I caught wind of some of the examples of GPT-3 answering PhD-exam-style questions plausibly. It seems to me an elegant if indirect proof that Wikipedia entries on many topics are written by current or former graduate students, or people with an excellent ability to imitate them. But it also called to mind the famous arithmetic scene in Eugène Ionesco’s La leçon, which I am sure I am not the first to think of in connection with today’s debates over “stochastic parrots.”

Violating my resolution to never click through to NYT higher education coverage, I went and read a report on the scandal over Columbia’s US News rankings. That rankings are “reactive” is not exactly breaking news (see Espeland and Sauder and Fourcade), but the article is worth it for two reasons. The first is the line in my title, which describes Michael Thaddeus, the Columbia math professor whose analysis is the basis for the story. The second reason is the link to the analysis itself, a highly entertaining exercise in checking Columbia management’s dodgy data. I recommend the analysis as an education in the value of looking things up in IPEDS, the Common Data Set, audited financial statements, and other public data sources. And as a reminder that there are many paths to radicalism, including those that go via algebraic geometry.

Eight years ago, I taught an undergraduate literary theory course with a section on the history and theory of the English curriculum itself. I spent some time looking at the University Archives’ collection of Rutgers course catalogues in order to make a selection for students. One of the pleasurable discoveries was the English listings of Livingston College in its early years (here 1971):

My colleague Jeff Lawrence has just published an essay in the Chronicle Review: Who Owns Your Academic Community? There are so many good points that I was having trouble choosing which to quote-tweet. But then I realized: I’m not tweeting. So instead of locating the most RT-able, like-able, fire-emoji-able sound-bite, I can just tell you to read the whole thing. Jeff shows that social media is a hopeless pis aller for intellectuals and the scholarly community. Two years of pandemic isolation has made it possible for the fetid outrage factories on Facebook and Twitter to appear in the guise of a righteously populist substitute for exclusionary “academe”—even to academics who should know better. But there is no salvation for intellectuals to be found in the ruins of the public sphere, least of all in the extremely limited possibilities of so-called “public scholarship.” Without scholarly institutions, there can be but few scholars.

I add as a footnote that the dynamic Jeff describes is recognized by Pierre Bourdieu as an established tendency in the cultural field. One of the characteristic positions in this field is that of “internal anti-intellectualism,” the practice of denouncing the values of intellectuals themselves as a mere disguise for self-aggrandizement. Some of the force of these denunciations comes from the fact that, of course, some intellectuals of high stature are indeed terrible people. And people who are marginalized within the intellectual field are, says Bourdieu, “well-placed to discover the contradictions, weaknesses or pettinesses which go unnoticed by a more distanced reverence….But the objectifications of the intellectual game inspired by these intellectual passions remain necessarily partial and blind to themselves: the resentment of disappointed love leads to a reversal of the dominant vision, demonizing what it once made divine.”¹ Social media has proven even more effective at disseminating this distorting and demoralizing vision than the cultural journalism of print and broadcast mass-media (or as we now call them, “legacy media”) that Bourdieu had in mind. Jeff’s point is that social media has proven far less effective as a substitute for the kinds of interaction that allow intellectuals to organize collectively in defense of their own institutions and the integrity of their own values.

I have an extended review of John Thompson’s new study of publishing, Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing, forthcoming in Contemporary Literature. Tempting as it is to publish an adaptation of my review as a cozy historical mystery novel on Kindle Unlimited, I prefer to keep adding to my personal weblog like it’s 2009. The journal kindly permits authors to share accepted manuscripts, so here it is: behold the digital revolution in publishing! The final edited version will appear in Contemporary Literature 62, no. 3 (Fall 2022). Spoilers: I liked the book and think that literary scholars should read the work of this eminent sociologist. Also spoilers: the digital revolution in publishing does not consist of putting LaTeX’d PDFs on your website.

Update: added the link to the published version.

Far be it from me to abstain from joining academics the world over conducting their sortes Joyceanae in search of an appropriate line for the day. Combing through my old notes got me the title of this post (“Eumaeus,” 16.1153), but what follows falls at about the level of late-night Bloomian rambling.

Or, the committee to review the committee to review has reviewed the review and issued its review review.

My union’s University Budget and Priorities Committee, which I am part of, just put out a new report on Rutgers’s Responsibility Center Management budgeting system: Reviewing the RCM Review: What Five Years Taught Rutgers About a Broken Budget System. Some time last year I imagined that committee doing a full-scale independent investigation of this baleful budgetary scheme, which has abetted privatization and austerity at countless universities. But the work was slow getting going, and in the meantime something weird happened: management did it for us, sort of. A high-level committee of deans and vice presidents produced an RCM Review Report, issued in June, whose findings are as damning as the most radical university budget-critic could desire. It baldly concludes that the budget model is bad for “Ph.D. education, arts and humanities, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and those [initiatives] that support students or further the university’s public mission.” In other words, almost every worthwhile goal of the university; elsewhere the report notes that the sciences are ill-served too.

Of course, that was not how management treated the results of its own proceedings: the report has been left to sit quietly, with no apparent change in the RCM machinery. So our union committee has produced a Review of the Review to highlight for the wider university public just how dire the effects of this machinery have been.

In the unlikely event that you, Internet Reader, wish to write to me, please note that Rutgers’s university e-mail system, provided by our friends at Microsoft at who knows what cost, aggressively misidentifies almost all non-Rutgers-origin messages (and many Rutgers-origin messages!) as spam. Over the last few months I have regularly been finding important messages from former students in my spam folder. I try to check my university spam folder regularly, but occasionally I neglect that particular Augean stable for too long. It seems Microsoft’s advanced machine learning technology is tuned to annihilate literally every message originating from Gmail.

I can be reached at first name dot last name at gmail. I cannot be reliably reached on social media.

This figure represents changes in the different types of instructors employed at Rutgers-New Brunswick since 2013 (the year Rutgers merged with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey), with Rutgers’s Big 10 “peer” campuses added for comparison. It spells bad news for tenure at Rutgers, and, since Rutgers is in many ways exemplary of national trends, bad news for the rest of US higher education too.

Joseph Kiger, a night-school teacher in Parkersburg, called Bilott to ask for help. About nine months earlier, he received a peculiar note from the Lubeck water district. It arrived on Halloween day, enclosed in the monthly water bill. The note explained that an unregulated chemical named PFOA had been detected in the drinking water in ’low concentrations,’ but that it was not a health risk.

That was 2005. This is from a 2016 New York Times feature on the lawsuits against DuPont for knowingly dumping toxic PFAS, the carcinogenic “forever chemicals” now known to be in a lot of people’s drinking water but only very recently and selectively regulated (thanks to the cozy relationship between chemical corporations and their regulators).

From Halloween to All Saints: yesterday all the customers of Middlesex Water Company learned that PFOA had been detected in our drinking water, but, says MWC in an informational slideshow, there is “NO IMMEDIATE HEALTH RISK!”

Nonetheless Middlesex Water sued 3M back in July for the cost of building the treatment facility to filter PFAS from our water. Glad they were ahead of the game there, and if they win, it will certainly be nice for them. The rest of us are supposed to wait until 2023, when the facility will be operational, in theory.

As I sit alone in my home office, there is also no immediate health risk from COVID infection or climate change. This is fine.