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What an English degree is good for (according to The Sims 2)

I haven’t had much of a “break” this winter break. I’ve been pretty busy working on some writing projects, getting caught up with teaching, and dealing with some other stressful things. Mostly “good” stress, but not all good, and stress is still stress.

Anyway, I did have a bit of fun. Among other things, I bought the new expansion pack to The Sims 2, “University.” I’m sure that Samantha is jealous.

As a (near) middle-aged male college professor, I don’t think I’m the typical player of The Sims 2. Still, I find the game a good distraction (beats a lot of what’s on TV nowadays), and I figured that this new “College-themed” supplement would be right up my alley. It’s pretty good, though, like many other things with The Sims, this new supplement makes some pretty weird assumptions.

I understand that you can’t really make an entertaining “game” out of the academic life, so it probably isn’t surprising that “University” is more about the social life of college: the dorms, frat houses, hanging out, and so forth. Sims do have to go to class and they declare majors, and different majors are good for different future careers. Most of the majors seem to correspond well to future careers: being an art major will help your Sim in the artist career path, being an economics major will help in a business career path, etc.

So, what’s the best career path for a literature major? Criminal. I kid you not.

I think I’ll play a literature major. Who knows? Maybe he’ll grow up to be a mob leader.

Oh, and PS: at least the makers of The Sims value literature more than philosophy. The ideal career path for philosophy majors is “slacker.”

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Will’s finest drama hour

Will’s school had the first and second grade musical program last night, a production called A Book is a Magic Carpet. Sorry for the poor quality of the photo, but it’s the best our zoomless and aging digital camera could do. I’m hoping for some better pictures with the film camera.

As this link to a google search suggests, this is a commonly performed production, sort of the grade school equivalent of Guys and Dolls or The Sound of Music. It’s more or less a medley of songs about various children’s books– a number about Dr. Seuss, “Hi-ho, hi-ho, off to work we go,” a couple of numbers about how good it is to read, etc.

Some of the parts included White Rabbit (along with Alice, of course), Snow White (with the dwarfs and the hi-ho number), Fox in Sox, Frogs, and Toads. Will actually had a major speaking part, “narrator #1.” There were a total of four narrators, and these kids pretty much said everything. Some of Will’s lines included:

  • “Books are magic carpets that can take us anywhere we want to go. Come on. Hop on board!”
  • “Yes, he did, sir! He wrote many! Maybe even ten or twenty! He wrote Horton Hears a Who… of Zooks and Yooks and green eggs, too! Now it’s time to go sir, now, sir” (this was during the Dr. Suess number).
  • “I love mud puddles. And they remind me of my favorite book– called Mud. Hey, look! There’s the little girl from Mud now!” (this was a tough ling because Will kept saying “I don’t really like that book.”)
  • And a lot of “hey, look there!” and “I don’t know; what do you think?”

Anyway, he did a fantastic job and it was of course the best production I’ve seen, well, ever. Of course, I might be a bit biased.

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The ups and downs of teaching porn

No, no, not me– Alex Halavais, who teaches communications and informatics at the University of Buffalo (isn’t that the same as SUNY, Buffalo?). I stumbled across his blog today while procrastinating, and read this entry about a course he’s teaching about pornography. A few of the highlights I found both amusing and interesting:

  • “I keep the door to my office closed when writing lectures and when someone knocks, I have to make sure the screen is clear of anything offensive, despite the fact that I will be talking about this in front of a class of 400.”
  • “Although there may be people who would find the danger of teaching such a course an addiction to porn, at this point I would be happy if I never again saw the image of a naked person.”
  • “It’s not just me who gets bored with porn. I have a feeling that while many students took this course because of the nature of the material, the novelty has worn off (despite what the school newspaper suggests).”
  • “At this stage, it appears clear that a not insubstantial number of the students are going to fail the course, despite some generous curves on the exams. I don’t know that some brief titillation is worth having to admit to failing your porn course.”
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The Happy Academic wants to ask Horowitz: how can I get in on that easy life?

I think a lot of folks have stumbled across my blog lately as the result of a “Ward Churchill Blog” Google search because I had a few posts earlier this month about that mess. Fair enough. I still don’t think Churchill ought to be fired over his infamous 9/11 essay, but the more I learn about him, the less crazy I am about “defending” Churchill. It’s like that bad feeling you get about defending the Klu Klux Klan’s right to march or Eminem to be Eminem: it seems to me that if you want to protect free speech, you’ve got to defend bad speech, too. This seems especially true in academia.

Anyway, that’s not really why I decided to write tonight. At least not entirely.

Churchill is still in the news in some interesting ways, including a deal where CU would offer him early retirement, and all this stuff about whether or not he is or isn’t Native American. But the piece that really caught my attention was the article “Faculty feels ‘beaten up'” in the Boulder, CO newspaper The Daily Camera (which, by the way, has one of the most annoying free registration procedures I’ve ever come across).

Basically, the article is about how the Churchill matter has been an enormous distraction for faculty at the University of Colorado, dragging folks into the mess who want nothing to do with this and to just get on with their teaching and scholarship and lives. And this is coming on top of budget problems, some other questionable administration decisions, and a bunch of controversy with the football team. I feel your pain, CU folk.

And just to add to it all, CU faculty had to deal with a “special speaker” earlier this month:

Nationally known conservative author David Horowitz told a crowd at CU that university professors work six to nine hours a week, eight months a year for $150,000. Horowitz’s comments came earlier this month, after Churchill’s essay comparing victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks to a Nazi bureaucrat ignited a political firestorm.

Wow.

Well, I am indeed a Happy Academic, but I’m not that happy of an academic. Shockingly, I make considerably less than $150,000 a year, and I spend more than six to nine hours a week just answering emails from students, colleagues, and administrators. I’m only in the classroom teaching about nine hours a week, but, as anyone who has ever taught at any level can tell you, most of the work of teaching is “behind the scenes:” reading, research, planning, grading, etc. It varies from week to week and from semester to semester, but I easily spend an average of fifteen or twenty hours every week out of the classroom getting ready for those nine hours in it. Plus there’s office hours and meeting with graduate students, both of which are more or less “teaching” activities.

Plus there’s scholarly work, which is part of the job description for a university professor, especially one at a place like the University of Colorado. Giving presentations, writing articles, writing books, and doing other kinds of scholarly activities are things that most happy academics (especially those at “fancier” schools) want to do, but it’s a hell of a lot of work.

And plus there is a surprising amount of work that almost all college professors have to do that has nothing to do with either teaching or scholarship. This tends to be called “service,” and I suppose it is. But really, it’s more like “administration” in just making things within the institution… well, work.

Horowitz’s characterization of the money and the workload of a college professor is of course incredibly wrong. But I suspect his characterization jives with the perceptions most folks in the general public have on the work of a college professor, and perhaps that is really the source of all this outrage against Churchill. Not only does Churchill get paid an outrageous amount of money from tax dollars to say incredibly stupid things; he doesn’t even really work! The Daily Camera article just fuels the fire when it reports “Churchill, a tenured professor who has only a master’s degree, earns more than $94,000 a year, teaches five hours a week and charges a $3,500 guest speaking fee. Last year, he spoke at a dozen campuses.”

Anyway, other than a few unusual situations like Churchill’s, I’m not entirely sure where this perception of the highly paid non-working college professor comes from and how its sustained. Part of it is perhaps because college professors tend to work weird hours and in untraditional settings. Everyone I know in academia does most of their work away from their university office (at home, in coffee shops, etc.). Another part of it (maybe the main part of it?) is that most people in higher education are pretty happy, even the ones who complain once in a while. Academics really seem to enjoy their jobs, so it doesn’t even really seem like they are working at all, at least not working in the way that far too many people in this country “work.” Like what you see in the movie Office Space or something.

Anyway, I think the academic job I have is pretty typical and it’s a far cry from 9 hours a week at $150K/year. But I’d really like to know how I can cash in on one of these gigs Horowitz is talking about. Call me, David.

Oh, and judging by this web site, I think Horowitz does okay paycheck-wise too.

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Two Oscar thoughts

Annette and I watched the Oscars last night, and this morning, I had two thoughts about the whole event. I’m sure neither of these thoughts is particularly original, but here they are anyway:

  • This year, Annette and I saw only one of the movies nominated for best picture, Sideways. What it boils down to is sitters for Will are getting harder to get and more expensive, plus we’ve both been pretty busy with other things this year.

    However, I don’t think we’re the only folks who watched the Oscars this year who felt out of touch with the big nominated films. Chris Rock had a funny bit where he was asking people in the Magic Johnson Theater complex in LA if they had seen any of the nominated movies. None of them had. Then he asked folks to name their favorite movies, and the list included things like Alien vs. Predator and White Chicks.

    Now, obviously, this was edited together this way, and it was supposed to be funny: look at all these people who didn’t see one of the movies that “the academy” thought were worthy, and look at the crappy movie these people really went to see. Ha-ha. But the thing is Rock’s bit seemed a little too true to me.

  • A closely related second point: the two most controversial and polarizing movies of the year, The Passion and Fahrenheit 911 (guess which one of these movies I actually saw), were no where to be seen. Other than the references Rock made in his opening monologue.

I’m not entirely sure what this all means, other than it seems to me that the Oscar people are walking a pretty thin and specific line in terms of what movies they see as “worthy.” It has to be arty, but not too arty; it has to be Hollywood, but not too Hollywood; ethnicity is nice, but not too ethnic; and for God’s sake, make sure it doesn’t piss anybody off.