academics
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Sarah M. Sala
“A poem is like a vision test—its vision is either clear or it’s not.”
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Vocabulary Lessons in Bucharest
I felt unhinged in my moments of isolation, and frustrated in my muteness.
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Putting the D in PhD
An anonymous writer at the Guardian has a second career in erotica to fund their academic lifestyle, despite mixed reactions from colleagues: Colleagues in the arts react with a strange mixture of nervous supportiveness and embarrassed indifference. If I bring up the subject (in…
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Tearing Down the Paywall
Academic journals are essential to scholarly research. Scientists making new discoveries publish their findings in these journals, for example, but also read the journals to stay abreast of the latest research. The journals are also hugely profitable—just not for the…
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The End of Literature
The rapid rise of “trigger warnings” is starting to impact literature curriculums. For instance, Columbia University students lobbied to include warnings on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a core text in Western Literature syllabi. Columbia refused to include warnings, but essentially capitulated by…
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: O Martyr My Martyr!
In most communities, teachers are compensated so poorly and afforded so little respect that in many cases the primary compensation is martyrdom.
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The Decline of the University Press
The university press system has faced a rapid decline. Research libraries, looking to cut costs to pay for expensive electronic journal subscriptions, buy fewer monographs. Subsidies from parent institutions are down. Meanwhile, the researchers who publish with and rely on…
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“Lol My Thesis” Illuminates Academic Achievement
If you had to sum up your undergraduate thesis in one sentence, what would you say? That’s the question posed by the Tumblr Lol My Thesis, and the answers are…pretty amazing. Recent examples include “Italian has 23 mutually unintelligible dialects,…