by Glen Wright
In particular they are critical of the creation of ‘journals focusing on an extremely narrow and insular circle of readers and authors who engage in a kind of obscurantist pseudo-intellectual mutual masturbation (often with some degree of public funding) with absolutely no measurable or even coherently expressible benefit to the field’.
The account has grown rapidly in popularity, especially as news spread that an earlier incarnation was shut down when the original founder received threats from enraged academics.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I instinctively baulk at the idea of an anonymous account singling out particular papers for ridicule. On the other hand, some of the papers highlighted by this rogue band of academics are truly confounding.
Title
Slightly satirical one-sentence summary
Quote
‘Sleeping Around, With, and Through Time: An Autoethnographic Rendering of a Good Night’s Slumber’8
Academic sleeps at her two houses, in a plane, and in a hotel, spends 11 pages talking about it.
‘I turn. Art turns. Between us, Buddha turns, then hops over me so she doesn’t get squashed by two human bodies rolling together. I stretch out my legs, disturbing Zen who is snoring at the bottom of the bed… Art snuggles in close to me, his chest and knees pressed against my back and legs . . . All is well here in our king-sized, platform bed; together we perform the twists and turns of our sleeping ritual, escaping from the tensions and noise of the outside world.’
‘Club Carib: a geo-ethnography of seduction in a Lisbon dancing bar’9
Academics go clubbing three nights a week for two years, find that Lisbon’s nightlife has a ‘(hetero)normative and patriarchal character’.
‘Some tourists, Erasmus students and young Portuguese students drink in order to socialize by sharing time, space and experiences with their peers. Others drink just to escape from their harsh individual realities. Many hope for an unforgettable night (and perhaps another in the future).’
‘“I’m Here to Do Business. I’m Not Here to Play Games.” Work, Consumption, and Masculinity in Storage Wars’10
Academics watch Storage Wars* find that it ‘helps mediate the putative crisis in American masculinity’.
‘By emphasizing the economic benefits (i.e., masculine) of bidders’ quest for thrift rather than the hedonic and relational benefits (i.e., feminine), Storage Wars suggests auction bidding allows for the ritual transformation of spending – a frivolous and wasteful act – into a productive act.’
‘The Perilous Whiteness of Pumpkins’11
Academic buys pumpkin spice lattes, realises they are oppressive symbols of white privilege.
‘To explore race, culture, and food, we turn to three recent moments in the narrative of pumpkins’ whiteness: the pumpkin spice flavor industry; the Internet phenomenon, “Decorative Gourd Season,” and lifestyle magazines’ fall embrace of class-aspirational pumpkins; and the working-class reality television Punkin Chunkin contests.’†
‘Group Sex as Play: Rules and Transgression in Shared Non-monogamy’12
Academics hang out at swingers parties, find that swingers have a lot of fun, but also a lot of rules.
‘I’m sitting on a couch, watching a gorgeous man being fisted on a sling. The woman leaning next to me lets out a long, pleased sigh: a lover has just entered her, unannounced, from behind. The researcher in me immediately thinks ‘‘she did not have time to indicate consent,’’ then remembers that this is not the first time I’ve watched them have sex tonight. They have obviously reached an agreement.’
#HASHTAGS
For those blissfully unaware of the machinations of the Twittersphere, hashtags are used to collate tweets on a specific subject.*13 As such they have proven to be a great tool for community building, with regulars such as #PhDchat, #AcWri, and Raul Pacheco-Vega’s #ScholarSunday providing opportunities for academics to interact and learn from each other. Others, such as #AcademicsWithCats and #AcademicsWithBeer cater to extra-curricular interests. The recently coined #AcaDowntime encourages the academic community to take time away from work, and a skim through the feed reveals that academics are an interesting and active bunch. Hashtags are also used to play games and joke around, which is where the real fun begins.14
#AcademicsWithCats
#AcademicsWithCats was one of my earliest forays into hashtags, and I am proud to say that it is now a staple of the academic Twittersphere. These days the feed is mostly pictures of cats engaged in decidedly non-academic activities, but the glory days produced some fantastic pictures of cats reading Nietzsche, correcting essays with a red pen in paw, and hammering out essays on laptops.
The hashtag spawned the annual Academics With Cats Awards, which provides a bit of light relief toward the end of the year. The awards have been covered by the higher education supplements of the Guardian and The Times15 – in 2016, around 500 academics entered and over 2,000 cast a vote for their favourite feline.
#BadAdviceForYoungAcademics
Oscar Wilde is famously quoted as saying, ‘sarcasm is the lowest form of wit’.* When I saw a hashtag being used to give advice to young academics, my first reaction was to join in with sarcasm. #BadAdviceForYoungAcademics was born and academics in their thousands chimed in to offer their un-advice. The sarcastic advice was much more fun (and probably just as helpful).
Writing:16
• Write your thesis in comic sans.
• Grammar be optional, it are what you says that mattering not how you say it.
• Just submit the paper. You can fix the bad writing and bogus results later.
Publish or perish:17
• Third author of eight is really an important position, especially when you did all the work and wrote the paper.
• Don’t publish during your PhD, there’s plenty of time for that later.
• Reviewers will respect you for challenging their critique and pointing out their idiocy.
Presentations:18
• No need to practise your presentations, just wing it. You’ll be fine!
• Make sure your Prezis feature lots of movement.
• Moonwalk to the front before a presentation. It’s good to maintain eye contact with the audience from the outset.
Career advice:19
• Don’t worry. Funding is plentiful.
• Trust that a tenure track position awaits you.
• Lots of older Profs will be retiring in the next few years.
• Now is the perfect time to go into academia. Universities are desperately searching for people to fill positions.
#RuinADateWithAnAcademicInFiveWords
This simple twist on the ‘ruin a date’ game gave us a fascinating insight into the academic psyche on one of life’s precious pleasures – love and romance.
To spoil a date with an academic, you can say something stupid like:20
• Is that all you’ve published?
• Oh, you’re not tenure track?
• So people read your articles?
• What is the practical application?
A sure-fire mood-killer is expressing admiration of/interest in any of the following: Fox News, astrology, homeopathy, Ayn Rand, or the History Channel. Disavowal of reading, evolution, coffee, and the Oxford comma might also end badly, and remember: hell hath no fury like an academic who’s been asked if they get summers off.
Other things likely to end with a drink in your face are asking how your date’s PhD thesis is going or when it will be finished, telling them that said PhD does not make them a real doctor, and completely misunderstanding their field (‘Astronomy? Cool, I’m a Virgo!’).
The majority of the tweets assumed the date-ruiner to be the non-academic party, but plenty of people realised that having two academics at the table could be the real recipe for dating disaster:21
• [your discipline] is really just [my discipline].
• I applied for the same funding.
&nbs
p; • Yeah, I was Reviewer 3.
• Let’s meet during office hours.
#FailAPhdInThreeWords
While it might take five words to ruin a date with an academic, the Twittersphere proved that a PhD can be ruined in just three:22
• Computer dead. Backupless.
• Ethics permission expired.
• What primary sources?
• Mein Kampf reconsidered.
• Dog ate it.
• Supervisor sex tape.
• Cf. Mum, Your.
• It was aliens.
#ScienceAMovieQuote
There is an excellent scene in The Martian where, after realising he has been left alone to eke out an existence on Mars, Matt Damon’s character says emphatically: ‘I’m going to have to science the shit out of this.’ Around the same time, the science folk of Twitter decided to science the shit out of movies in a beautiful marriage of science and movie geekery:23
• ‘I love the smell of null hypothesis rejection in the morning.’
• ‘I sequence dead people.’
• ‘We’re going to need to write a grant for a bigger boat.’
• ‘I’m just a girl, standing in front of a rat, asking him to press a lever.’
• ‘Say hello to my little trend.’
#AcademicForecast
People have, on occasion, asked how a particular hashtag came about. I have often wondered the same of others’ hashtag creations (#PhDAsExistentialCrucible, anyone?) but usually struggle to remember what the thinking was behind my own.
One day I started out trying to tackle some ‘minor revisions’. An hour in, I realised that so-called minor revisions are rarely minor. Admittedly, some of the reviewer’s comments were easily answered (e.g. I had neglected to capitalise the word ‘Tuna’), while others, innocuous at first glance, were Pandora’s boxes of academic pain.
I turned to Twitter to procrastinate but my feed was overflowing with snarky tweets from internet pedants. Faced with pedantry from Reviewer 2 or pedantry on Twitter, I made a forecast: ‘90% chance of pedantry on Twitter, otherwise acceptable with minor revisions.’
I quite liked the idea of an academic day being summed up by a slightly sarcastic weather forecast, and figured that others may wish to join me. They did:24
• ‘Outlook uncertain. Copyright handed over to publisher, peer review highly likely, acceptance rate 26%. Rejection expected.’
• ‘Strong, gusty modelling until 13:00, followed by brief exposure to daylight, then heavy spreadsheets.’
• ‘Heavy morning fog, lifting as caffeine levels increase. High chance of distraction with possible tweeting.’
#AcademicNovel25
• Harry Potter and the Half-Written Thesis
• Harry Potter and the University of Phoenix
• For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls
• Where the Tired Things Are
• The Lord of the Files
• 20 Thousand Leagues of Self-Citation
• The Grades of Wrath
• Fear and Loathing on the Tenure Track
• The Curious Incident of the Grant in the Pipeline
• The Winter of Our Job Market Discontent
OVERHEARD ON TWITTER
Students say the funniest things on Twitter, apparently unaware or unconcerned by the highly public nature of their musings. They brag about plagiarism, trash-talk their tutors, and laugh about skipping class. Occasionally more amusing (or concerning) than students’ own grumblings are some of the things they quote their professors as saying:
• ‘I drink like a fish. I can drink you all under the table!’
• ‘Papers should be like a woman’s skirt. Short enough to be interesting but long enough to cover the subject.’*♀
• ‘My music professor makes us stay after class and play Twister with him to make up attendance. Dead serious. I find a problem with this, no?’
Notes
For the love of trees, I have opted to keep this bibliography (relatively) short. For more details, please go to AcademiaObscura.com/buffalo, where I plan to concoct a multimedia extravaganza containing links, photos, and videos. If I get distracted and don’t get around to doing this (highly likely), I will at the very least provide full references and PDFs (where I can do so legally).
* @AstroKatie became known to the internet more broadly in 2016 due to her quick comeback to a climate sceptic troll who told her: ‘Maybe you should learn some actual SCIENCE . . . stop listening to the criminals pushing the #GlobalWarming SCAM!’ She responded: ‘I dunno, man, I already went and got a PhD in astrophysics. Seems like more than that would be overkill at this point.’ J.K. Rowling posted a screenshot of the tweet which was liked 165,000 times, doubling Mack’s following overnight.
* Say it in a footnote.
* In real life, she holds a PhD from Cambridge University and is an Associate Professor at a top-flight research university in North America.
* I too follow Raul (@raulpacheco) and Steve (@shawpsych), both of whom are great for a motivation boost.
* A US ‘reality’ show about abandoned storage units and the people that make a living buying them blind at auction
† i.e. pumpkin throwing
* One of the rabbit holes I went down while writing this section was trying to discover the origin of the hashtag, and then the hash symbol itself. This is a fascinating story (honest), beautifully told in an episode of the podcast, 99% Invisible. If you’ve been meaning to figure out what these new-fangled podcasts are all about, I’d highly recommend starting with 99% Invisible, which is worth listening to just to hear presenter Roman Mars’s voice.
* My Mom always used to tell me that Wilde went on to say that sarcasm is the highest form of intelligence, though this part is usually omitted from the quote.
* The sheer frequency of this one is astounding and concerning in equal measure.
1 Priem et al., ‘Prevalence and Use of Twitter among Scholars’ (2011) in Metrics 2011 Symposium on Informetric and Scientometric Research.
2 Scoles, ‘I Went to the “Contact” Radio Telescope with the Astrophysicist Behind Twitter’s All-Time Sickest Burn’ (2017) Motherboard.
3 ‘Academic Makes Twitter Splash Saying “Nein”’ (2014) The Local.
4 Jarosinski, Nein: A Manifesto (2015).
5 Haustein & Peters, ‘@AcademicsSay: The Story Behind a Social-Media Experiment’ (2015) Chronicle of Higher Education.
6 Clark, ‘Twitter Joke Theft Is a Real Thing, and the Social Network Is Taking Action’ (2015) Wired.
7 Mali, ‘@realpeerreview: Their Thoughts and Qualms with Academia’ (2017) Areo Magazine.
8 Ellis, ‘Sleeping Around, With, and Through Time: An Autoethnographic Rendering of a Good Night’s Slumber’ (2016) Qualitative Inquiry.
9 Nofre et al., ‘Club Carib: A Geo-Ethnography of Seduction in a Lisbon Dancing Bar (2016) Social & Cultural Geography.
10 Rademacher & Kelly, ‘“I’m Here to Do Business. I’m Not Here to Play Games.” Work, Consumption, and Masculinity in Storage Wars’ (2016) Journal of Communication Inquiry.
11 Powell & Engelhardt, ‘The Perilous Whiteness of Pumpkins’ (2015) GeoHumanities.
12 Harviainen & Frank, ‘Group Sex as Play: Rules and Transgression in Shared Non-Monogamy’ (2016) Games and Culture.
13 ‘Episode 146: Octothorpe’ (2014) 99% Invisible.
14 Kolowich, ‘Meet the 26-Year-Old Behind Academic Twitter’s Most Popular Hashtags’ (2016) Chronicle of Higher Education.
15 Lock, ‘Paws for a Moment and Vote for Your Favourite Academic Cat’ (2015) The Guardian Higher Education Network; Wright, ‘Academics With Cats 2016: The Winning Photographs’ (2016) Times Higher Education.
16 Tweets by: me; Jack Orchard (@Jarona7); Ann Loraine (@aloraine206).
17 Tweets by: Jason McDermott (@BioDataGanache); Kate Montague-Hellen (@PhDGeek); Bill Sullivan (@wjsullivan).
18 Tweets by: Michelle Booze (@DrMLBooze); Kris Weinzap
(@krisilou); Viva Voce Podcast (@vivavocepodcast).
19 Tweets by: Philip Adler (@CrystPhil); Mariel Young (@Mariel_Young); Andrew Robinson (@AndrewR_physics); Mareike Ohlberg (@MareikeOhlberg).
20 Tweets by: Bilby Summerhill (@BilbySummerhill); Ameena GhaffarKucher (@AmeenaGK); Ethicist For Hire (@ethicistforhire).
21 Tweets by: Laura Howes (@L_Howes); Cafer Yavuz (@caferyavuz); Steven Vamosi (@smvamosi); John Van Hoesen (@Taconic_Musings).
22 Tweets by: me; Kelly Arbeau (@HealthPsychKell); Tracey Berg-Fulton (@BergFulton); Ben Utter(@liberapertus); Bilby Summerhill (@BilbySummerhill); me; Jeremy Noel-Tod (@jntod); Matthew Ketchum (@mattketchum).
23 Tweets by: Jon Tennant (@protohedgehog); Rebekah Rogers (@evolscientist); David Shiffman (@WhySharksMatter); Meg Fox (@NotThatMeganFox); Robinson Lab (@RobinsonLab).
24 Tweets by: Graham Steel (@McDawg); Dr Mike Whitfield (@mgwhitfield); Grouchy Grad (@GrouchyGrad).
25 Tweets by: Dieter Hochuli (@dieterhochuli); Chris Bohn (@DocBohn); Richard Emes (@rdemes); Carol Tilley (@AnUncivilPhD); Kate Maxwell (@skatemaxwell); Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco); Erin Fisher (@DrErinFisher); Michael Kirkpatrick (@kirkpams); Laura O’Connor (@Lou_922); Lisa Munro (@llmunro).
LOVE AND ROMANCE
Tired and unloved? Working an 80-hour week with no time for dating? Put down your red pen, back away from the UCLA Loneliness Scale,1 and read on.
Academics have conducted an awesome array of research on love and romance. Some of this is pretty common sense stuff: you are better off single than in a dysfunctional relationship,2 but unhealthy relationships are easier to fall into once you have been alone for a while (because we settle for less when we are lonely).*3