Some More Thoughts On Cheating

I assume most of you have seen this CHE story (h/t Joey) written by someone who writes custom papers for students who pay for it (and they pay a lot). It's interesting, if not terribly noteworthy (except for how much he and the company he worked for gets paid. Particularly the company, which seems to be extracting close to a 100% profit). However, certain responses to the story are worth noting. Take this one, for example (h/t Craig). There seems to be a general argument from both the author of the CHE story and the author of the blog post that rampant cheating is somehow the fault of the faculty. But I don't care about that, here is what I care about: That in a desire to better police cheating, many educators seem willing to decrease the effectiveness or excitement of their pedagogical assignments. I have before taken a stance for anti-cheating measures, but only because they allowed me to become less of a cop and more of an educator. However, many educators admit to going to only in-class writing assignments or in-class tests in order to deal with such for-hire plagiarism services. Other educators admit to moving toward smaller and more narrow focused assignments in order to thwart such cheating.
Now, there are surely many appropriate times and places for tests, in class writing assignments, and certainly for narrow focused assignments. However, it seems many professors are moving to these assignments, and almost exclusively toward these assignments, not because of any pedagogical demand, but because of a policing demand. I am tempted, at this point, to write something cliche, like: If you assign this the cheaters have already won!
What really galls me from the CHE article is how the author seems oblivious to how his work and his stated goals are at cross-purposes. It is exactly the sort of assignments that the CHE author claims he supports, open-ended assignments that allow for the maximum creative and academic freedom, that are the most vulnerable to the sorts of services he provides. Most professors do not read the CHE article and feel that an effective response is to provide more academic freedom to students. I don't think anyone here believes that students are willing to pay $2000 (!) for an assignment simply because they felt it was too restrictive.
Anyway, if I am ever going to have to choose between being an educator or a cop, I am going to choose educator every single damn time.

A Post of Links

I've been very negligent in keeping up with the various blogs and discussions, so I am sure I am going to miss a lot of important stuff. If it seems I have missed some things, let me know.

I just saw this cool looking conference over at SUNY-Buffalo, Animal.Machine.Sovereign. If I still lived nearby, I would have to be going. As it is, you still might want to think about going. (h/t Complete Lies).

Here is Levi on Hyperobjects and OOO. Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy? was the first book of theirs I read from cover to cover as well, I also read it my first year in undergrad. Jason Wirth called it their deceptively simple book, and I have always agreed with that assessment.

At this year's ASLE, the panels on "The Vegan Challenge to Posthumanism" looks pretty awesome. Two abstracts have been posted, Craig on CAS & OOO, and Eric on Derrida, Hospitality, and Veganism. I really wish I could be at this conference, but I will be on my honeymoon. So, maybe I don't wish it that much...

Speaking of awesome conferences I wish I would be at, Devin is getting ready for the Radical Philosophy Association Conference. You can follow that link to get a link for what is going on at that conference. I really don't know why I didn't my act together in time to try and go, but I will make going to the next one a priority.

Lastly, here is Henry Salt on the ridicule of vegetarians. Still mostly true.


The band Dark Dark Dark have a new album out, and it is completely gorgeous. They seriously have one of the best sounds around. Here is the 'single' off that new album Wild Go, "Daydreaming". You will not regret listening to it.

How states raise revenues: something of a rant.

I haven't posted in a while. October was a rough month, and then I got sick. Also, once I fall out of the habit of posting, it is hard to get myself back into it.

Recently my fiance got a speeding ticket. In general, most speeding tickets annoy me. They tend to be rather obvious attempts to raise revenue, rather than promote any sort of general welfare. But, whatever, we paid the absurd $245 fine. However, I just got another notice, this one from the state, which feels my fiance is a super speeder, and therefore we also have to pay the state $200. This is for going less than 20 miles over the speed limit on the interstate, and not in any sort of construction area or other high danger place. The state law went into effect January 1st, 2010. Despite all the sound and fury over sticking it to speeders, the law is clearly about raising revenues.
This is what happens when the state is suffering from falling revenues and yet won't raise taxes. This is one of the practical problems that emerges when you demand that states continue the same level of services while cutting taxes. And the sad thing is that I am pretty sure that many people would still support more fines and fees over a regulated progressive tax structure. Oh well, rant over. And here is music video for how all of this makes me feel.

I like teaching and researching

This has been an absurdly busy and difficult month. So, sorry for the lack of updates. Hopefully November will be better.

There seems to have been a recent influx of funny videos and posts about what it means to teach, and the current job market. Here is so you want a PhD in the Humanities, and here is so you want a PhD in Political Science (btw, there is a really interesting post to be had about the gendered differences between the two. One has two women talking, one has two men. The first one carries with it concerns about marriage, the second about 'getting laid'. There is more going on to be talked about as well. Maybe someone else will write that post). Also, Adam has a post worth reading about repeating the grim facts about the job market. All of this speaks to something I was very naive about when I went into grad school, and something I was never naive about.

I was incredibly naive about the possibility of getting a job with a PhD. Basically, people warned me I wouldn't get a good job, but I would get a job. We'll see if that works out personally, but in general the job market is far worse than I was lead to believe. Part of that is it has gotten increasingly worse while I've been in grad school, and part of it is simply it got worse since my undergraduate professors were on the market. I was incredibly naive about the state of the job market, and I was incredibly naive about the basic boxes I needed to check in order to even stand a chance at the absurdly random process of getting a job (I am in complete agreement with Adam about how random it is). For example, I had no clue that I needed to get my PhD from a prestigious school to even get my application read. And as someone else said in one of the many job hunt laments (I can't remember where I read it now) applying for a job out of 750 applicants is not a market, it is a lottery.

But whereas I found the So you want a PhD videos to be funny, they are also kinda offensive to those of us who really want to be doing what these professors seem to dismiss. I want to teach, to do research, to be a professor. And this is something I've never been naive about. I've never thought it was the life of the mind, or that it was really any different from any other job. I know it is political, and filled with petty people, and requires a lot of work. You work hard to get a degree that you are never going to get rich with. But, in general I never have had the cynicism that the professors in these videos seem to express. I have never had the contempt for my students, the disgust with my colleagues, or the dismissiveness to my own work. I have never expected academia to be any better than it is, and I am really happy when I get to do the job of being a professor. I understand people who love their jobs want to vent, and again, the videos are pretty funny. But it is worth noting that being a professor is really a pretty damn good job for the people who honestly like teaching and researching.

Judith Butler FTW!

I just got back from a weekend debate tournament, which was long and vaguely nightmareish. As is usual, I have way too many posts on my blog reader to read them all, so if I missed anything interesting, let me know (self-promotion, as always, is encouraged). Also, if I owe you an email or anything, let me know and I will get back to you.

In very good news, though, I found out that I will be presenting on a panel about Judith Butler and non-anthropocentric ethics/politics/ontology at the Sex, Gender, Species conference this coming February. I'll be on a panel with EJ of Deconstruction, Inc. and with Stephanie of VegiFem. I am way excited, and very happy about the conference, about meeting both EJ and Stephanie (finally), and hopefully that some of you might there and I can meet you as well. So, let me know if anyone else who reads and comments on this blog will be there, and I'd love to meet you.

Jonathan Safran Foer vs. Bourdain part II: The magical natural community of animal flesh eaters

This post follows up, in a very different way, from the earlier post on the debate between Jonathan Safran Foer and Anthony Bourdain. Both posts are ways of thinking community in the midst of a debate about eating animals.
One of Bourdain's major arguments against JSF is that eating animals is a special and unique bond, a special and unique production of community. JSF wonders if we can produce community only through eating other animals, and Bourdain basicallys says no. The example he gives is the tea party, that they probably wouldn't agree on much expect how awesome barbecuing is. Which is odd, because if he decided to say that Obama was a secret Muslim socialist fascist, he'd be able to bond over that. That is to say, community can be produced through other ways, it just depends on what ways we want to produce community, what ways we feel are ethically justifiable. Though of course, maybe Bourdain is right about the uniqueness of flesh eating in producing community.
One doesn't have to be a sacred sociologist in the tradition of Durkheim, Mauss, and Bataille (though it helps) to realize how important sacrifice is to producing community. Remember, sacred life is an ambiguous life: it is both protected and at the same time absolutely killable. It is through the sacred life that we sacrifice that we are able to produce inside and outside, us and them, lives to be protected and lives to be killed or let die. In other words, community (there is of course an entire intellectual tradition that tries to think community outside of foundational violence and separation. See Bataille, Blanchot, Nancy, Agamben, Derrida, and Esposito for some of the more important examples). How else can we possibly understand Bourdain's many incoherent arguments? Rather than trying to respond with rational arguments to JSF, Bourdain treats us to transcedentalism as why we must kill and eat animals. In one of the weirdest moments of the debate Bourdain is going on and on about magic, and about how roasting the flesh of other animals is completely magical and produces community and communion. At this point the moderator steps in and asks Bourdain if he means that it is natural, to which Bourdain readily agrees. Magic=nature=roasting and eating animals. Of course, the structure of sacrifice also equates magic with nature, both a practice of giving to the gods while at the same time producing natural divisions. This is also the way to understand Bourdain's bizarre insistence that the Christmas turkey is an everyday example of dead animals producing culture. As JSF responds, that isn't an everyday example, but rather a one day a year example. [sidenote: This always JSF's maneuver in these discussions: simply refuse to argue about the marginal cases, and insist that we give up eating animal flesh in all the instances everyone agrees that meat eating is indefensible.] This is again the logic of sacrifice, that the exceptional moment of the sacred structures the everyday as well.
Okay, on some level I am being silly here. On some level Bourdain is just speaking gibberish. But I am interested why this gibberish is instead sense to Bourdain and for many other people. I am interested in why the moderator hears one of his guests talking about magic and immediately thinks the natural. By abstaining from our cultural sacrificial rituals, I have also (to some degree) abstained from our sacrificial ritual. And I want to underline this last point, the abstaining from the ritual preceded the abstaining from the logic. This makes such a debate between JSF and Bourdain so interesting and so impossible. The ability to communicate is based in many ways upon a shared sacrificial language and logic, upon a shared community and culture. Bourdain can talk about magic and have the moderator hear the word natural, even though those words are antonyms, because they share a similar logic and language. And in that logic and language sacrificing animals is both at once supernatural and natural. What is gibberish for me living in my different culture is obvious to those within this other, border community.
What I am saying is that in a very real way, Bourdain is right, the sacrifice of animals produces an unique culture. What we have to figure out is if that is a culture we wish to be members of. Think about it this way, for any of you who have lived in the South or had discussions with certain Southerners, many people contend that the Civil War was not about slavery, but instead about conflicting culture, about trying preserve a way of life. And without a doubt, that is true. But it was a way of life, a culture, that necessitated the sacrifice of the black body through rape, murder, and enslavement. The connection between sacrifice and culture explains why Derrida included "Heidegger's Ear" -- an essay on sacrifice, friendship, and animals-- as an appendix in the French publication of The Politics of Friendship, his work on rethinking community (even sacrificing community).
This is one of the main reasons that so many people in the vegan movement have had such reaction against 'localvorism' [.pdf], or at least the pro-meat eating version of localvorism. While in many ways opposing factory farming should make us allies, and in some cases it does, when you read Michal Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, you realize that both of them are desperately worried that factory farming is destroying the sacred rituals of slaughtering other animals. In other words, the vegan movement wishes to exist from this particular logic of sacrifice, of which the factory farm system is the fullest expression of, meanwhile these particular localvores which to oppose factory farming because they feel it is destroying the sacredness of killing animals. Those of us who oppose the killing of other animals have the particular problem of working from outside the material-semiotic realities of the community that engages in sacrificing animals. These debates almost always replicate the cultural chasm between those eat animal flesh and those that don't.

A Post of Links

Abstracts for the Animal, Vegetable, Mineral conference are up. It looks like a wonderful conference. I wish I could attend.

Here is a link to the panel on Promiscuous Ontologies (I assume they wore scarlet Os). The panel was composed of Tim Morton, Levi Bryant, Ian Bogost, and moderated by Jeffery Bell.

JJ Cohen has up two excerpts from a conference paper on animals and monsters. Check out here and here.

Speaking of monsters, Prodigies and Monsters has a post on Unconditioning Reason (okay, that isn't really self-explanatory, so click to the link to figure it out!).

Stuart Elden has up the Table of Contents for his up-coming book The Birth of Territory. I cannot really explain how excited I am for this book to come out.

Normally I would post a link to a youtube video at this point, but in honor of the upcoming Halloween, I've made a short mix for you to listen to.