When universities act like corporations...

Folks,

As a consciously self-induced academic failure, I can't pretend that
the following describes my main reasons for quitting academia, but I
can say that as much as I lament not being a professor, and as
depressed as I should have been for quitting, at least I know that
what I'm "missing" isn't worth "missing" at all.

Add to these horrifying trends the professionalization of the best
undergraduates (and the utter apathy -- and who can blame them? -- of
the rest) and being a professor adds up, in the common case, to a
bunch of low-paid nonsense. (Add to this the very good prospects that
college athletes, before the end of this decade, will likely be better
paid than the average misnamed "teaching assistant" and you have a
scenario for some very embittered, highly educated people -- which, to
pick a daisy from among the piles of shit, strikes me as an organier's
dream.)

University is one of the few countervailing forces, in principle, to
corporate domination of society; it's frightening to see how little
countervailing it's still able to do in practice these days.

reading-it-and-weeping-ly yr's, Kendall