Campaign Finance Reform

Professor Cooper notes that there's something strange going on with the panel of judges assigned to hear the campaign finance reform case. According to the Washington Post, the judges may not be getting along for some reason. While the leaked information about the internal politics of these three judges is interesting, I'm more interested in what they finally have to say about the case itself. I wrote a few law school scholarship and admissions essays on the subject of campaign finance reform—it's a subject near and dear to me because I'm convinced that there's no hope the U.S. will ever have an effective and just democracy if we do not radically change the way we fund political campaigns. The McCain-Feingold bill is definitely flawed, but I haven't been able to follow the pro/con arguments closely enough to know whether it's so bad we should scrap it. It seems we've got to start somewhere, but...

Posted 05:55 PM | general politics

Academic Life

This week's Chronicle of Higher Education featured a personal essay from "Catherine Evans" (not her real name), a tenure-track faculty member in the humanities at a major, "near-Ivy" university. This professor is leaving academia (in the humanities) for a lot of the same reasons I've decided to leave—the work is never-ending, thankless, isolated and isolating, and invades every aspect of your life. Her moment of truth sounds like the future in which I worried I'd find myself trapped if I stayed in academia:

So there I was, caught in a job that made me miserable rather than excited, modeling for my toddler son a disheartening priority of rationalized duty over fulfillment, and apologizing to colleagues for the activities that energized me the most. I thought about spending the next 30 years or so of my professional life as an academic. I began imagining alternatives.

Alternatives are good. L. (who is also leaving academia) and I like to joke about academia as a deep hole and academics as diggers. You start digging when you head to grad school, and the closer you get to tenure, the deeper your hole becomes. And as your hole becomes deeper, you steadily lose your ability to see the world around you; dig long enough to get tenure, and the only part of the world you'll be able to see is the tiny speck of sky at the top of your hole high above you. (Imagine being trapped at the bottom of a deep, deep well.) This is why it's so hard for academics to see alternatives and pursue them—they're too deep in their academic holes. I'm sure climbing out was hard for Evans, but once you start, it certainly gets easier.

(If anyone reading this is thinking about going to graduate school in the humanities, please read Invisible Adjunct's advice and think again.)

Posted 05:54 PM | Comments (1) | life generally

Self Evident

Joining a growing number of artists opposed to the war on Iraq (and the Bush Administration more generally), Ani DiFranco has released "Self Evident" as a free download. A few choice lines:

Take away our play stations,
and we are a third-world nation
under the thumb of some blue-blood royal son
who stole the Oval Office in that phony election.
I mean, it don't take a weather man to look around and see the weather—
Jeb said he'd deliver Florida, folks, and boy did he ever!

And we hold these truths to be self-evident:
Number one: George W. Bush is not president.
Number two: America is not a true democracy.
and Number three: The media is not fooling me.

Ani rocks.

If you want to build your own pro-peace sampler, check out Salon's list of links to other free mp3 downloads from the likes of the Beastie Boys, Billy Bragg, Chumbawumba, and more... (Just one reason you won't regret your subscription to Salon...)

Posted 08:59 AM | general politics