1) A searching thread on how to advocate for people in less advantaged positions than mine. I.e. I’m asking for *your* thoughts and advice, no matter who you are, not offering mine. The issue that prompted this for me is …
2) I read as approachable in a lot of ways but also as someone with the privilege to stand up to people. [Both are for the most part true.] So I’m a go-to person for a lot of students and contingent colleagues who’ve been ignored by those who are supposed to hep them. …
3) I also have a very particular sense of justice, bordering on pathological, which means I honestly relish righting wrongs. I mean, I wrote a book on Don Quixote and that wasn’t an accident. But here’s a snag:
4) One of the types of advocacy I tend to excel at is what I’d call litigious advocacy, or making arguments to people in charge that force them to concede either that they’re wrong or that they’re unprincipled. This is, among other things, a tone, a voice, and a degree of license
5) that people expect from someone who looks like me, but also that a tenured person can get away with, but also which many of the people I’m advocating for wouldn’t find comfortable to assume. Hence my advice sometimes has those limits. I’ve discussed this at length with …
6) my partner, a first-gen / refugee / WoC PhD student, and her view is essentially ‘yes, but if you hadn’t shown me an email written that way I wouldn’t have had access to that or thought it possible.’ At the same time, I understand that it’s not comfortable for everyone to …
7) Write that way to another person, particularly a person in charge. So I’m curious about what other forms of support people would value in situations in which e.g. a disabled student is being pushed around by their college, or an advisor won’t read their student’s work, etc.?
8) Ie I recognize my first instinct is often to be like ‘I’ll just push them till they break in your favor,’ but that’s not a sustainable solution. /end

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More from @AaronRHanlon

28 Jun
1) Here's a short thread combining thoughts on @CT_Bergstrom et al recent warning paper about the potentially catastrophic impact of ad-driven social media, algorithmic search, etc. *and* ... what's going on with 'critical race theory':
2) In particular I'm concerned about the possibility that many if not most adults' intellectual life is strictly in the form of reading and responding to online bullshit on Twitter, FB, etc.
3) By 'intellectual life' I mean time and energy dedicated to thinking through ideas and their implications. I worry that the social media effects we all talk about for being bad--misinformation, disinformation, filter bubbles, amplification, etc. ...
Read 9 tweets
20 May
1) Here are some context notes about the tenure review process for journalists and others commenting on the @nhannahjones case. Observing these might help reduce confusion and misinformation:
2) The substantive academic merit case for tenure is decided by a committee typically called something like 'tenure and promotion' or 'promotion and tenure.' It's widely regarded as the most challenging, arduous committee to be on bc of how extensive and rigorous the process is.
3) At larger institutions that committee makes recommendations after a similar process happens at the level of the department or school (school of journalism, of engineering, etc.). But in either or both cases, the recommendations of such committees are where the substance is. ..
Read 14 tweets
10 May
The poll questions are very poorly designed. This is one way to get Frankfurtian bullshit with data, i.e. polling designed without truth as its objective. Touting this poll is straightforwardly irresponsible.
'Inherently' introduces an unnecessary confound: One could agree there's structural white privilege (much closer to the claim of mainstream CRT) and disagree that such privilege is 'inherent.' Those are substantial conceptual differences not registered in the data. Total failure.
Similarly, dealing in absolutes (as below) introduces a catastrophic error into the question: One could view race as a very important component of identity to study in school *without* believing it's 'the most important thing about [a person].' Fail.
Read 4 tweets
9 May
1) Some thoughts about faculty governance in higher ed. and being in the position to change things for the better. ...
2) Actually governing and running a college is complicated and a ton of work, much of it the kind of work that too many faculty look down on. I say this based on ...
3) my first year as a dept. chair, hiring, writing staffing requests, managing the curriculum, &c &c and having now served on committees for reevaluating the college core curriculum, for developing free expression policies, for developing first-year orientation and ...
Read 12 tweets
6 Apr
@conor64 I think what would have the greatest impact is reversing the adjunctification trend. Particularly if we take seriously the conjectures about faculty self-censorship. About 75% of the professoriate works off the tenure track, not protected by academic freedom.
@conor64 Another, further afield idea would be to incentivize more collaboration between departments and divisions, such that the viewpoint diversity already present isn't concentrated in disciplinary enclaves. At present I think this has some negative externalities, including ...
@conor64 ...a distorted media image of what academia is like, which focuses on a few lefty depts. while giving e.g. biz schools a (relative) pass and a tendency to form disciplinary 'teams' with distorted impressions of people in other disciplines. No point in viewpoint diversity if...
Read 4 tweets
11 Feb
1) Dreaded thread on why I think the response to postcritique is so vitriolic. Short version: Because literary studies is a discipline in search of an application.
2) Before I go on, I'll say from the outset that many in lit studies explicitly reject the idea that the field *should* have an application. My opinion is that's fine if you want to do book clubs, but if you want an institution you can't ignore that difficult issue. But anyway...
3) The evidence by this point is overwhelming that when lit scholars talk about 'method' we're actually just talking about ourselves: 'ways of reading,' 'how we argue,' 'phenomenology of reading,' etc. etc.
Read 24 tweets

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