Too many of you are doing too little. You gnash teeth over the erosion of tenure but then you never put it to use. Even now, with a virus that doesn’t care what your academic rank is, many of you are just closing your proverbial office doors and tapping out your pet projects. https://twitter.com/nonmodernist/status/1277600739523788801

Every campus, college, program is different. But at Georgia Tech, where Alex and I work, it’s as if we’ve been preparing for this moment of extreme apathy for years, carefully insuring that everyone does and says nothing about anything. Everything is always fine enough. Now this.

It’s as if the professoriate has been diligently exercising its total surrender to apathetic comfort, even when it knows that things ain’t right. The pressure to relent, to keep quiet, not to make waves is so heavy. Coalitions are impossible to build, because nobody cares.

Maybe this is self-indulgent, but I can’t overemphasize the feeling of actual madness that accompanies this circumstance, building slowly over time like a boiling frog. “Am I the crazy one? Is there something wrong with me?”

I talked to a number of faculty colleagues today, here and elsewhere, about their discomfort making waves. Ine pattern of response I got was, “It’s easy for you. You’re Ian.”

But listen: I am just some guy!