Jeffrey Insko 🐳🐬🐋
@JeffreyInsko
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Editor, the Norton Library Edition of Moby-Dick (available now!). Currently writing about Line 5, oil, infrastructure, extraction, environment.
Groveland Township, Michigan
Joined April 2012
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Forgive me in advance for the posting I'll be doing about this the next few days but...it's here! And the first person, including me, to have an actual physical copy of this thing is a student from my Cetology class who preordered it months ago. Which seems perfect to me.
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the best tenure advice I ever got was on the first day of your job find the biggest, baddest person in the department and walk right over and punch them in the face. that’s how you get respect.
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If Ross Douthat thinks masturbation is so bad why isn’t he more upset about Bret Stephens’ last column?
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The takeover of universities by consulting firms of various sorts is the biggest scandal in higher ed, no?
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Hey, has anybody seen a new television series called "The Chair" recently released on a streaming platform and starring an actress named Sandra Oh?
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Crazy idea: what if a regional public university just took seriously “regional” and “public” instead of trying to be some two-bit imitation of some marketer’s or consulting firm’s generic idea of a university?
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when I asked my students yesterday what they thought about the announcement of our provost's departure, not one of them knew who our provost is, that we even have a provost, nor what a provost does.
every university needs a required freshman course on "how a university works"
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just your occasional reminder that academia is literally part of the "real" world. like, colleges and universities actually exist.
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Well apparently as of today I have been promoted to full professor. Here’s a picture of Sam sleeping.
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so um, well, this is actually going to be a thing. pinch me?
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So, um, you see, well... we already have colleges and universities in the Midwest.
yes I would - Harvard should be opening locations in the Midwest instead of China.
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super grateful for the NYTimes's hard-hitting coverage of the West Virginia U situation.
Oh wait.
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Subtweeting: can we please stop citing scholars' institutional affiliation as a measure of the authority/respect/deference owed to them? Thank you and good day.
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This semester, as an experiment, I gave my grad students a very rigid essay template to use for their final papers. The results, I think, are essays that are generally more engaging and purposeful and clearly organized.
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hey I know
@oaklandu
is just an obscure regional public university in the midwest so nobody takes much interest. but what's happening here is (or soon will be) happening at your university too and our faculty and the
@OaklandU_AAUP
are showing everybody how to fight back.
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do university administrators just not recognize cliches and platitudes? or do they think we're into that sort of thing?
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Everybody's worried about online or F2F or hyflex in the fall but I'm scheduled to teach an 1820-65 class and I don't know what to do now that the activists took all the history away.
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No but seriously what the fuck is this guy talking about? Raise your hand if like me you’ve had almost none of this.
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The fact that there is not a nationwide mobilization of higher ed leaders raising hell about this is almost as chilling as the FL legislation itself.
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Just sharing this once more: a crowdsourced document with ideas for increasing English major enrollments. Please share and feel free to add additional suggestions and resources. Thanks to those who have already contributed their brilliant ideas.
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my favorite thing about spring is Great Lakes whale migration season. Sleeping Bear Dunes is great for watching!
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I know some of you enjoyed seeing pictures of this good, sweet boy. This is the day 10 years ago we brought him home. We said goodbye to him yesterday. Grief upon grief these days.
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has there been even one university president in the US who has stepped up to publicly denounced the fascist bullshit in FL? honest question.
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A major highlight of Paris was seeing the world’s biggest dog lounging around a cafe.
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Everybody’s posting this with comments and jokes or whatever but I just see a whale
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I am canceling the phase "top tier university." Thank you for your compliance.
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This is what happens when you hire Walt Whitman to write headlines.
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Universities out here hiring more and more administrators to get faculty to do the things the administrators are getting paid fat sums to do. Neat trick.
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@nhannahjones
@bakara_j
apparently the experiences of Black people in Iowa don't count as Black experiences?
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okay, academic friends, i hate to already be thinking about next semester, but question: how's everybody teaching a required course in Critical Theory these days? Survey-style? Eagleton-like? one -ism after another? Lots of Jacqueses? Or have we moved on? Thanks in advance!
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An unremarked part of the gross Harvard letter thing is just the sheer number of endowed professorships there are. Like, wtf? My university has, I think, zero.
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If you’d have told this dumb bumpkin at 17 he’d one day give a plenary at the Sorbonne, he’d have said, “what the fuck is a Sorbonne? Or a plenary?”
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I love the idea of scholars zooming into one another's classes (it's always been great when I've done it as guest or host). I'd love to invite a bunch of people whose work I am teaching into my class. But I often don't because I have no resources to compensate them. Discuss?
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this morning i went to abebooks and found a first edition Moby-Dick for $65k and clicked "Add to Basket" just to feel alive.
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Ok, as promised, here's an early release of my One Minute Moby-Dick film. Be sure to crank the volume.
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Four of the students in my class had never heard "Born to Run" before but all of them thought it was a banger and instantly added it to their playlists.
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Check out this chart that shows the admin bloat at my university. I'm a full prof and my salary is lower than every single one on this chart. Every one. And we're currently hiring another Chief Officer. And the uni is trying to slash overall faculty compensation.
#ThisisOU
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Here’s my hot take: faculty a shouldn’t write to faculty b to tell them a student won’t be attending b’s class because they are doing something for a’s own class.
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It’s been a long time coming but my
@AmLitHist
forum on “Abolition’s Afterlives” is finally out! It’s such an honor to get to amplify these 6 brilliant voices. The essays are so good, I have to make this a thread.
#abolition
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Student last night on Middlemarch: "it's just 500 pages of people visiting other people's houses."
@V21collective
#victoriancetology
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just when it felt like this site was done, someone comes along with hilariously bad tenure advice and suddenly everybody's back and on their game
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fun making syllabuses not knowing if we'll be online for two weeks, a month, a semester, forever, on and then off and then back on or what or whatever
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show of hands of those whose university is distributing branded masks
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i feel like we don't say or acknowledge this enough: collaboration is by far the best part of being academic life.
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First sightings of this season's Great Lakes whale migration were this weekend!
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Call me unrigorous but I am in favor of relaxing, not tightening, tenure requirements. I am also in favor of cancelling Harvard.
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okay, lit twits, twitterati, twitterary critics: the bookstore has begun to nag abt next semester, so b4 we all bail out on this hellsite forever, can u help me compile a list? Whales in literature, any genre, period, nation of origin. (I already know about that one.) Thanks!
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This is your annual reminder that when it comes to the use of incomprehensible or exclusionary academic jargon, literary studies barely even cracks the top 10.
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Well, it looks like this is a thing that's happening. So excited to be working with
@WVUPRESS
where they're building a great list in the Environmental Humanities.
#EnvHist
#livingoil
#Enbridge
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I just now found that at some point Steven Pinker blocked me so it turns out I'm way better at twitter than I thought I was.
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@JamieLJones8
Ok, here it is. Theory class, w/ FD as test-text. assignment included but I think it's adaptable. We looked together at essay examples also.
@NotSorrySari
@AprilAnson
@AshleyKReed
@TheGurglingCod
@drreznicek
@JamieUtphall
@lindsaychurch
@JanaTigchelaar
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I'm a terrible photographer. I think this is my best pic ever.
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once again, let's not forget that the governor of WV is worth more than half a billion dollars
The Department of World Languages at
#WVU
is recommended for dissolution, eliminating ALL programs, grad and undergrad, and reducing faculty to ZERO.
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just recorded my first video lecture of the semester which is super awkward and so half of it is me just saying how super awkward it is but i refuse to spend hours or even minutes editing; i'm not martin scorsese and this is pandemic teaching.
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how about a comprehensive list of all the recent -cenes?
Anthropocene
Capitalocene
Plantationocene
Cthulucene
Anglocene
Thermocene
Anthrobscene
Urbanocene
what am I missing?
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What's happening at the bargaining table right now at my uni is emblematic of attempts everywhere to destroy higher ed. But my amazing colleagues and my union are speaking up and pushing back. So instead of lament, this is a thread of solidarity:
@OaklandU_AAUP
@AAUP
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I wonder if anybody has any thoughts they’d like to share about the academic job market.
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My next book project is basically this photo my brother just now took of two deer standing on a giant pile of coal.
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Netflix academic drama pitch for "The Trustee": long time political operative responsible for a state’s right to work law colludes with criminal governor to gain control of a University’s Board of Trustees and tries to bust the faculty union.
The hero is collective action.
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universities out here working overtime to demoralize their faculty.
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it's a pedagogical win when your class inspires inspires students to get tattoos
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show of hands if you've ever left out a word or a name from a conference talk out of fear of mispronunciation
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My academic fantasy: paid fellowship leaves, but not for one's own research; for taking colleague's classes.
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Fuck you Trump and and Ryan and McConnell, there’s still this sunset, which also hates you.
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When you have the most amazing students, sometimes they give you handmade gifts. And sometimes those gifts are the BEST GIFTS EVER and totally capture the spirit of the class.
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For their collective final "exam," the students in my Cetology class made a whale...
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Okay, lit colleagues, in response to the national trend of dwindling English majors, has anybody launched successful dedicated initiatives to recruit new majors? Or does anybody just have good ideas about how to do so? Whatcha got?
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shout out to the propane refill guy today who, upon learning I'm a professor of American literature, wondered whether American lit was canceled yet since "they've canceled the rest of American history."
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And among lots of other things I'm talking about tt and non-t solidarity. We elected a special lecturer union president then hired her as our Executive Director and she's kicking ass. You should try that.
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Hey
@AuburnU
, you should know that
@KempoJesse
is a deeply committed, thoughtful, widely respected scholar and teacher whose professional and public work models exactly the kind of ethically motivated citizenship you want your students to learn and practice.
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I just this second decided that my Lit & Env class next year is going to be "Cetology." We won't even read the rest of the novel. I pretty much composed the whole syllabus in my head this afternoon while building a raised bed for the garden.
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twitter's final act; it's over now.
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perhaps you’d like to see Murphy on the campus of NCAA phenom OAKLAND UNIVERSITY
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Fuck yeah Michigan faculty unions!
BREAKING: University of Michigan lecturers union reaches deal with U-M. Deal includes "parity in starting pay, with lecturers on all three campuses making a minimum of $51,000 by academic year 2023-24, an increase from the current Dearborn and Flint minimums by $10,000."
@freep
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I’d just like to announce that, as usual, I did not keep track of anything at all in 2023 and therefore have nothing to report. Here’s Murph.
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I developed a new course on Literature and the Environment for our revised dept curriculum and it was enthusiastically received by my colleagues. Very excited about our bold leap into the 21st-century!
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and the great shroud of the [lake] rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago
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Happy publication day to the first US edition of Moby-Dick, upon which the forthcoming
@TNL_WWN
edition is based.
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speaking of self censorship, there’s a lot of stuff I want to say in class and in, like, dept meetings but I don’t.
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ENG 6900: The Literature of Extraction
(not pictured: McTeague: a Story of San Francisco by Frank Norris)
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People who complain that literary scholars are jargony obscurantists who don't know how to communicate to non-specialists have clearly never read any scholarship in any other academic discipline across the university. Thank you for attending my subtweet.
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I’m going to need everyone to stop working on their fall syllabuses. It’s way too soon for that. Thank you for your cooperation.
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it seems like everybody's buying microphones and cameras and whiteboards and various other sorts of online teaching-related gadgetry and I'm not doing any of that. Am I doing it wrong?
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