White men bad; white dogs worse
We spent the weekend in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania with an anthropologist friend who has two 3-year-old bitches (Lab and Husky) and 4 acres of land on which Alex and Sammy could play with them. One of the nice things about colleges located in areas where real estate is cheap is that the professors live close to the campus and are available to students for informal dinners and shared extracurricular activities. Thus over the weekend we encountered a few other Gettysburg College professors. I asked one of them whether faculty could bring their dogs to work. She replied “The college’s Affirmative Action lawyer, before she left, made up a lot of new rules. One of them was that junior and senior faculty could not sleep together. Another was to ban dogs in the buildings.”
This is a good measure of how desperate PhDs are for jobs as college professors. The college pays lower salaries, to people of the same age, as the public high school down the street. The high school teachers were able to go to work at age 22 without suffering through a long period of starvation wages as graduate assistants. The high school teachers are union members who ever have to worry about losing their job, compared to the college professors who live for 7 years in fear of being tossed out as a middle-aged has-been (”denied tenure” is the polite term for this event). And now these poor souls are expected to get through their day without a dog at their side and without the possibility of an interlude with a more senior professor.
[Note to parents: if you want to know why tuition prices have risen so fast, consider that a very small liberal arts school was paying a full-time lawyer to work on affirmative action; Walmart has a "Chief Diversity Officer" but they had $billions in revenue over which to spread the cost.]
