So edgy!

Mafia romance? Like Sopranos, but sexy?

Writing and approving policies takes forever. My college has been trying to put together one for two years. Two separate committees have worked on it. We're only now discussing the first draft of a policy in faculty assemblies.

Did I mention the latest committee used ChatGPT to write the policy?

If your students are cheating, it must be your fault, right? This doesn't happen to good teachers like me.

We've had PhD students using AI on their comprehensive exams without permission. We still don't have an AI policy for our graduate program.

After years of trying to maintain basic academic integrity in my classes--and being vilified by students, colleagues, and admin for being "mean" and fascist (seriously)-- I've concluded that a disturbing number of faculty never gave a shit about academic integrity to begin with.

I know faculty who still think *their* students aren't using AI bc they had a good discussion about it as a class, their assignments are truly unique, students are passionate about the subject matter, etc.

How do you maintain basic standards with colleagues who refuse to acknowledge the problem?

My point is, anyone claiming they didn't know about the job market in 2025 is full of shit. Even if their advisor didn't tell them. Even if their program was optimistic.

There's no way they didn't encounter these truths somewhere, though there's a good chance they thought they were the exception.

Michael Berube was the professor for our Intro to Grad Studies class my first semester of the MA, so I decided to read one of his books the summer before: The Employment of English.

I was SHOOK. That book's from 1998, and it was already sounding the alarm about the job market.

That was also the era when Kathryn Hume's Surviving Your Academic Job Hunt came out.

It would be hard to overstate the amount of trauma this book inflicted on a generation of new PhDs.

Have you been to Altoona?

Altoona may have been the "beating heart" of the railroad, but that era has been over for decades. Now, it's the beating heart of the rural mid-Atlantic meth industry. Those cops are yokels and ridiculous out of their depth.

Would "I <3 Waterville" work? 😛

I tried to explain the job market to a student by talking about how many people applied for my job, and how almost all of them were overqualified. That, at that point, the chance of getting a job comes down to pure luck.

One of my friends used to compare it to Toy Story's claw scene.

Yup.

*if you're a woman.

Perfect casting: Henry Cavill, another infamous baby man.

This makes sense. Repetitive movement calms the nervous system.

Sometimes you have to put on your own oxygen mask first etc etc

Any writer who has lost a parent understands this. It's been over a decade, and I, too, am tired of having a dead dad.

The grief never goes away. It just takes new forms. But eventually the brain fog lifts, and the writing comes back. I know this is cliché, but go easy on yourself in the meantime.