• Three teaching days.
• Five class sessions.
• One session of office hours.
• Two committee meetings.
• One meeting with a program administrator.
• Two lunches with deans.
• One department meeting.
• One program meeting.
• Four job candidate campus visits.
• Thirteen rough drafts of graduate term papers.
• Sixteen final literary interpretation papers.
• Twenty-five final new media projects.
• Sixteen final graduate term papers.
• One senior thesis draft.
• Two final senior theses.

Oh, yes—and:

• Clean the house.
• Pack a semester’s worth of belongings.
• Ship a semester’s worth of belongings.

Other than that, just cooling my heels.

My doctoral institution, that private university in the public service, was at one point not too many years ago ahead of the pack in its recognition of its grad-student union.  That recognition has of course now been withdrawn, and the university’s failure to negotiate with the union at all resulted in a decision by the union to go on strike back in early November.

The university’s administration, and particularly NYU President John Sexton, however, have retaliated against the grad students in a series of heavy-handed ways, including infiltrating the campus’s Blackboard installation in order to find out which faculty members were supporting the strike.  Now Sexton has sent the students an ultimatum:  any students who remain on strike as of Monday will be denied next semester’s assistantship, and any who return to strike next semester will be deprived of a full year’s funding.

A coalition of NYU faculty in support of the union has written a letter asking for the help of the academic community nationwide.  The full text of the letter is below the fold, but let me just note this, here:  Something big is definitely brewing when Andrew Ross and Alan Sokal are standing shoulder-to-shoulder.

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(cross-posted from ElectraPress)

I’m having many behind-the-scenes email conversations with many folks interested in contributing to the future of ElectraPress. These conversations have been fascinating, engaging, helpful, and visionary, but they’ve also been private. I’m hoping that I can move some of these conversations out into the open, such that the folks who are talking to me can also talk to one another.  To that end, I want to urge anyone interested to register for an account, on the blog, as well as on the wiki and the forum (you’ll see links in the blog’s right sidebar). When you register for the blog, you gain the immediate ability to comment on posts by others; I’m very quickly upgrading everyone interested to “author” status, however, after which you’ll be able to create posts of your own.

And please do. I’m hoping to foster ElectraPress as a space in which those interested in the future of scholarly publishing can be active in shaping that future.

Massive muscle spasm, just left of my right shoulderblade, as I was sitting here writing an email message.  Can no longer raise my head.  Have cleared my schedule until 4 this afternoon, so muscle relaxers are imminent.  But infuriating:  today is one of my too-few thinking days, and it kills me to have it so disrupted…