Take Care and Good Luck Doug!

-mason

If I attempted to do the public application process, on the other hand, I’d be rejected in the first round.

And who wants to start a career that way? By accepting the benefits of corruption? Doesn’t seem like a good foundation.

And I hear you on the risk to my “public intellectual” status. Though I look at a guy like Stuart Ewen and see that you don’t have to give one up to get the other. He’s at City College in NY, and loving it. Then again, he publicly attacks the president of the school, and says academia is extremely political.

I actually had a professor encourage me to think of myself as CEO of my own corporation. Talk about Life Incorporated!

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I ran into a strange employment opportunity from the performing arts department at San Francisco State University. I received a letter from them asking if I was interested in a teaching position. Being a self-employed actress/acting coach I thought what the heck, a steady paycheck, why not!
After a few Catch-22 phone calls to set up an interview I got the funny feeling that the invite was bogus, which indeed it was. I learned from a friend who worked there that the state requires them to demonstrate that they have advertised open positions to the general public even though they had already filled it with an insider.
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Talk about hurdles and hoarding… be glad you’re not an actor. According to the Screen Actors Guild there are 52,000 roles annually for about one million actors in LA. The job openings are released daily to agents and managers who have an oath of honor (yes, honor in Hollywood, can you believe it!) not to let actors see the list.

I’ve often wondered which part of the sky would fall first if actors had easy access to job openings? Would actor fatigue resulting from waiting in the inevitable cattle call lines separate the chaff from the wheat organically thus eliminating the need for the agents and managers to do it?
One can only wonder.

Good luck!

“What if” i thought “NYU’s motives for leaving the marketplace to the ‘appropriate school or department’ is merely an attempt to preserve and protect academic freedom?”

That lead me to one of my favourite pages of Derrida: Page 33 of Otobiographies. Jaw dropper

etc

called perversion of the text? The Fifth Lecture tells us that there must be something unheimlich—uncanny—about the enforced repression [Unterdruckung] of the least degenerate needs. Why “unheimlich”? This is another form of the same question.
The ear is uncanny. Uncanny is what it is; double is what it can become; large or small is what it can make or let happen (as in laisser-faire, since the ear is the most tendered and most open organ, the one that, as Freud reminds us, the infant cannot close); large or small as well the manner in which one may offer or lend an ear. It is to her—this ear—that I myself will feign to ad¬dress myself now in conclusion by speaking still more words in your ear, as promised, about your and my “academic freedom.”
When the lectures appear to recommend linguistic discipline as a counter to the kind of “academic freedom” that leaves students and teachers free to their own thoughts or programs, it is not in order to set constraint over against freedom. Behind “academic freedom” one can discern the silhouette of a con¬straint which is all the more ferocious and implacable because it conceals and disguises itself in the form of laisser-faire. Through the said “academic freedom,” it is the State that controls everything. The State: here we have the main defendant indicted in this trial. And Hegel, who is the thinker of the State, is also one of the principal proper names given to this guilty party. In fact, the autonomy of the university, as well as of its student and professor inhabitants, is a ruse of the State, “the most perfect ethical organism” (this is Nietzsche quoting He¬gel). The State wants to attract docile and unquestioning functionaries to itself. It does so by means of strict controls and rigorous constraints which these functionaries believe they apply to themselves in an act of total auto-nomy. The lectures can thus be read as a modern critique of the cultural machinery of State and of the educational system that was, even in yesterday’s industrial society, a fundamental part of the State appara¬tus. If today such an apparatus is on its way to being in part replaced by the media and in part associated with them, this only makes Nietzsche’s critique of journalism—which he never

etc

It is not only old fashioned, it is a broad practice. A lot of operations look inside first. And what better way to do it than not adapting or creating blinds to the inside.

Now, with the same operations – Let’s say there is no one “they” want on the inside? Adjust the blinds. Let’s say the undesirable insider get’s an interview? Assemble a “favourable” panel. It goes on and on. And that’s just with hiring….

My guess is that NYU either genuinely likes you and/or is genuinely complacent with having not “adapted.” Either way, as my asshole father says, “Don’t kick against the pricks.”

I guess i’d agree adding only “…too much.” OTOH one never knows what one may be dropping in one’s karma….

”Cause there’s a knock on wood that says, ‘It might’ Then there’s the long, long arm of the law that says ‘It’s right.’ And it’s a tricky balancing act between the two because both are equally true. And anything can happen que sera, sera. ‘Cause might makes right. Am i right?”

-laurie anderson

http://www.jimdavies.org/laurie-anderson/lyrics/UnitedStates.txt

- mason

But I don’t like it, and it strikes me as an extension of old boys network insider favoritism.

What’s troubling about this hurdle is less that it creates knowledge barriers to “outsiders” than it reinforces boundaries between academic departments. By separating out departmental job listings, NYU is ensuring that only the thinkers that belong to a single information flow and its correlative resources are even aware of the opportunities to join their faculty.

Innovators/intellectuals/scholars with different but perhaps complimentary knowledges are implicitly discouraged from “cross-pollinating,” thus keeping academia at its core conservative, slow-moving and unimaginative.

It’s just the first of many barriers to the Generalist in higher education.

As a young admirer of your work– I totally object to this, but wish you good luck in your pursuits nevertheless!

-R