At first I was just going to write about the still-online but no-longer-updating 100 Reasons NOT to go to Graduate School(last post: August, 2018), but there are so many others from the glory years of blogging (2004-2020).
Confession of a College Professor (2013-2020)
This was a blog of musings by a conservative college professor ("Professor Doom") who taught Mathematics and was stuck doing a lot of remedial classes. He got cancer and died of it sometime in 2019 or 2020, and a friend uploaded the final posts. Prof Doom gave us such bangers as "Why Remedial Students Should Leave College" and "New Campus Commissar: Departmental Academic Diversity Officer" and a series on college myths. This is the same Professor Doom that publishedWhy Johnny Can't Read, Write, or Do 'Rithmetic Even With a College Degree in 2014. I haven't read the book, but any fan of Charles Sykes' ProfScam (1988) might nod in agreement.
Inside Boston University (2013-2020)
I've mentioned Ray Carney on this blog before, but this is is his possibly-defunct blog about working at Boston University, the private college in the town of the same name in Massachusetts. Pretty much Carney (being a decent film theorist and film historian) is butting heads with the grubby masters of the Film & Video Department at BU, who are conning their young charges into seeing themselves as the next Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese, while Carney is a skeptic concerning the artistic merits of film because it is such a young art form, and one that is shot through with market demands. Also the Film Department is passing off lower-level courses as graduate level ones to out-of-town students, a claim that deserves investigation from whomever accredits colleges on the East Coast.
The Rate Your Students (2005-2010) and College Misery (2010-2016) saga
Rate Your Studentsbegan as a Bush II-era (pre-crash) mockery of the schlocky Rate My Professors website (founded 1999) with anonymous professors ranting about how crappy their students were academically (all the standard BS of grade grubbing, begging for extra credit, other undergrad social diseases the non-Golden Children probably remember if they did time in an American U.) Over time they started ripping the shit buildings, shit administrations, and general second-handedness of life in most non-Ivy schools.
By 2010, Rate Your Students petered out, and a new blog run by some readers popped up the same year. College Misery picked up the slack, printing anonymized emails about the crap students, the crap buildings, the nincompoop leadership, etc. During 2014 the blog went through some backroom drama, and reader Beaker Ben ran the Academic Water Cooler (which you can only see on archive.org, unfortunately) for that 11 month period. I still don't know why College Misery closed down, and really the best of it should be published as a book. Also, Yaro IS the Christ.
Bonus: Thomas Frank Savagely Rip the American University
In the pages of The Baffler magazine back in 2013, founding editor Thomas Frank decided to look at US colleges and things were pretty ugly. "Academy Fight Song" rips all of it, even the textbook scam:
An educational publisher wrote to me a few months back; they wanted to reprint an essay of mine that they had seen on the Internet, where it is available for free. The textbook in which they wanted to include it, they said, would be “inexpensively priced,” and authors were therefore being asked to keep their reprint fees to a minimum. The low, low price that students were to pay for this textbook: $75.95. “Approximately.”
I was astounded, but it took just a few minutes of research to realize that $76 was, in fact, altruistic by the standards of this industry. Paying $250 for a textbook is more like it nowadays; according to one economist, textbook prices have increased 812 percent over the past thirty-five years, outstripping not only inflation (by a mile) but every other commodity—home prices, health care—that we usually consider to be spiraling out of control.
The explanation is simple. The textbook publishers use every trick known to the marketing mind to obsolete their products year after year, thus closing off the possibility of second-hand sales. What’s more, textbook publishing is a highly concentrated industry—an oligopoly—which means they can drive prices pretty much as high as they feel like driving them. Meanwhile, the professors who assign the textbooks and who might do something about the problem don’t have to pay for them.
In the Spring of 2014, Frank talked to Radio Open Source, and the 18-minute interview is fascinating for all the outsiders who might read these words. For the insiders, those who have spent time in the American University in the last 25 years, cringe and have 'Nam flashbacks.
The reader looks at the post title and asks themselves "Who is Mike Huben?" Huben was the founder/editor of Critiques of Libertarianism, a website that had been around since the mid-1990s. The original version of the website was a simple all-text-and-hyperlinks affair, as were most sites in the Netscape Navigator era of the Internet; a few years ago Huben switched over to a Wiki-style site at another address....and then it all imploded. The site went blank a few years ago, and then went down. The original (now badly link-rotted) also vanished, though you can get to it via archive.org.
So why care about Huben? The guy knows his stuff; he was arguing with 'tarians and O-ists (what they were calling Libertarians and Objectivists in the '90s) on Usenet newsgroups back when The Internet was brand-new. He had actually written one of the first FAQs on the subject ("A Non-Libertarian FAQ", link here.) My understanding is that Mike Huben moved to Costa Rica (?) within the last decade and started a new life, which I think meant that he gave up doing math for a paycheck, and the English-language Internet stopped being so damn interesting.
As long as you are here, please check out Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature, which started off as a book of the same title by Greg S. Nyquist in 2001. I know I first found the blog via Huben's website, which I forgot to mention was a giant collection of links on top of being a series of critiques of Libertarian ideas; they had an entire section on Rand and Objectivism (her take on Libertarianism). It was here I first read the name "Murray Rothbard" in conjunction with his satirical play "Mozart Was a Red", which took pot-shots at Ayn Rand's group of fan-collaborators, "The Collective" which he was a part of for a period, alongside Allan "The Undertaker" Greenspan. In fact, the Rand stuff was the most interesting part of Critiques of Libertarianism; that woman was an utter nut. The ARCHN blog hammers that home if you read the posts from 2006 to 2014. Pass it along to friends who have fallen into the Rand rabbit-hole. And if anybody who reads this knows Mike Huben, please pass along that I would love to interview him on the subject, because of all the overlap with the early years of Wikipedia (he might have argued with Wales and Sanger in ancient times.)
Encyclopedia Dramatica has the basics on Snowolf; he's an Italian guy in Trieste who is a domain squatter, last we heard. An example of his dickery in English:
....In December 2014, three Wikipediocracy users set up a "#Wikipediocracy" channel on Freenode. They
were discussing unrelated items when showed up and destroyed the channel.
Capture:
• metasonix (misspelling intentional)
• Stierlitz I blame weird keyboard angles.
• metasonix Two-way radio ceased to be "magic" by the 1970s, really.
• comets (~xchat@wikimedia/Cometstyles) has joined
• Stierlitz Transistors made it too commonplace.
• Stierlitz Hello, comets.
• QueenOfFrance (~snowolf@wikimedia/Snowolf) has joined
• QueenOfFrance (~snowolf@wikimedia/Snowolf) has left ("We are leaving you peasants.")
• metasonix Ha ha, Wikipedians are showing up.....
• Snowolf (~quassel@wikimedia/Snowolf) has joined
• metasonix "Queenoffrance" is Maurizio "Snowolf" Lussetti.....
• ChanServ gives channel operator status to Snowolf
• metasonix Welcome back, Maurizio. I'm curious why you spent so much time trying to squat
domain names.
• Snowolf sets ban on *!~metasonix@*.sonic.net
• Snowolf has kicked metasonix from #wikipediocracy (Kindergarten is elsewhere!)
• Snowolf removes channel operator status from Snowolf
• ChanServ (ChanServ@services.) has joined
• services. gives channel operator status to ChanServ
• Stierlitz The hell?
• Stierlitz What is your deal, Snowolf?
• Snowolf hmm?
• comets o/
• comets ur chan snowy?:P
• Stierlitz He gave Metasonix the boot for no reason.
• Snowolf Actually, I've removed him for attempting to out me:)
And now to annoy the readers more, here is what these goobers were doing on what must have been Thanksgiving in 2009.
Session Start: Thu Nov 26 17:14:30 2009
Session Ident: #Wikipedia
[17:14] * Now talking in #Wikipedia
[17:14] * Topic is 'Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia | Status: Up | No public logging | Specific Wikipedias: #wikipedia-<lang> | Guidelines: http://bit.ly/OiAr | For channel operator assistance, join #wikimedia-ops or, in emergencies, type !op followed by your request'
[17:14] * Quagmire|GONE is now known as Quagmire
[17:14] * GrooveDog (n=GrooveDo@wikimedia/GrooveDog) has left #wikipedia
[17:15] * sj|| (n=sj@wikipedia/sj) has joined #wikipedia
[17:15] <eptalon> Fleetflame: I think I do.
[17:16] <Fleetflame> eptalon: never mind, thanks anyway
[17:17] <eptalon> Fleetflame: what would you need that for?
[17:17] <Fleetflame> eptalon: a report
[17:17] <eptalon> Fleetflame: you said you already got the pdf?
[17:57] <Schroeder> do I want to write my paper for Islamic History that's due Wednesday, or play NetHack and listen to Wolfmother and Shostakovich?
[17:57] <PeterSymonds> Fleetflame, yeah yeah. ;p
[17:58] <Fleetflame> :D
[17:58] <ceranthor> Fleetflame, have you told 'em yet?
[17:58] <ceranthor> On .help?
[17:58] <Fleetflame> huh?
[17:58] <ceranthor> nvm
[17:58] * mavhk is now known as mavhc
[17:58] <ceranthor> Wrong person I guess.
[17:58] * Ose (n=ose@wikia/Ose) Quit ("Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach a person to use the Internet and they won’t bother you for weeks")
[18:01] * Ajraddatz (n=Ajr@199.126.181.169) has joined #Wikipedia
[18:02] <Schroeder> hey, is anyone interested in a chess-by-email group?
[18:04] * dungodung is now known as dungodung|sleep
[18:06] <Fleetflame> Schroeder: tried it, doesn't work
[18:59] <BarkingFish> derenrich, When palm kernel oil is cold, it hardens, hence peanut butter being quite thick
[19:00] * maimai (n=Snail@p8194-ipad303hodogaya.kanagawa.ocn.ne.jp) has joined #wikipedia
[19:00] <derenrich> BarkingFish: what else could I add then?
[19:00] <derenrich> i want more dimension
[19:00] <derenrich> in my soup
[19:00] <BarkingFish> But when it's heated, it loses it's bonding properties, liquifies and you wind up with a mess of peanuts at the bottom, and PKO floating on top
[19:33] * engla_ (n=ulrik@90-229-231-23-no153.tbcn.telia.com) has joined #wikipedia
[19:33] Clones detected from 90-229-231-23-no153.tbcn.telia.com:8 engla engla_
Session Start: Thu Nov 26 22:30:12 2009
Session Ident: #Wikipedia
[22:30] * Now talking in #Wikipedia
[22:30] * Topic is 'Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia | Status: Up | No public logging | Specific Wikipedias: #wikipedia-<lang> | Guidelines: http://bit.ly/OiAr | For channel operator assistance, join #wikimedia-ops or, in emergencies, type !op followed by your request'
[22:30] * Quagmire|GONE is now known as Quagmire
[22:32] <DarkAudit> a bad precedent is about to be set in [[Brian Joseph Stone]]
[22:33] <DarkAudit> CSDs are being declined because the service medals awarded just for showing up are being considered an "assertion of notability"
[22:34] * Triplestop (n=asdfasdf@unaffiliated/idiot123) has left #wikipedia
[22:34] <Sky2042_afk> Checking out the medals, they aren't compellingly asserting notability.
[22:35] <harej> you're all dumbasses
[22:35] * harej (i=484c2f14@wikipedia/MessedRocker) has left #wikipedia
[22:35] <Sky2042_afk> Bye harej.
[22:35] <DarkAudit> That would lead to several hundred thousand articles on service members who do no more than their job, but cannot be considered for CSD
[22:36] <Schroeder> DarkAudit: speedy deletion is vandalism anyway
[22:36] * Sky2042_afk sighs.
[22:36] <Schroeder> anything that exists is a valid and proper subject for an article
[22:36] * dillange1 (n=dillange@94.76.229.70) has joined #wikipedia
[22:36] <Sky2042_afk> Schroeder: No. And no.
[22:36] <Sky2042_afk> DarkAudit: Indeed.
[22:36] <Schroeder> actually, yes and yes
[22:36] * Euphonium (i=desu@cpe-76-183-145-33.tx.res.rr.com) has joined #wikipedia
