Michael O. West, who was on the UNC faculty with [Julius] Nyang’oro for six years until 2002 and still considers him a friend, said he has often wondered why his former colleague has said nothing in his defense for years. Nyang’oro could face up to 10 months in prison if convicted.
“He is a man of patience and forbearance. Long-suffering is his strong suit,” said West, now a professor at Binghamton University in New York.
People hate professors because a professor will describe a fellow professor who spent years offering bogus courses that never met, and getting paid close to two hundred thousand dollars a year in exchange for this activity, as long-suffering.
… recounted here. Fun cast of characters, and makes for some interesting subsidiary reading.
The part about the sloppy professor threatening to sue the careful graduate student is a high point.
There’s much in this story that explains why a lot of people hate professors. As long as stories like this one keep happening (University Diaries has chronicled quite a few of them), Sarah Palin has a clear rhetorical field.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm has a slightly different take, though. SOS says Look at the passage he got sloppy with.
But this power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the “privilege” of a dominant class, which exercises it actively upon a passive, dominated class. It is rather exercised through and by the dominated. Indeed, it is perhaps unhelpful to think in terms of “classes” in this way, for power is not unitary and its exercise binary. Power in that sense does not exist: what exists is an infinitely complex network of “micro-powers”, of power relations that permeate every aspect of social life. For that reason, “power” cannot be overthrown and acquired once for all by the destruction of institutions and seizure of the state apparatuses. Because “power” is multiple and ubiquitous, the struggle against it must be localized. Equally, however, because it is a network and not a collection of isolated points, each localized struggle induces effects on the entire network. Struggle cannot be totalized–a single, centralized [pagebreak 139-140] hierarchized organisation setting out to seize a single, centralized, hierarchized power; but it can be serial, that is, in terms of horizontal links between one point of struggle and another.
What sort of person, reeling with nausea from prose beyond anything George Orwell savaged in Politics and the English Language, would say Now this is exactly what I want to write in my book. In fact, I think I’ll lift verbatim a bunch of his beautiful phrases.
LOCALIZED LOCALIZED TOTALIZED CENTRALIZED HIERARCHIZED CENTRALIZED HIERARCHIZED LAY IT ON ME BABY DO IT TO ME ONE MORE TIME ONE MORE IZE BEFORE IZE CRIZE MIZE IZE OUT BABY OVER YOU
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Update, from the very long comment thread:
One problem in academia these days is that hardly anyone reads anyone else’s work.