New Colossus, With Corrections for the MAGA era

Not like the brazen giant of Greek ^[M1]  fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman^[M2]  with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles^[M3] . From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome^[M4] ; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp^[M5] !" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.^[M6] 

Send these, the homeless^[M7] , tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

---

 [M1] Greece is too socialist, use another country

 [M2] Women should be nurturing and loving, change to "caring woman"

 [M3] Sounds too much like "immigrants", change to "Citizens"

 [M4] This is Globalism, which is almost Socialism. Change it to "USA-wide welcome"

 [M5] This implies that pomp is bad, and President Trump likes pomp. Please replace with something else that we don't like about Europe, like, say "Socialized Medicine"

 [M6] The entire piece needs to be changed. Please replace with something like "Give me your your educated, your rich, your wealthy businessmen yearning for lower taxes, the affluent few of your most exclusive coastal villas".

 [M7] This may imply that we should take care of homeless, who, as we know, have only themselves to blame. Change to "Homeowners"

My Garden, or, Me Being Tiresome, Talking About 30 Square Feet

A few years ago, after more than twenty years of marriage, we finally bought a house. The previous owners had put together a nice garden, but had not worked on it all that much in the previous year or so. When we moved in, my better half talked about having some vegetables, or perhaps an herb garden in the little herb box by the side of the house. Of course, this did not materialize. However, as my job search stalled, I started climbing the walls out of boredom. That next spring, with the help of a good friend (thanks J!!), the garden was organized, ordered, trimmed and cleaned up.

Nice.

Now what?

Boredom decreed that I do something else, so, the next spring, I decided to tinker. I started by removing the salt cedar that started sending roots everywhere. So I pulled it out, replaced some soil, and planted a couple of wildflower mixes. I also cleared some more space, and added a bit more of the wildflower mix. I also planned some grass mix in a bare strip up front, where the previous owners had stripped out a row of bushes, and couldn’t decide what to do.

To my everlasting shock and surprise, they came in like gangbusters. By late spring, the flowers were in full bloom, nicely complementing the existing flowering plants and tree. Drunk on power, I vowed to continue. However, I only saw a part of that, since I was away, working in California.

Leaving my California job in the early spring, I remembered my vow. Well, more truthfully, I was bored again. I cleared some more of the existing vegetation out back, and planted a whole set of butterfly plants, as well as couple of raspberry plants. In front, I decided that I would establish a Native Wildflower Garden. So, armed with a shovel, enthusiasm and nothing resembling a plan, I cleared a circle of some 30 ft² of turf, and planted a mix of prairie plants – a blow struck for Mother Earth!!!

A week later, the Oak Park Conservatory had a plant sale. In a green-tinted fever haze, I bought some basil, oregano, parsley, and sage. I cleared the tangled jungle of weeds out of the herb box, added soil, and planted them my herbs. I was now the proud owner of a realio trulio herb box, as well as couple of raspberry plants. I was now a Gardener, and a Restorer Of Native Habitats, and an Organic Berry Farmer!

As spring progressed, the plants seemed to be growing especially slow. The previous year’s flowers came in, though, and suddenly we were drowning in cone flowers and black-eyed Susans. They grew to four feet tall, and were flopping over everywhere. Up front, the cone flowers were also blooming in the prairie. Then the milkweed exploded in the front, and the butterfly flowers and bee balm exploded out back. All those decades of education, all those years studying ecology, had finally paid off – For I was He Whose Garden Grows. Off again to another California job, my garden continued to thrive. A rainy Chicagoland summer had resulted in rampant growth in the herb box usually seen in weeds and bad pop songs.

Back again in the spring, I expanded my little plot a bit, added some seeds, and was both overjoyed and shocked to see how many of the plants were growing and flowering, and doing well. I greeted the milkweed as an old friend, smiled indulgently as the pushy coneflowers crowded the plot, fighting with the black-eyed Susans for attention, and watched as my prairie thistles towered over the other flowers, intimidating all but the wild bergamot, which is pretty badass. I congratulated the very first guaras and mountain mint plants, and peeked in on the side-oats grama leaning hither and fro, red anthers dangling as though it had somehow forgotten that grasses don’t have showy flowers.

They grew, the produced seeds, and, as winter set in, they died. While I was a bit sad, I knew that this was The Circle Of Life. I would see them all again in the spring, and they would, hopefully, bring some buddies too.

My wife was relieved, since I got pretty tiresome, waxing all lyrical about my garden. My child avoided my any time I came indoors after being in the garden for any length of time, having no desire to be subjected to a minute description of the daily activity in that wild tangle of vegetation up in the front of our house. When bringing friends home, he learned to sneak into the house through the alley, rather than subject his unsuspecting friends to Dad Going On About His Prairie Plot. Again.

The back yard did well, but, as I found it boring, I will continue to talk about My Favorite Child. I’m That Type Of Bad Parent

It is the end of winter, and boredom has set in. It is time for New Big Things in My Garden. I will reveal all in my Next Post.

The Great Academic Job Application Scavenger Hunt

I have been on a job search (on-and-off) more or less since the beginning of the Millennium. The fact that I was only able to actually get a full time job in the conventional sense once in all that time may say something about me. It also may say something about the job expectations, opportunities, and processes for those unfortunates who choose to go through the PhD Experience.

It is the character of most Doctoral programs in Ecology that they prepare you only for a career in academia (federal and state jobs are usually populated by people with PhDs from Fish and Wildlife departments, the arch-nemeses of True Ecologists). That means that, from the time that you see the light at the end of the PhD tunnel, you start your academic job search.

I never landed that Crowning Achievement of a tenure track position, though I worked in a series of non-tenure positions over the first decade or so of the 21^st century. It seems that, as an applicant, I was the type that Universities wanted as a friend, not as a serious relationship. The reasons are not entirely clear to me, but then again, they’re never clear to anybody who gets the “I like you, but I don't LIKE like you” comment. In any case, copies of my application packet took up residence in trash folders of computers around the country. Considering the number of applications I sent out, I would say that electrons from my applications are still inhabiting old computers in solid waste dumps across the USA.

I became, however, well educated in the process of the Academic Job Search, and therefore I feel qualified to opine on the topic. Of course, I have never shied away from opining on topics about which I know nothing, but in this case, the opinion has not entirely originated in my nether regions. I will limit myself, more or less, to the Job Application Game.

The academic job application is like a super-unpleasant scavenger hunt, during which you have to produce or find a number of items, which you then present to a search committee, who will judge whether your items fulfill the rules of the game. Every school has its own variation of the rules, so every job application feels like you are playing a whole new game. While this is fun when you’re visiting a casino resort, it loses whatever appeal it has by the time you are sending your fifteenth job application, and trying to remember what you need to mention in this or that document.

All of the items collected or produced in the Hunt are collected in an “application packet”, which is only rarely an actual, physical, packet. Those places which still request an actual physical packet also prefer that it be delivered by Pony Express.

Rules of the Game: the Job Ad.

This gives the basic rules of the Hunt, and supposedly spells out the items required. All job ads are confusing, puzzling, and inexplicable at best. However, academic job ads are a category in and of themselves. This is because, to begin with, they have been written by the half-dozen members of the Search Committee, revised by every administrator in the university, and then re-revised by half a dozen HR people. By the end it is not only incomprehensible, but also contradictory. Imagine a job ad written by Salvador Dali. This adds to the excitement of the game, since you can never be sure whether your "targeted" application is aimed at the correct target.

Items to be Collected:  the Application Packet

Item Number 1: the Academic CV. This is an item that one must create. The best minds of the nation have determined the format of this document, with the purpose of making job applicants feel bad about themselves. You have just spent 10-15 years learning the trade of an academic researcher and teacher. You have gained a myriad skills, and have performed remarkable mental feats. All of these would amaze most human being on the planet. That is, if they would ever know about them. Unfortunately, academic CV manage to avoid mentioning any of these. Instead, a Good CV only mention those accomplishments that have the narrowest appeal. The academic CV manages boil a decade of toil and labor to a few articles that have a readership that could fit into an airport shuttle. So the CV includes:

Education: where and when you received each academic degree. This should NOT include your High School, for obvious reasons. You should also NOT include GPAs, mostly because they would be embarrassing. This information will allow the committee to rank you based on how many friends they have working at each of those universities
Employment: It should be concise, since no department gives a rodent's posterior about your other relationships. Be careful not to include too many, since, like 19th century men, departments are uncomfortable with experienced candidates, and prefer to be your "first".
Publications: This is where you list all of your peer-reviewed publication. The most important parts are the count and the prestigiousness of the journals. Topics and titles are irrelevant, since nobody reads them anyway.
Grants and Awards: Since academia is all about Life Of The Mind, this is the most important part. This is where you write how many grants you have received and the dollar amounts. That is the only section in you do not need to be concise.

Other: You may add entries like Memberships in Professional Societies, Hobbies, and whether you have won a non-academic, and thus unimportant, award like Volunteer Firefighter of the Year, Congressional Medal of Honor, or Nobel Peace Prize. They don’t matter and nobody reads these parts.  

This is the most important item on the list, since most decisions for winners are based on the prestige of your graduate program, the number of publications, and the amount of grant money and award money you have received, all which you must display prominently on your CV.

Items # 2 and 3: Teaching Philosophy and Research Statement. More items that you need to create. Let’s describe them in detail

Teaching Philosophy: It often comes as a shock to graduates that they need to have a philosophy of teaching, other than “let’s get it done with, so I can get back to important things” for a research university, or “I love students, and they will love me because I am an awesome teacher”, for everywhere else. Well, truth be told, that is exactly what goes into a Teaching Philosophy, just wordier and with more bombastic phrases. If you can manage that, you’re good to go.

Research Statement: description of your research in which you tell them exactly what you’ve done, are doing, and will be doing for the next decade or so. Basically a history and a prophesy combined into a single document. Because you need to show extensive background and detailed future plans, make sure that it is no longer than one page.

Neither of these documents are all that important, since the decision to invite you for an interview will be made based on your CV. However, they may be used as evidence against you by members of the search committee who have do not want to hire you because you remind them of their least favorite sibling, their ex, or of that student who beat them out for class president in 5^th grade.

Item number 4: the Cover Letter. Not always needed. In the letter, you need to tell the committee why their school is the absolute best place for you. You are not supposed to say too much about yourself, for that would be Bragging, a Cardinal Sin for SuApplicants. The requirement is “tell us how wonderful we are, and why we are your Dream Job”. By the time you finish that damn letter, you really do want that job, even if you were lukewarm about it at the beginning.

Basically, you need to flatter the school outrageously, and pledge your everlasting devotion to them, while, at the same time, demonstrating that you understand their aspirations and needs. Sort of like contestants on The Bachelor.

Item # 5: Letters of Recommendation. This are to be collected from the most famous people you know who are willing to take the risk of telling the world that you are the best thing since the Cambrian Explosion. These must describe you in words appropriate for a mix of Einstein and Aristotle, otherwise, it will be considered faint praise and will damn you. Make sure that there are three of them.

The Judges

The judges for our Scavenger Hunt are The Search Committee. The members of this committee are not being paid extra for the extra work demanded by the committee. Despite not getting paid, they are being asked to spend a shitload of time doing a job usually performed by dysfunctional Human Resources personnel. Theoretically, academics welcome the opportunity, since they are, by nature, control freaks, and don’t trust any non-academic to do a good job hiring faculty. True, they do not really trust any other academics either, but do not really want to do the work by themselves. As a result, search committee members are either more controlling than busy, or have been dragooned into being on the committee. Since they are academics, and have some of the larger egos of humankind, their judging style tends towards being hyper-critical of anybody, especially young whippersnapper job applicants. A typical search committee is, therefore, comprised of a half a dozen super-critical people who are either control freaks or consistently annoyed. That, of course, explains why cover letters need to be so flattering…

When the Game is Played

This Scavenger hunt is played during the Job Season. For some unknown reason, search committees cannot function from June until September, so, applicants need to find other ways to occupy themselves for the rest of the year. Hopefully these occupations will provide funding for things like food and shelter.

Further Information

Actually, after the Scavenger Hunt, you haven’t yet won the Big Prize. The prize for the Hunt is an Interview. The Interview is sort of like an intellectual version of American Gladiator, and deserves a post all to itself, which I may or may not write sometime in the future. The Big Prize is the Tenure Track Position which is won by Winning The Interview. Of course, even the Tenure Track Position is nothing more than an invitation to the Great Game Of Tenure-Track, for which the prize is TENURE.

“What is the point of this game?”, you may ask. Or you may not, I have no idea. Just to be sure, I’ll answer the question. In all honesty, an academic career really isn’t all that great. Despite a slew of articles by people whose knowledge of academia is from other articles, also written by people without a clue, a faculty position is about the farthest thing from a cushy job that doesn’t require working in sewage up to your waist. Actually, when we’re speaking of ecologists, it actually does sometimes require work in waist-deep sewage.

An average beginning tenure-track faculty member has trained for more than a decade, works 20+ hours overtime for no extra pay, is a teacher, researcher, counselor, and committee member, rolled into one person, who also does their own office administration work. For that, they are compensated with a median salary is lower than that of people who left school years earlier, they have terrible healthcare and benefits, and are subject the whims and whimsies of clueless administrators. The one advantage of academia, the vaunted “Tenure”, gives all the protection of a Time Out during a game of tag.

So, after much thought and reflection, it occurred to me that the point of the Academic Job Search games are to create an aura around academic jobs by making a Tenure Track Position a prize that one must struggle to win. If you are offered a Tenure Track Position, it means you have Brought Down your Quarry, Run the Gauntlet, Climbed the Mountain, Slain the Dragon, and have been crowned with the glorious Tenure Track Crown. You are officially A Success. You have proven to all and sundry that you are indeed, a Winner. In all that excitement, you don’t really notice that the crown is only painted with gold color and is mass-produced.

Surprisingly, millions of highly intelligent people continue playing this game every year. Despite a shrinking chance of winning, increasingly difficult rules, and a prize which is diminishing in value, players seem ever more determined to play, and play for a long time.

I guess that playing the academic job search game is sort of like playing blackjack or roulette. You are always going to Score Big in the next game. The academic Job Search is one of the largest games of chance played in the USA, and it’s totally legal everywhere. Search Committee Chairs should wear dealer visors whenever the search committee meets.

I really think that somebody should create an Academic Job Search board game. 

It was a Dark and Stormy Night… Like if you support weather

While not a Facebook addict, I do log in every now and then, and sometimes I even comment. I do notice, as has probably everybody else, that many posts end with the admonishment to “like” the post if some condition or other has been fulfilled. Usually the condition has to do with you supporting the beliefs of the person posting. Of course, these beliefs are usually couched in terms that make it clear that their beliefs are shared by all people who are Kind and Loving, Brave and True, Smart and Discerning, are Good Neighbors and Friends, Take Care of Their Families, and Make the World a Better Place. 

As I am all of these, I only “like” the Very Best Posts. By Very Best Posts, I mean posts that support my own cherished beliefs. I would never even THINK of liking posts that support the beliefs of the Selfish, Jealous, Greedy, Conniving, Treacherous, and overall Evil people who disagree with me. That is the sort of principled person I am.

I NEVER request that people like my posts, since I am a very humble person. Besides, if a person is indeed a Superior Intellect, a Moral Leader, and a Giant Among Mortals, they will like my posts, because they will immediately perceive the brilliance of my writings, and will be unable to resist the sheer wonder created by my scintillating prose. I am not bragging, merely describing things the way they are.

One of the reasons that I started this blog is that I believe that my literary endeavors should be expanded to include readers of blogs – a crowd who are more intellectually bent and could appreciate my genius more than the plebeians who populate Facebook.

Like if you think that kittens are cute and you think I am a good writer..

You May Already be an Employee!

Oh, the wonders of job searching! So, this morning, my email inbox had a message from LinkedIn with the following title: “RTI International, University of Illinois at Chicago and CSSI Marketing + Culinary are looking for candidates like you.”

I get a lot of these emails, and the companies in the title are often quite puzzling. For example, one mentions Walgreens and Business Insurance. Now, while I cannot be certain of the needs and wants of these companies, I am pretty sure that they are NOT looking for somebody with a PhD in spatial ecology. Yet LinkedIn is made up of some pretty smart people, and if they say that these companies are looking for people like me, there must be something to this. I tried to figure out what sort of people are employed by the companies that, according to LinkedIn, are looking for Candidates Like Me. There are universities, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and others. The only type of people I could think of that are being hired by all of these are in HR, PR, or IT. Since I am not trained or educated in any of these, I am still confused. Perhaps they’re looking for people slightly below average height, with glasses and graying hair, living in the Chicagoland area?

Then there are the recruiters who post jobs on LinkedIn. Most of these very generously leave contact information, along with an invitation to contact them if you have any questions. I guess that they just like knowing whether people have questions, because there is a certain reluctance to actually answer any questions. Only once have I actually received a response, but it was not all that helpful, since it was a snarling email telling me that "everything you need to know is in the job ad". That email didn’t answer any questions that I may have had about the job, but it answered every question I may have had about that recruiter.

I cannot leave without writing about the LinkedIn job search function. While the layout and features are pretty good, I have yet to have any success in actually finding a job there. It also has not been very good for my self-confidence, since about 80% of my results have been some sort of job spam from places that are supposedly is matchmakers between volunteers and places that need volunteers. The results of my job searches seem to be sending me a message of “with your qualifications, nobody is really willing to pay you to work, sorry”.

My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that LinkedIn people are trying to create an easy job searching experience for job-seekers and employers. However, they seem to have assumed that people are logical, reasonable, helpful, and ethical. This is always a bad assumption to make. I do appreciate their supportive emails, though. I don’t know that I have received that many emails saying “Good Job”, "You’re On Fire”, “you’re almost there!” from anybody else, including my mother.

Gotta go now, it seems that Harvard University, Charlie Trotter’s restaurant, and AT&T are all looking for candidates like me. I finally understand these emails - they’ve figured out that I need an education, a good meal, and a phone. 

I’ll Come Home in Time for Homecoming, my Dear, or The Spirit of the School Passed

And so, my child went to their very first “Homecoming”, an ironic term, considering that they did not actually come home until past midnight. Having grown up in a distant land, I was denied this tradition, and did not understand its cultural importance until I saw large crowds of young people dressed in attire of various levels of formality and age-appropriateness posing with their proud parents. I could practically hear the thought as I drove past: “it seem like just yesterday they were holding hands, doing ring-around-the-roses, and now they’ll be grinding crotches to blaring pop-music. I’m so proud”. 

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, for my progeny, I lack the understanding of the importance of this coming-of-age ritual and I did not show off my appreciation of a good education by parading my wee child out in front of other parents in expensive designer clothing. I also lack the cultural background needed to dress my 14 year old in stilettos and mini skirt whilst demanding that any book mentioning sex should be banned in high schools. I am definitely not a Good American. 

But back to Homecoming. According to reliable historical research (AKA Wikipedia), it is called “Homecoming” because that is when alumni visit their old school. Just why people would want to visit their old high school during a typical teen-age party is beyond me, except to make comments on how bad and loud modern music is, and how modern dancing is scandalous. According to personal accounts of the dance, the old farts would be correct on both accounts. My correspondent who was on the scene reported that while the music was passable, it was being played at levels more appropriate for the engines of a Boeing 757, while the “dancing” consisted of jumping or grinding various nether regions. I am sure that the Gen-X’er and Millennial parents of these young persons would be scandalized that their kids are acting the same as their parents did when they were in high-school. My correspondent was unable to cover these antics for very long, mostly because they decided that their hearing was important, and because they feared for their health and sanity. They also were following other developments in teen-age drama occurring in areas where people could speak without yelling. 

It all ended by midnight, with the teens slowly scattering to their various abodes, and responding to the queries of “so, how was it?” with the ever informative “OK, I guess” following by less articulate sounds, slowly fading away as the teens make their way to their rooms, where they exchanged only a few hundred texts before being claimed by exhaustion.

Evidently this is all good for School Spirit, another term for which I understand the individual meanings of each word, but which is unintelligible to me when put together. Does the school have as spirit? That would actually make sense, considering the amount of angst experienced in any high school. This would slowly soak into the building until it took on a life of its own. But how does Homecoming help this Spirit of Teen Angst and Unrealistic Expectations? Perhaps the Spirit of the school is restless, since the school has not yet been named for some famous person, and can only be appeased by ritualized fertility rites at the beginning of the school year? That would also explain the football game the evening before. Nothing like a simulated battle to put an unquiet spirit to rest. 

Well, I hope that Homecoming was successful, and the Spirit of the School will be peaceful and benevolent for another year. I will conclude with the spell chanted by the students to appease the Spirit “Go Huskies!”

Post, the first.

I will start my blog with a short story written by the late great James Thurber. it seems appropriate in light of what's going on in the Republican party primaries:

"The Owl Who Was God"

Once upon a starless midnight there was an owl who sat on the branch of an oak tree.  Two ground moles tried to slip quietly by, unnoticed.  "You!" said the owl.  "Who?" they quavered, in fear and astonishment, for they could not believe it was possible for anyone to see them in that thick darkness.  "You two!" said the owl.  The moles hurried away and told the other creatures of the field and forest that the owl was the greatest and wisest of all animals because he could see in the dark and because he could answer any question.  "I’ll see about that, "said a secretary bird, and he called on the owl one night when it was again very dark.  "How many claws am I holding up?" said the secretary bird.  "Two," said the owl, and that was right.  "Can you give me another expression for ‘that is to say’ or ‘namely’?" asked the secretary bird.  "To wit," said the owl.  "Why does the lover call on his love?"  "To woo," said the owl.

The secretary bird hastened back to the other creatures and reported that the owl indeed was the greatest and wisest animal in the world because he could see in the dark and because he could answer any question.  "Can he see in the daytime, too?" asked a red fox?  "Yes," answered a dormouse and a French poodle.  "Can he see in the daytime, too?"  All the other creatures laughed loudly at this silly question, and they set upon the red fox and his friends and drove them out of the region.  They sent a messenger to the owl and asked him to be their leader.

When the owl appeared among the animals it was high noon and the sun was shining brightly.  He walked very slowly, which gave him an appearance of great dignity, and he peered about him with large, staring eyes, which gave him an air of tremendous importance.  "He’s God!" screamed a Plymouth rock hen.  And the others took up the cry "He’s God!"  So they followed him wherever he went and when he bumped into things they began to bump into things, too.  Finally he came to a concrete highway and he started up the middle of it and all the other creatures followed him.  Presently a hawk, who was acting as outrider, observed a truck coming toward them at fifty miles an hour, and he reported to the secretary bird and the secretary bird reported to the owl.  "There’s danger ahead," said the secretary bird.  "To wit?" said the owl.  The secretary bird told him.  "Aren’t you afraid?" he asked.  "Who?" said the owl calmly, for he could not see the truck.  "He’s God!" cried all the creatures again, and they were still crying "He’s God" when the truck hit them and ran them down.  Some of the animals were merely injured, but most of them, including the owl, were killed. 

Moral: You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.


From: James Thurber, Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated (New York, 1940), pp. 35-36. 

 A clip of Thurber reading it himself, presented by Keith Olbermann.