Monday, August 23, 2021

First Day of Classes

 It's day one of the fall semester here and the predicted temperature is going to reach 100 degrees.

This usually wouldn't matter, but I have a class on the other end of the campus that starts at 10:00. UGH.

I finished watching The Chair last night -- it's a little depressing, but not at all "woke." The opposite, in fact -- the main plotline concerns how a Twitter mob ruins a professor's life (with a little help from the professor) and the way the admin rolls over to that mob.

What I think my FB critic meant by that is that it has people of color as main characters. It doesn't matter what the plotline is, or what happens in the show: if brown people, and women, are main characters, instead of just gazing adoringly at white men, then the show must, de facto, be woke. At least to white conservative Trump cultists.

Trump did get boo'd for advising his followers to get vaccinated yesterday. So apparently he can shoot a man on 5th Avenue, sexually assault women, and try to overturn the government, but contradicting militant ignorance about medical matters is RIGHT OUT.


4 comments:

Bardiac said...

I think I liked the Chair a bit more than you did, though it gave me anxiety. And I'm pissed about the Bill Dobson character. Argh.

delagar said...


I ended up liking it more than I thought I would after the first two episodes -- I really like the Holland Taylor character. And yes, it gave me SO MUCH anxiety.

nicoleandmaggie said...

It was 100 degrees (literally) when I left student orientation today. Only about 10% of the students were masked. And maybe 30% of staff. My department chair did mask up for the event though, so that's something. One of my friends complained that her department chair did not.

Hahaha, admin rolling over to a woke student mob. Hahaha. We still have confederate statues on campus. *sigh*

I've been working on a DEI statement for a job application and it is so depressing how much low-hanging DEI fruit there is in academia. And how many committees and grants etc. I've been on with so little institutionalized systemic change resulting from it.

delagar said...


Our u has pushed masks pretty hard -- all of my students (four classes, ugh) were masked today, and we were given boxes of masks to give out if anyone "forgot" their masks. If anyone refused to put a mask on, we were supposed to call campus security.

I'm glad I didn't have to do that.

And yeah, it's much more likely that universities will roll over for the far-right conservative mobs these days. :(