Category: Academia

Another long day in a series of long days. Some things going well, some exasperating, near to maddening. Colleagues intermittently pleasant, wise and helpful, or occasionally, luckily and mercifully briefly, flaming assholes. Not so bad I suppose – many in business deal with much more, and much worse; and I have of course fought intermittently…

Detachment, coolness, space: long sunny days. There’s a lot of work – this is the week when we spend hours deciding and negotiating final marks, sitting in judgment over undergraduate and postgraduate – and there is plenty of administration waiting, not to mention research, demanding attention at every corner. But I am somehow calmer than…

Today all of the postgraduates had work due (and I am the Cerberus, or perhaps more accurately Rhadamanthys, of this whole structure). I received several frantic calls and e-mails starting from about 8:30 am, from students who had hit some sort of wall, intellectual or physical – one battling with an incoherent conclusion, another with…