The Silence of the Brands

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First, a few words about the current state of play:

The AAUP voted yesterday to censure the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  It feels anticlimactic, much like final BOT approval of a tenure and promotion decision: everyone knew it was coming, but now it's officially official.  And as with that final stamp of approval on the tenure decision, everybody is at a bit of a loss.  The big surges of emotion at various stages earlier in the process have left little in the reservoir for this moment.  Any sense of vindication is cancelled out by a profound sense of "now what?"

Tenure brings with it less ambient anxiety but more service and higher expectations.  Censure brings with it...well, what really?  Life goes on as it as for the past year, except that our local crisis over academic freedom has been overshadowed by threatened catastrophic budget cuts and the demise of tenure in Wisconsin.

Yes, this blog has comments! Or it's supposed to, anyway....

Well this is mortifying.  People have been commenting on this blog all along and I haven't known it. Early on, I was getting an email whenever I had a comment awaiting moderation.  I hadn't gotten any such emails for a while, so I assumed that no one was commenting.  Turns out I was wrong, and I just "published" a whole backlog of comments.  I'm not sure: maybe there was a glitch in Blogger or maybe I inadvertently removed my email address while changing some other settings.  Either way, a lot of great comments, questions, objections, and (most annoying) compliments ended up in internet limbo. To those who wondered why their comments never appeared, much less got a response: I am so sorry!

I have now changed the settings, and vow to be more responsive going forward.

The Posts Not Written

And suddenly, the number of things I couldn't blog about--too personal, too mired in the concerns of relevant parties, too subject to institutional regulation, too specific to the bitterness of a particular moment, too consequential--left no room for the things I could blog about.  Here are some of the posts not written:

• Work-Life Vertigo, or The Limits of Compartmentalizing.

• Tales from the First Time on a Search Committee (adjunct hiring edition).

• The Plagiarism Smackdown

• The Making of a Faculty Union

• Mercy, Despair, and Sloth: The Truth of Grading Finals.

But the semester has finally washed me up on the shores of summer and I've had some time to catch up on the last six weeks of academic fun on the internet.  Let the blogging recommence!