internet, I would put a link to the song “Seven” here.

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A toast to the douchebags

Watching TV the other night I saw a commercial for Bud Light Platinum* that started with the piano notes from Kanye West’s “Runaway”. You can see the commercial here:

Given that rappers typically name drop more expensive (or, in some cases, their own) brands of alcohol, my first thought was, “why is a high-profile rapper allowing his song to be used in a commercial for a variation of Bud Light?” Then I thought about the lyrics to “Runaway” and realized that this commercial wins the award for the best match of a song and a product in advertising history. The reason is found in the first eight lines of the song:

And I always find, yeah I always find something wrong / You’ve been putting up with my shit just way too long / I’m so gifted at finding what I don’t like the most / So I think it’s time for us to have a toast

Let’s have a toast for the douchebags / Let’s have a toast for the assholes / Let’s have a toast for the scumbags / Every one of them that I know

So here we have blatant recognition that the public has been putting up with Anheuser Busch’s shit just way too long and that the drinkers of something called Bud Light Platinum are likely to be douchebags and assholes. I have no idea who is responsible for this, but that person is a genius (and likely to be fired).

*I’ve never had Bud Light Platinum and I probably never will, so I make these observations while allowing for the slim possibility that Bud Light Platinum is a great beer.

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Kanye West describes the need for degrees

A recent article at Inside Higher Ed attributes the continual attainment of Ph.D.s despite the lack of jobs as the result of search for “smugness,” stating in part:

Take two reasonably intelligent 25-year-olds, both with undergraduate degrees. One, Aphron, goes the way of Mammon, getting a job and spending the next decade as a salaryman — first at a low level, but by year 10 well-advanced in the hierarchy, doing pretty well. The other seeks a Ph.D. — call him Metis — and spends eight years lurking outside his dissertation director’s office followed by two years actually writing. The Economist would tell you that the Aphron is in materially better shape.

But what about spiritually? Ego-wise? Qua a fully-formed human being? There’s where the Metis, Ph.D., holds all the cards. Aphron spent 10 years getting and spending so as to fill the hole in his center. A decade out of school he careens from one excellent meal to the next, from one satisfying Caribbean vacation to another, from a well-heated home in January to a well-cooled one in July, no closer to fulfillment than when he started. Metis, however, has done something less than 1 percent of Americans have done — climbed the mountain of the academy and planted his flag. In conversations with Aphron he can parry chatter about the trouble with tax shelters with something high-minded about myxobacteria or heteroglossia or dark matter. Dark matter!

This reminds me of one of the skits on Kanye West’s The College Dropout:

My question is, can we also extend this explanation to the adjunctification of higher education?  Could it be that those without Ph.D.s, including the general public as well as our elected officials, argue for cutting education budgets as payback for our smugness?

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“Kanye West is a nigger.”

The title of this post is one of the more gentle quotes compiled from Twitter on this site following Kanye West’s interruption of Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards Sunday night.  For those unfamiliar with the situation (though I recently saw this story on CNN, so if you’re reading this you’re probably familiar), Taylor Swift won the award for Best Female Video and Kanye West took the stage to say that Beyonce’s video for “Single Ladies” was one of the best of all time.  Apologies followed, but the story continues to be told.

Entertainment Weekly, of all places, does a good job of examining the racial implications of this situation:

Then there’s the other context underlying this story: namely, race. I want to make it 100 percent clear that I am absolutely not accusing everyone who’s criticized Kanye’s VMAs conduct of having racist motivations. That would be ridiculous, not to mention hypocritical. But racism is a undeniable part of this controversy. Not just from the Twitterers and blog commenters whose first instinct has been to spew truly vile racial slurs in Kanye’s direction. (Blogger Harry Allen has compiled some of the most disgusting examples; warning, lots of NSFW language.) I’m talking, too, about all the characterizations of Taylor Swift as a victim of some awful crime. When a black man speaks rudely in the presence of a younger white woman — and that’s all Kanye really did — and it gets described as an “attack” or a “violation” or an “assault,” you bet that’s playing into centuries of racist tropes. When a black man does something impolite, making no reference whatsoever to race, and he immediately gets crucified for “hating white people” or “reverse racism,” that itself is a form of racism. Here’s a question for those who use this line: VMAs host Russell Brand made some pretty gross jokes about Katy Perry and Lady Gaga during the broadcast. Does he hate white people, too?

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