University of Venus

I am a sociologist. I teach some of those courses that many academics wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. One such course is Sex, Gender, and Society. I also teach other courses or segments of other courses that deal with sexuality, globalization, imperialism, wars, religion, sweatshops. These are all difficult courses and topics to teach. Many of my colleagues think I am a glutton for punishment for wanting to teach these courses (if these weren’t enough I just added Sociology of the Body and Embodiment to the list of courses I teach).

In Turkey, students are admitted into universities through a nationwide test. After the students take the test and receive their scores, they submit a list of choices of the institutions and programs they want to attend to a nationwide center which places them to one of their choices. This placement is a result of not only the test score of the student but also the relative scores of all other students who made the same choice across the country.

In a recent interview with Mother Jones, the author Philip Pullman admits: ‘I'm perfectly happy about being superstitious and atheistic.’ Pullman, who has been outspoken about his own lack of faith and has critiqued organised religion in much of his writing, describes a set of rituals he has around his writing

Thirty years ago, my family went to Disney World for the first time. I was five and my brother turned three while we were away on our trip. We stayed in Daytona Beach, visited Cape Canaveral, watched the Space Shuttle Columbia launch from our balcony, hung out at the beach, and made the aforementioned trip to Disney and the newly-opened Epcot Center.

I recently read for the first time a book that for many (most?) is a classic: Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines, in its revised edition (2001). I admit that the idea of an ethnography of academic disciplines and their internal codes is a bit narcissistic in the sense that it belongs to the genre of academics studying and writing about academia, but then so is this blog and all the writing about the theories of pedagogy and the analyses of higher education.

At a General Education course training, I was disconcerted by a colleague’s presentation which showed carefully selected personal notes from students, which she made them write at the end of every session. I was equally perturbed by other news that one of my younger colleagues has been cooking(!) in his Southeast Asian History class; and another opted for a study tour in place of a written final exam.

A few weeks ago, I graduated with my MA, and I’m now confronted with the question of “what next?”

The young woman is a brilliant researcher. We’ve bonded before over dinner and art. She introduced me to Japanese toilets. That changed my life. She wanted advice and perhaps too a little comfort. Like many of us, she had heeded the call from universities for scholars to demonstrate their value to society through engaged “public scholarship.”