So are you saying tenured faculty are unhip??

Any academic who receives money from the federal government has agreed directly or indirectly to a federal "drug free workplace."

That federal drug free workplace agreement consists of more than just a promise not to do drugs at work. It also contains a snitch clause where you and everyone covered by the grant is obligated under severe penalties for non-compliance to snitch all of your pot-smoking graduate students out to your grant officer, providing the grant officer with their names and social security numbers.

I never heard of any academic refusing to sign this agreement, like academics used to refuse to sign loyalty oaths back in the sixties.

So any academic who thinks he or she is cool enough to pretend to be a gangster is really just a wankster, and a snitch waiting to happen.

Put that in your B.I.G. and smoke it.

You're not a gansgter.

You're just a wankster.

You sign agreements,

but you don't read them.

Now you're a snitch,

the gov'mint's b*itch.

Ain't that just rich?

But you don't know it,

so you don't show it.

You're think you're cool.

But you've been fooled.

Time to get schooled.

you are the Gestapo:

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~jendres/oath/

http://xpress.sfsu.edu/archives/news/006324.html

A friend of mine, formerly academic, was offered 400K (that's 400 larges, grands or whatever you call it) for a script he wrote while in graduate school. He assures me the parties are better in LA than in New Haven. And sex with younger women is as readily available as at Yale, but without the little complications of faculty-student relationships. He jokes that he's aced rehab... Apparently, the funniest part is that all these LA writers are all saddled with bad cases of intellectual envy...

BTW that guy's column completely forgets the unforgettable : ie. the fact that as Bourdieu would say, academics have to constantly invent new ways to rationalize the gaping chasm between their accumulated cultural and symbolic capital vs their paltry financial/material capital. Public, smart-ass hip hop takes on departmental politics is one of these revenge strategies - ie. I'm hip to the game, I know it's a game, I don't take it too seriously. It is also an unwitting acknowledgment of the young Professor's painful education in the true nature of social domination in academia. Academia, much like the street, is much more pre-industrial than one would imagine (for instance, seniority trumps money - the worst senile reactionary asshole can still wield incredible power in a department). Ultimately, academia exists and perpetuates itself as a pre-industrial institution within an intensely capitalist society. This is the mark of a completely dominated segment of society. Just like hip hop artists, most academics think they escape their status as dominated serfs because of their critical knowledge of how the game is played - in other words, their wits. In the end, Niall Ferguson and Judith Butler are as grotesque as Diddy or Fiddy. Because for all their posing and their pimping, truth is, they are not in charge.

Anonymous,

Most of what you say about academia being pre-industrial is right on. It's like a silly little guild system. But you make it sound like being grotesque is a bad thing. Or that the other 99.9% of the world's population isn't just as active in forming its "revenge strategies."

For my part, I find both Judith Butler and 50-cent a lot more interesting (not to mention humane) than, say, Donald Trump or King George II (as for Ferguson and Diddy, well, every game has people who give hustlers a bad name).

After all, there's a lot of nice things about being on the pre-industrial side of an articulated social formation. Yes, seniority trumps money, but shared governance, intellectual rigor, ethical comportment, etc, get more play than the market would otherwise allow. Not by much, but a little bit. As far as workplaces go, academic ones are a bit more progressive about race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. than most. Not so good on class, obviously, since that's part of why academia is allowed to exist--it helps reproduce inequalities. I'm not naive about it--most of the time it's about the senile reactionary asshole wielding great power, or the politics of parking space assignments. But other jobs have this too. It's not as if the pecking order among QuikiMart cashiers is regulated according to strict meritocracy or market efficiency.

Let's face it--a lot of academia is brutalizing, but not nearly as much as crack dealing. The smart-ass assistant prof is being more than a bit silly in his conflation. A sense of humor is helpful for those of us in the grotesque majority of the population. You should try it sometime.

I find those "academics" too discouraged by unfamiliar/taboo "profanity" to find meaning and substance in an art form or culture they don't understand cowardly and unthinking. Did Sir Richard Francis Burton grow flaccid in his translation of the Kama Sutra, Freud in his penetration of the unconscious, or Napoleon Chagnon in his explorations of the "fierce people"? Indeed it seems the more abhorrent the subject the more it deserves examination. The Notorious B.I.G. and his lyrics may seem to a freshman of intellectual pursuits "profane and [of] absolutely no educational value," but to the senior members of the mind they are an indispensable window on our society and culture. Ford suggests not to "let academic faction get in the way of friendship, fun, or human values generally. Be a hustler, but don’t hustle yourself." Perhaps commandment 11 is simply an extension of 4: Don't let academic faction get in the way of true academic pursuits.

I wasn't hatin'. I'm not a hater. I'm just happily retired from the hustle of depart/mental meetings (to be butlerian...) and I'm loving every minute of it.

I only read this agreement once, because I only applied for an NSF grant once. As soon as I read the agreement, I decided not to apply for another grant ever again, because I couldn't agree to follow all of the requirements honestly.

As far as I recall, you've agreed not only to inform on your drug-taking employees and colleagues, providing their SSNs to the feds, but also to actively propagandize FOR the War on Drugs.

It's just possible that this Biggie crack commandment BS could invalidate your federal grant, because this is NOT supporting the War on Drugs.

When you sign the agreement, you also agree that if you are found in violation of the agreement, you will give back the entire amount of your grant, and pay a $25,000 fine on top of that.

I think you're also prohibited from receiving any federal funding in the future.

So everyone covered by a federal grant -- go back and read the fine print in your Drug Free Workplace agreement.

It's possible that this idiotic gangster rap posing could actually put you in violation of your agreement.

I haven't heard of anyone yet who's been penalized for violating the terms of the agreement. But there's always a first time.