… 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.
October 15th, 2010 at 11:29AM
LOL. I grew up on the Stanford campus, where you can’t buy a house unless you’re a Stanford professor or high-level administrator and it is true that a lot of professors are a little, shall we say, different from the rest of us.
October 15th, 2010 at 3:13PM
The phrase UD quotes reminds me of the site some MIT students set up that will write a Sokal-like paper. They actually succeeded in getting one of their computer written papers accepted at a scientific conference. http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
I generated a couple of papers with my students and I as co-authors and put them up on the bulletin board outside of my office. One of my colleagues complimented me and said that he did not realize that I did work in the computer science area…
October 15th, 2010 at 3:21PM
Bill G….I hope the colleague in question was not himself a computer scientist??…
October 15th, 2010 at 9:52PM
He was not, fortunately…
October 16th, 2010 at 8:20AM
Several years ago I read about an experiment in which **actors** were taught some electrical engineering jargon and sent out on job interviews. Real, live EE’s were also sent out on other job interviews. The actors got more expressions of interest from the prospective employers than did the real EEs.
It wasn’t clear whether the interviews were just with HR people doing preliminary screening, in which the case the results would be somewhat understandable, OR whether they were also with the actual managers to whom the employee would be reporting–who would themselves have almost certainly been EEs, in which case the results would be pretty scary.