University of Venus

I was in Pennsylvania to present at a workshop when Louis Freeh took to the podium and damned those living and dead who abandoned boys to Jerry Sandusky’s brutality. Everyone at the workshop exists within the academy, and all of us expected Mr. Freeh’s conclusions. Tragically, no one in a room of higher education professionals seemed remotely surprised by the range of power-brokers willing to feed boys to a predator before they would consider decreasing the athletic department’s profit at Penn State.

I should have paid heed when I was still in my work clothes of sweats and greasy hair. Everyone told me to plan a career while I was a Ph.D. student. Don’t just think deep thoughts and write about them. Frame the work in a career trajectory so that I could launch myself straight through the windows of the ivory tower before the ink on the diploma was even dry. I didn’t listen.

Call me crazy, but I am not on Facebook. That’s strange for somebody my age and stranger still for somebody who belongs to a group of writers here at UVenus who are masters at using social media.

We all know the score: despite the continued growth in post-graduate degrees, full-time, permanent positions in academia are increasingly rare. In 2009, part-time faculty members represented more than half of all faculty in teaching positions and only 30 percent of all faculty held tenure track positions. Certainly, to search for work in today’s over-saturated academic market, in the depths of a recession, is no easy task; as a newly minted PhD, this is a fact I know all to well.

Summer is here, and for most of us it is also spelled as v-a-c-a-t-i-o-n: sunny days, ice cream, mint juleps, children at play, and long family evenings. But this is not all there is to it…

Inspired by this post by my virtual colleague at the University of Venus, I decided that once again I will address the issue of the importance of reading. At first glance, my statement sounds like an ’ideological’ statement, but it is far from being one. As someone used to reading as much as possible, regardless of the domain of study (but especially political science and history books), I find it very often painful to discover that books do not play an important role in the life and time management plans of many current students, future intellectuals and elites.

A few years ago, I was walking down the streets of my hometown trying to picture places of my childhood to make an archive. When I came in front of the house I lived in as a child and compared my life then and now, I asked myself the question: “How the hell did you get to where you are, Itır?”

Don't get me wrong – book reviews often offer telling insights about the reviewer as well as, hopefully, the book under consideration. They are often fun to read, if only for the small jabs that reviewers make when the (dubious) benefits of anonymity are removed. My favorite is: “The text had minimal typographical errors.”