Arrogance

Arrogance is perceived as a negative quality because it is associated with

A lack of courtesy to others.
The possibility that arrogance is a cover for insecurities.
A lack of self-awareness. I could be arrogant because I have a PhD, but everyone I work with does too!
Narcissism. Excessive self-involvement.
A lack of intellectual humility. An arrogant person cannot recognize that s/he may be wrong.

Yet some quality resembling arrogance is also necessary for the following reasons:

Confidence. You have to project a sense of confidence, that you know what you are talking about. Making apologies for oneself or being too self-deprecating can backfire. I remember dumbshit students taking my profession of ignorance about something at face value. I've seen people apologize first, then give a bad presentation. When you say, "I don't have these ideas very well developed yet," and you really don't, then people will be sitting there thinking, "You are right, you don't."
Honesty about one's capabilities and accomplishments. Look at your cv as though it belonged to somebody else. If you are impressed by what you see, then you should be impressed with yourself.
Ambition. It is hard to be ambitious if you are too afraid of being arrogant.

Also, you have to distrust the motives of people who call you arrogant. Are they jealous? Are they trying to hold you back or put you down? When I published in Insula as an Assistant Professor, a senior colleague, instead of congratulating me and encouraging me to take legitimate pride, made a snarky remark about my "swelled head."

So narcissism and rudeness, bad. Ambition, legitimate pride in real accomplishments, good. False humility and apologetic discourse, bad. Intellectual humility about being wrong, good.

K State

If you want to look at job placement from another angle, you could look at the Spanish department of Kansas State. They have an excellent department with several people I know, and four of their faculty members got their doctorate at the institution where I teach, the University of Kansas. Others come from Purdue, Arizona State, and the University of Texas at Austin. At a school like this, with a different character from KU, there is a stronger regional character, with fewer PhDs from California or the East Coast. If your goal was to teach in K State, your best bet would be to get a PhD a few hundred miles away, at KU, not at Harvard or Yale, Berkeley or Stanford.

A great post on

time management.

Time management is not simply about being more productive; it is about deciding in advance how to make the most of our most valuable resource: time. When I plan my week, I include time to take long walks, to exercise, to have lunch with my husband, to pick up my children early from school, and to prepare home-cooked meals for myself and my family. I am convinced that, without time management, I would not find the time to do things that I think are important for my emotional and physical health.

A Research Plan for Summer

If you are an academic, then you will be looking forward to the summer. Either your semester or quarter has just ended, or it will end fairly soon. The paradox of the summer is that it is an opportunity for more research and writing, but also a time when mental exhaustion calls for some relief in the form of a vacation. You want to make progress on your research, especially if it is difficult to do so during a normal semester, but the more harried you are teaching, the more you need a break. Here are some points to be kept in mind:

(1) You need to make the transition from structured time, built around classes and meeting, and unstructured time with its own set of problems. Unstructured summer time needs to be just as structured as time spent between classes.

(2) You need to travel or spend at least some time away from where you normally are, whether for research or vacation. The mental distance of being somewhere else is invaluable.

(3) You need to take some actual vacation time, even if it is only a week or so. Preferably some right after classes are out, and some more right before classes resume in the Fall. I like to shut off the computer during a vacation, only checking email once a day.

(4) Work on the scholarly base, not just on what you have to write. Read some novels in Italian or Portuguese if those aren't your main languages. Good ideas come from lateral connections outside one's own area of expertise. Work on the happiness base too, while you're at it.

(5) If you are graduate student or untenured, make substantial progress on your research. Write one complete article or chapter from start to finish, or a major revision of a dissertation.

(6) Whatever you decide to do, make a written plan at the beginning of the summer, including not only work but also play and non-work obligations. Having a more structured plan actually gives you more freedom and autonomy than just waking up each day and deciding what you will do.

My plans include being in a dissertation defense in July for another university (Santiago de Compostela), driving my daughter to North Carolina for a music camp, maybe working on the book version of SMT, getting my consulting business going, and writing at least one chapter of the book.

Breakthrough

Last night the thesis of a chapter occurred to me all at once. I had the two parts of it already, separately, but somehow I had not put these thoughts together. It was one of those "aha" moments. I realized that this thesis, the main idea of this chapter, is also the main idea of the book itself, or at least a version of it.

Cultural Literacy (iii)

I'm thinking of teaching a course in cultural literacy for the University Scholars Program outside my department (if they'll have me.). I have to think quickly about what I want to do. I think this would a natural place to develop my earlier ideas about what anybody ought to know.

Feel free to give me your suggestions. So far all I have is the phrase "cultural literacy" and the idea of working with Bourdieu.

Scholarly Self-Fashioning

My image of myself, of what I am doing as a scholar, has shifted gradually over the years. I once saw myself as the hot-shot, hyper-theoretical Young Turk. Now I am more the old-fogey, old-school Comparative Literature professor. Between these two phases, I saw myself as the person with the deepest possible insight into poetry, aspiring to be the greatest possible reader. Sometimes I've wanted to see myself as the consummate specialist in my particular subfield. Other identities I've tried on include the "poet-critic" and the high-modernist.

I mention these overlapping or partially contradictory identities because it might be strategic to define oneself in a particular way, but it is also helpful to question one's own identity from time to time. What benefit do we get from thinking of ourselves in a category like those I've described? If you call yourself a professor-activist, a cultural critic, or an interdisciplinary scholar, what does that mean for you?

(I borrow the word "self-fashioning" from Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning.)