Whoring in Higher Ed
Rock Island, IL
There’s an old joke about a middle-aged man in a bar talking to a woman of similar age. The man knows he’s not much to look at any more. He knows his chances are slim. Both have a pretty good grasp of who’s got the upper hand here.
So the man says to the woman, “I’m curious. Would you sleep with me for a million bucks?”
The woman, amused, thinks about this for a minute, takes a sip from her vodka martini, looks the guy over a little more, imagining him about thirty pounds lighter, and says, “yeah, I guess for a million bucks I’d do it.”
The man reaches into his wallet and pulls out a one-dollar bill. “How about for a dollar?” he asks.
The woman stands up outraged and says, “what do you take me for?”
The man says, “I think we’ve already established that you’re a whore. Right now we’re just negotiating price.”
The joke isn’t exactly charitable toward women, nor flattering of men, but it does serve to remind us that many of us have a price and that the world is full of people who will probably be able to arrange things to their advantage for the simple reason that they possess money, the object par excellence. It’s the pixie dust that can turn a dumpy middle-aged loser into a veritable Adonis, if only for a few unimpressive minutes. The number of lecherous old rich coots you sometimes see with large-minded beauty queens on their withering arms bears this out in some measure at least.
As a joke this one works pretty well, but as a parable it can be pretty unsettling, especially if you have a hard time not seeing yourself as the woman–and whoever pays your bills as the man.
I make my living in what is called—mistakenly, I believe—“higher education.” I enjoy the work, though it’s not really “work” as we have understood that word through time. It’s not hard enough to be called “work.” It’s not what my dad did in the early winter mornings down at the barn when he was twelve, or what some people still do at that time during the cold months—and also the hot ones.
There are plenty of “tasks” in my work to keep me busy, to be sure, and I’m often very tired at the end of what are usually very long days, but I’m not exactly picking cotton under an unmerciful sun.
Perhaps I engage in no less self-justification than the woman (or man) in the joke when I think that there’s some honor in what I do—which, as I see it, is to suggest to undergraduates how they might live good lives, lives that might even include going home and milking cows on cold January mornings.
But I have a hard time not thinking of myself as the woman who has just relinquished her power–and whatever else–by saying “yes” to the guy with the crater face, the hairy back, and a million bucks.
This whole conundrum becomes more pressing with each passing year. My children stand to benefit from substantial tuition breaks at what are generally regarded as good colleges so long as I keep saying “yes” to the rich dude with the neck hair.
And so I keep meeting him, as it were, for drinks. Lots of them—from September to May every year and occasionally during the summer.
(He doesn’t really make me laugh, and he’s about as interesting on most days as a hairball retched from the mouth of a furry house cat, but, you see, I just can’t help myself. Plus he keeps his pockets full of spending loot.)
The presumption here is that my children should go to college, as I did. I went and loved it and stayed in it and am grateful for it. I am grateful to my parents, who made it possible for me read Donne in January while others milked cows.
But if there’s one thing I see with startling clarity, year after year, it is this: there are way too many people in college. Not everyone needs to go to college, and not everyone should go to college. Perhaps my own children shouldn’t.
This latest “perhaps” to bedevil my thoughts came crashing through one day as I began to think of all the bullshit my kids are going to be told by people who have advanced degrees in bullshit. I’ve served on many hiring committees over the years, and what astonishes me year after year is how poorly educated newly minted PhDs are. I’ve come to expect graduate programs to take bad care of their students (“go learn everything you can about the micropube”), but what I’m seeing now is how poorly undergraduate programs have taken care of their students.
That is to say, I look at job candidates and wonder what on earth their undergraduate years must have been like.
Which is why I like to begin an interview by asking a candidate to tell me about his or her undergraduate experience. You’d be surprised how easily a candidate can muff this answer. I hope to hear stories of intellectual awakening, of incipient and genuine intellectual curiosity, of a commitment to reading that ranges widely over the landscape of knowledge and received wisdom.
What I often hear is endless blather about “my work” on what pretty quickly turns out to be a quarter-piece of belly-button lint. I offer as but one example the number of people in “religious studies” who not only have no interest in what used to be called the “Queen of the Sciences” but who treat theology and theologians with utter contempt. Even the Bible nerds and Church historians don’t seem to give a damn about theology. When I was twenty I couldn’t get enough of it, and now, at forty-six, I think I have a pretty good sense of what it means to say “I can’t get enough of it.” There’s a brutality to irony.
The effects of the contempt I instance here are not isolated. Literary criticism and philosophy conducted from deep inside the dark cave of theological illiteracy have gotten duller and duller with every dissertation. I’m not even a theologian or philosopher and I know this.
With whom, I wonder, will my daughter (who loves to read) study Shakespeare? Will she walk away from Twelfth Night having learned nothing except gender-role ideology and supposed cross-dressing preferences in Elizabethan England?
In their philosophy classes will my sons be taught the love of wisdom or the love of disputatiousness?
Will they learn science from scientists who actually know the history of their own discipline? One of the most influential courses I ever took as an English major was a course in the history of science, taught by someone who had a great appreciation for Newton as a writer. Is anyone like this professor out there waitng for my kids?
More than likely my kids will learn their science from people trained to interact not with other people but with instruments. More than likely they will learn their science from scientists who can’t distinguish between Roger and Francis Bacon–and who don’t know what it means that the methods of science cannot be tested by the scientific method. They will be told that “earlier” and “later” are synonyms for “false” and “true,” while over in religion the faculty—though unused to litanies–shout “amen!”
I have to debrief my children enough already. I don’t really want that job to get less manageable, and at any rate I could keel over from a massive M.I. before they’re even called upon to distinguish between Kant and cant—if indeed there’s a distinction to be made there.
You think of certain kinds of parents (not the ones who majored in packaging at Massive U. and who were members of I Phelta Thigh or Tappa Kegga Beer) who send their children off to “premier” liberal arts colleges. Obviously their expectations do not accord with what reality has in store for their kids. How much is being sacrificed to a certain parental naiveté is anyone’s guess. I certainly couldn’t say. All I see are the intellectual crimes being committed on young people. The perfidies almost make me shake with terror.
It may be—it is certainly so in some cases—that “higher education” is little more than a poorly wielded blunt sword that maybe strikes, but for the most part glances off, the heads and shoulders of young people, and I suppose this is lucky.
But not in an ideal college experience. There’s a risk to education, and education should be worth the risk, to say nothing of the cost. It should result in better and more thoughtful citizens of given places. It should culminate in full human beings who know better than to be enamored of abstractions. If I allow that education should be driven largely by content, I hasten to add that it should also be ethical, moral, and humane. It should be conducted with respect for both the future and the past, which is to say its should be conducted with measured suspicion of and admiration for both.
Young men and women, if they have been properly educated, should undergo a crisis of conscience analogous to physical growing pains.
By and large they don’t. They undergo a closing of conscience–and of consciousness. They are introduced only to the easiest of moralities—“tolerate difference” (save what issues from tradition)—in what is obviously a prepared and effete language not nearly responsive enough to the complexities of the human experience, which inevitably and necessarily involves sameness, opposition, contrariety, sympathy, fecundity and sterility, faithfulness, altruism, and (just to cut the list short) limits not yet imagined.
Obviously these students shouldn’t be racists. That’s easy enough to say. But they should aim at something higher than mere tolerance. A doctrine of tolerance will only require inattention to difference, and inattention to difference will unfit them for judgment, which is to say it will unfit them for criticism. They will enter a world in which chickens and Chicken McNuggets are interchangeable. They won’t know—or care about—the difference between Nickelodeon and the Nicomachean Ethics. They’ll say “libido” while we say “libretto.”
Hip-Hop? It’s the new opera, yo!
It is difficult to imagine handing over democracy to such people, but we really don’t have any other choice. We can’t exactly hand it over to the cows.
And of course there’s the other kind of student who will not suffer any crisis of conscience whatsoever. He is the student who has been raised by fundamentalists, either religious or secular. He arrives at college knowing he will be assaulted and he is determined from the start to withstand the assault. He believes St. Matthew was written first and Revelation last. Or he believes all facts of existence can be explained in terms of natural selection, or by brain states, or by the subconscious. The great catastrophe of his existence is that mystery has been dismissed before he even gets a chance really to be confronted by it. He was raised by parents who on Sunday mornings either went Jesus-hunting at the Bible Chapel or warbler-hunting at the Cathedral of the Pines.
All of this is to say that there are both pervious and impervious students and that all of them are being introduced by “higher education” to a lower form of existence. Perhaps all of them are credulous young men and women, at best the trusting sons and daughters of trusting men and women who don’t know that they’re paying a lot of money so that their children can be told things that aren’t so by people who don’t know that they aren’t so.
As Hamlet once put it, this must give us pause.
I’m not sure there’s a solution to the problem as I have described it, save a vague faith in time and the will of heaven. What has been lost in “higher” education will be hard to recover. It is difficult liberally to educate students with a faculty that are not liberally educated. We’ve known for years that R1 institutions don’t give a damn about liberal education. The horror of our moment is that liberal arts institutions don’t give a damn about it either. They suffer from R1 envy.
Not all of them, of course. But the trends are unmistakable.
Number among the solutions I would suggest this one: that we begin with work. I’d like to see more people with soft hands working harder, professors and students alike. I would allow no one on a liberal arts college campus to eat in the cafeteria who has not participated that week in serious food production.
And I would make more stringent demands on faculty members who enjoy arguing in the faculty dining room the merits of various single-malt scotches. Let them argue, but let them do some real work first. Let them, for example, castrate a ram for every gyro they eat.
And once we have recovered a sense of our fragile dependencies, let us start over with the Trivium.
I’d have ora et labora.
Then maybe the woman would say “no” to the rich guy with a face like eight miles of bad road. Or maybe she wouldn’t even have to.
And, best of all, there might never be such a thing in this vast enchanted mysterious universe we’re lucky enough to inhabit as a vodka martini, which as everyone knows was invented in hell and to this day is served there to specialists of all stripes, especially to MFA poets with bad wardrobes. (But I repeat myself.)
“difficult liberally to educate” ?
That’s an odd construction. It is our right as English speakers to simply split infinitives down the middle for clarity’s sake — particularly in cases with a preceding adjective to which the adverb could possibly be applied.
To Ethan C.:
Exercising rights as speakers isn’t quite synonymous with cultivating quality as writers–especially in cases where the ‘odd construction’ is meant amusingly to suggest more than one meaning.
Unless, of course, your comment was meant to illustrate just the sort of disputatious pedantry with which Mr Peters’ post took issue. If so, you’ve captured perfectly the object of criticism.
Oh, the stories I could tell you about my experience at the University of Iowa:
My American History – Post Civil War teacher was a loud preachy Marxist (a title he relished) who gave us all the answers to the tests the day before and spent the lecture time talking about nothing but legalizing pot and how we need to go out and fight ‘the capitalist system’.
German Heroic Literature of the Middle Ages – lots of stuff here. I read the assignments, and more, and came to discuss them, but was often treated to things like two class periods talking about ‘just how accepted was masturbation in the Middle Ages?’
Computer Science was taught entirely by TAs who couldn’t answer a question in class and basically just read from the text book.
If I hadn’t been reading on my own time and already working in the computer field, I never would have had a job, and would have learned very little of value.
I was reading the following interview this morning on the “failure” of colleges to effect “social mobility” up to the statistical calibrations our technocrats promised us:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/07/07/berg
I was going to wretch, I was going to steam, spout, and shout. But then I read this little essay and realized it was the one thing needful, the only response required. Well done.
Hmm… I’m of divided opinion on this because in different ways it did and did not seem true of my experience as an undergraduate, and was outright untrue of my experience as a graduate student at a liberal arts college. I admittedly haven’t been obliged to milk any cows, much less castrate any bulls, though I did have one rather delightful class (in which I wish I’d payed more attention) where we got to chop wood, lay bricks, stoke fires, and make pots — but that was mostly for play, really. I *didn’t* have this experience as an undergraduate because I spent my two years at the state university (I transferred in from community college) being an eastern Orthodox catechumen, and that was nearly all the theology and internal upheaval I was prepared for. As a grad student I’m at a small liberal arts college (St John’s in Santa Fe) that, as far as I can tell, people like me go to as a way to tour great books for a year the way others might tour Europe or go sailing for some period of time. It’s both growth-inducing and mildly indolent, and mostly, I suppose, we’re self-conscious of that (I had worked for a year as a teacher to pay for it, and in general people hardly suppose it to be profitable in a monetary sense). Then people get on with life — go back to where we came from and work at bookstores or grocery stores or oyster farming or musical composition; or get PHDs in something.
I’ll admit that the whole thing is a bit too self-indulgent for complete comfort, just as spending my first several years in formal education (at the community college) printing from zinc plates, looking at slides of Assyrian statues, throwing pots, and whatnot was a bit self-indulgent. But I console myself by supposing that, really, everyone should have hobbies, interests, and pursuits, and it’s better to build on them now than be irritated and bitter about “lost opportunities” or whatever later.
New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, ID, and New College Franklin, TN are doing wonderful things in liberal arts education based on the Trivium.
http://www.nsa.edu/
http://www.newcollegefranklin.org/
That’s certainly all true of my experience as an undergrad. The only reason I turned out more or less all right is because I was constantly disagreeing with professors and skipping class to read. I would not have predicted this, but I now feel sorry for my friends who went on to graduate programs and quite proud of friends who became construction workers.
Reforming higher education is only part of the problem. The other, possibly much bigger, problem is retrieving a living sense of the dignity of labor. I’m constantly hearing radio adds that say “improve yourself, come to out college,” as well as receiving mail from local colleges with taglines suggesting higher education is the only path to self-improvement. It all sounds very positive, but there’s a corollary being constantly ignored: people doing physical work are a lower life form. What needs to be overcome is the attitude that says we help the working class by raising them up to the level of the educated elite. If society is an organism analogous to a human being, this mistake is like the eye seeing a hand with a broken finger and saying the problem is the hand’s poor vision.
Thank you for the lamentation, Jason. I don’t always agree with what you write, but you’re peerless in how you write. Finding convergence of substance and style is a double pleasure . . . even when the topic is depressing.
It’s bad; of course it’s bad.
But as an undergraduate in the belly of the beast, I’m not ready to turn completely against the Leviathan (my parents wouldn’t appreciate that, given that they’re feeding it). And so I accentuate the positive, at least until I graduate.
Now I’ve never known any better, though I know enough to see where the academy’s gone wrong. And I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been very fortunate to find ways of snatching a wholesome education out of the jaws of a thoroughly unwholesome institution. But the more time I’ve spent in college, the more like-minded people I’ve met, and I’ve become the more convinced that, however dim it might seem, hope remains.
The intellectual institutions of the “conservative movement,” to be sure, have done a mighty poor job of keeping the university honest. But I take it as a proof of the wrongness of the academy’s state that, however little encouragement they may have to do so, students keep on wondering whether there isn’t something more, and looking for places where they can find it.
But then, I have a strong inducement to think this way. I’ve got to motivate myself somehow to get back on campus come September.
I worked on a college dairy farm for about six months—–I had never worked so hard in my life, nor have I since. But I have to wonder if all my hard work (and the lifelong hard work of those to man these 24/7 operations) is any substitute for thought. Or, put another way, is it not important to have both, with perhaps the nod going to thought. Mindless doing, which many farmers specialize in (yes, I do think that Menken had something to say on this subject) is worse than thoughtful non-doing, so to speak. An illustration: the Tea Party movement, here in our state of Washington, can be found almost entirely in the “east side” (that is east of the Cascade Mountains), out here “behind the pine tree curtain” as one wag put it, amongst the rural and small town folk, many chronically unemployed, who rail against the federal government—federal and state—- yet owe their entire existence to the federal government—-highways, logging on Federal land, irrigation projects, dams, rural hydroelectric power, lakes created by dams, and more recently the wind power projects (courtesy of the much criticized stimulus bill), farm subsidies, barge subsidies, and let’s not forget our very own nuclear operation at Hanford—- all courtesy of the government, mostly the federal government. So, I ask you, what do you make of all this mindless doing? Most work hard. Yes they do. And all the while they ridicule thought. They love Sarah Palin for just this reason. They find her manifest ignorance reassuring. Yet, all the while they are out and about yammering about big government they take all those handouts without blinking an eye. Year after year after year.
Can college education help straighten this out? (it obviously didn’t help Sarah Palin–I’ll give you that). Where else is our youth going to get straightened out? On talk radio? College is, or should be, at war with provinciality. Often it isn’t—-it is about job training. It is often, yes, whoring. But more often, I think, it attacks provinciality in all its forms. At the very least, college holds out the hope that there is a bigger world out there, that learning can happen and that it matters. As bad as college can be, as narrow and abstract as it often is, I do suggest that more often than not it is better then the alternative. Dispelling the idiotic romanticism we attach to often mindless labor isn’t a bad thing. Not even for the dispellee. Especially when the dispellee fails to even grasp the reality of his situation. I rather hope that more than one of my students, who may not want to ever see a farm again, goes home to his hard working Tea Party father and says, “You know, Dad, if it weren’t for big government we would be living in a desert.”
“if it weren’t for big government we would be living in a desert.”
Says the drug dealer to the junkie.
Interesting how Mr. Peters writes “Obviously these students shouldn’t be racists,” and then derides an entire genre of music, as well as its creators and fans, by saying “Hip-Hop? It’s the new opera, yo!” His sarcastic use of slang speaks volumes. He then goes on to insinuate that these people (black people? Latinos? city people?) are hardly better than farm animals and unfit for democracy. It’s too bad that Mr. Peters has no understanding of the history of hip hop either in the United States or abroad, and that he seems to equate opera and classical culture with some form of political ideal. Writing music for the salons and theaters of rich patrons wasn’t exactly the height of democracy, musical or otherwise.
Kevin-
I went to a decidedly white and affluent university and lots of people talked that way.
Asher Roth, anyone?
Well done, indeed! This makes me want to quit my job and read and work in the garden for the rest of my life. The cultural disaster that is higher education strikes me as similar to the monoculture of inedible GM corn that many of these undergraduates likely subsist on, for which bullshit is the fertilizer, and mediocrity the seed. Perhaps what is needed, in addition to hands-on work, is some organic intellectual variation.
Interesting comments from Kevin. I would agree that Richard Wagner is less culturally advanced than Tupac Shakur. Though, keep in mind Kevin, the majority of young Americans who listen to rap are consuming chart-topping songs like “Sex Room” – with lyrics not worthy of recitation (but worth googling if you care to be disgusted at the current state of popular culture).
The primary appeal of hip-hop to youth (and adult perpetual adolescents) isn’t the music per se, but the attitude, which is a chip- on-our-shoulder, f**k you type of thing. This “music” screams rebellion, disdain and incivility, and should be avoided.
The more you listen to classical music and traditional folk music, the more you realize what banal crap we’re being fed these days by the entertainment conglomerates. Take it from a guy who just 6 or 7 years ago was listening mostly to eclectic rock and pop 95% of the time, and had upwards of 800 CDs. Now, after listening mainly to classical music steadily for the past half-dozen years, the majority of the stuff I used to like sounds rather trite and boring.
“Lick my ass.”
-Mozart
There’s nothing wrong with a little rebellion, disdain or incivility when facing the proper opponents. Particularly when you can do it through music, that is, nonviolently. That said, I much prefer Dylan and Dvorak to DJs.
“the methods of science cannot be tested by the scientific method.”
My son, who is college bound in the fall, and I were discussing self-referential loops (via the online MIT lectures of Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel Escher Bach). The concept that science, perhaps the most valid question in his mind, could be based on a true but unprovable statement was profound for him. He knew of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, but (rightfully) tentative of the applications. Perhaps he is one that should go to college. (The fact that we just learned he earned a full IB diploma is an indicator too? Woo-hoo!) Forgive the proud papa syndrome, no doubt Jason is correct. Higher Ed. has been marketed with the same zeal as sub-prime mortgages with a similar and inevitable result.
BTW hip-hop is no more dangerous than Elvis’ hip gyrations caused young girls to involuntarily drop their knickers. They are just kids. Being about the same age as Jason, I bet there is a polyester disco shirt somewhere in his past, perhaps even white pants?
“There’s nothing wrong with a little rebellion, disdain or incivility when facing the proper opponents.”
Key terms being “a little” and “the proper opponents,” neither of which apply to rap and hip-hop.
“BTW hip-hop is no more dangerous than Elvis’ hip gyrations caused young girls to involuntarily drop their knickers. They are just kids.”
Hip-hop is more dangerous than Elvis in that it combines a warped post-60s sexuality with a violent spirit of rebellion.
Hip Hop is, like all parable, a mirror. That it is held up to amply show the dysfunctions of the Welfare State certainly does make it dangerous, valuably so.
It is also a vehicle of high comedy for all its violent rhythms. After all, without it, we would miss the rich hilarity of hearing a bumping and grinding car approaching from a half mile away, packed with fleshy white boys with their hats turned backwards, surly because they are so confused by the feckless culture they inhabit that hip-hop provides them some kind of clarity. Or, at least it is useful for irritating their fusty old parents who passed the mantle of confusion onto them.
“Key terms being “a little” and “the proper opponents,” neither of which apply to rap and hip-hop.”
I can think of no more worthy an opponent than the prison industrial complex or big government’s so-called ‘war on drugs’ – which is really a war on poor (usually black) communities. See the lyrics quoted below for an example, from Mos Def. He’s not exactly a front-porcher (he’s pretty far-left), but he shares some common values with us in his willingness to stand against the destruction he sees ravaging his home community – and that speaks to a lot of people.
I’ve heard enough hip-hop with similar themes to resist indicting the whole genre. Granted, there’s a lot of crap rap out there, but there’s also a lot of crap pop, crap rock, crap folk, and – yes – crap classical. Pointing fingers at hip-hop seems silly when you could also pillory punk for the same rebelliousness, pop for the same sexual looseness, rock for its self-destructiveness, or metal for its nihilism. I see far more dangerous attitudes from juggalo culture than from hip-hop culture.
When the average minimum wage is $5.15
You best believe you gotta find a new grind to get cream**
The white unemployment rate, is nearly more than triple for black
so frontliners got they gun in your back
Bubblin crack, jewel theft and robbery to combat poverty
and end up in the global jail economy
Stiffer stipulations attached to each sentence
Budget cutbacks but increased police presence
And even if you get out of prison still livin
join the other five million under state supervision
This is business, no faces just lines and statistics
from your phone, your zip code, to S-S-I digits
The system break man child and women into figures
Two columns for who is, and who ain’t niggaz
**Can’t help but interject: I’ve heard many economists refer to the illegal drug trade as the closest we’ve come to a pure free-market system. I find it interesting that the combined forces of welfare, minimum wage controls, police, and prisons are not enough to stop the free market incentives offered by the drug trade. Of course, big government both propagates and profits from these incentives, and makes the natural decision to keep drugs illegal.
Well said, Sabin!
“Pointing fingers at hip-hop seems silly when you could also pillory punk for the same rebelliousness, pop for the same sexual looseness, rock for its self-destructiveness, or metal for its nihilism.”
And I do.
“I’ve heard enough hip-hop with similar themes to resist indicting the whole genre.”
I find that picking peanuts out of poop is neither a profitable nor an enjoyable enterprise.
Without Punk, there would never have been pogoing and the arcane pleasures of battering holes in low acoustic tile ceilings with your thick skull while on a combination of Jim Beam and whatever else might have been at hand as Ig and the Stooges ground out “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and your girlfriend and her pals retreated to sulk at such brazen displays of public primitivism.
Not that I would know anything about this personally mind you, it’s what I’ve heard.
Yes, that’s right. Kids are drawn to studies of hip-hop — and Elvis, and the philosophy of grunge rock — because they yearn for the intellectually rigorous mental exercise they couldn’t get from Latin, Shakespeare, or matrix algebra.
The point is not whether or not one approves of pop culture, but the extent (if any) to which it should receive extended attention as part of the curiculuum of a serious liberal arts university.
Salyer,
Absolutely correct. Seems progress is stalled on this front however, just as entropy speeds up. Reading a little Walter Lippmann , you could lift entire sections of his meditations on the dysfunctions in education and politics and apply them directly to today. Prohibition might be replaced by our Cable News Networks as a current villain but beyond that, it seems we’re stuck on the same depauperate treadmill.
“Reading a little Walter Lippmann , you could lift entire sections of his meditations on the dysfunctions in education and politics and apply them directly to today.”
Ditto Richard Weaver. I’ve just read his “Visions of Order” and was struck by how pertinent much of it is to today’s situations, despite its having been written in the 50s.
Rob-
In fact, I find picking peanuts out of poop very enjoyable, indeed, as well as VERY intellectually profitable. It seems I have little choice, anyway; most of what I encounter is poop, and the peanuts are few and far between these days – but SO delicious when I find them. How lucky you are to have avoided poop your whole life. You must know a trick!
Or perhaps you find the peanut-to-poop ratio more favorable in classical music than in rap?
“What do you take me for?”
“I think we’ve already established that you’re a whore. Right now we’re just negotiating price.”
“Or perhaps you find the peanut-to-poop ratio more favorable in classical music than in rap?”
So favorable, in fact, that one can go for extremely long stretches without encountering any excrement at all.
I’m of about your age (just past), still looking for my first full-time teaching job in higher ed (graduated in 1998). I’m ordained in a mainline denomination, so one of the avenues I’ve investigated over the years is college chaplaincy. Most of the jobs in schools of my own denominations want people who will run religious programming that will help campus people pursue “spirituality” (defined as broadly and vaguely as possible). As a Jesus guy, I just can’t bring myself to prostitute myself to the service of some amorphous “religion” or “spirituality” just so I can get the job I want.
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