Being a college professor would be a great job! You do a little teaching, and get the summers off! –Â frequently expressed misunderstanding To be clear: being a professor is a great job. Since I elect not to teach during the summer, I can devote more –Â though not all –Â of my time to research and writing.
As you probably already know, Forbes‘ Susan Adams contributed to the professors-don’t-really-work myth in naming “University Professor” the “Least Stressful Job of 2013” (Forbes, 3 Jan. 2013). Â After learning that this is utter nonsense, Ms. Adams did at least have the decency to publish an “addendum,” in which she acknowledges that the survey on which
When I started writing what was then a biography of Crockett Johnson (back in the late 1990s), I thought: When I finish this, I really will have achieved something. Even as I wrote other books, I continued to think of the biography – which became a double biography of Johnson and Krauss – as The
It’s Labor Day. Â Looking for a pro-labor novel for older children/young adults? Â Thanks to Archive.org, you can download (for free) the full text of The Company Owns the Tools, a 1942 novel written by Henry Gregor Felsen (1916-1995) under the pseudonym Henry Vicar. Here’s what Julia Mickenberg has to say about the book in her
Though I often attempt to dispense advice from this blog, I now have a question of my own. How much is too much? There’s one request that I never turn down: when I am asked to write a letter on behalf of someone going up for tenure and/or promotion, I always say “yes.” Â I don’t
One of the many pleasures of Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (2010) is its evocation of the thrill of research. As he traces the history of his family’s netsuke (small Japanese ivory and wood carvings), de Waal describes great-great-great grandfather Charles Ephrussi’s art-collecting in nineteenth-century Paris as “‘vagabonding’ … done
I don’t enjoy flying, but I do like traveling. There is pleasure in being somewhere else, in experiencing a different city or country. All that is taken for granted in daily life cannot be taken for granted – and this is especially true when in another country, when the food, language, and culture differs in
One wonders if David C. Levy came by his ignorance naturally, or whether it’s a state of mind that he has cultivated carefully over the years. Â His piece in the Washington Post is so poorly informed that I suspect ignorance may simply be something with which nature has endowed him. Â He claims that “Happily, senior
Moments after I finished my the oral portion of comprehensive exams, Professor Michael Kreyling (a member of my committee) turned to me and said, “You’re going to want to relax. But you can’t.” He then listed many reasons for not relaxing: I needed to write a dissertation proposal, start working on the dissertation itself, send
Yesterday, songs.  Today, a poem.  There are many poets to whom we might turn (Whitman and Sandburg rush to mind) for Labor Day, but I’ve opted for the title poem from What Work Is (1991) by America’s new Poet Laureate Philip Levine (b. 1928).  When you hear him read, he often shares a story about the
