Academics Gone Wild...
Smallish wank mostly because I had to put some of this together from context without the benefit screencaps...

College Misery is a (largely) anonymous blog for college professors, university adjuncts, and graduate students to discuss their professional problems, complain about their administrators, colleagues, and most especially students. It is a successor blog to the recently closed blog Rate Your Students which was much more closely moderated and didn't allow comments.

As anyone who’s ever been stuck in a hotel with a couple hundred academics knows, it's the comments that are going to kill you.


A regular poster at both RYS and now CM is kalamazoo_katie, an english professor with what many considered unnatural attachment to some of her students. It was well known that kalamazoo_katie was either a well known academic blogger with quite a following (and quite an ego) Dr. Crazy, or someone playing with her persona. For reasons that shall become clear I'll side with the former.

When the community migrated from the highly-moderated-no-comments Rate Your Students to the academics-will-eat-their-young model at College Misery kalamazoo_katie soon discovered the delete function. She would post entries intended to shir shit up long enough for them to gather a dozen or so comments and than delete the entry and post a follow-up stating that she didn't feel the comments were appropriate and that she was getting better feedback on the subject "in her real blog". She would occasionally post comments on others entries usually never quite left the second wave sisterhood patronizing language that was largely ignored.

This pattern repeated itself several times over the summer until today. Katie posted an entry about the Amazon Kindle sometime in the several hours where I was actually being a scholar instead of wasting my time reading blogs about being a scholar, where there was apparently some discussion of her alternate identity. Strangely enough, Dr. Crazy also recently espoused on her troubles with the Kindle. Exposing the real identity of people in this community is generally frowned upon, but no one else so routinely drops hints about "their other blog" and their "real online identity" quite as much as Katie. She deleted the Kindle entry and repeated her pattern of posting why she had deleted the entry including a fair bit of crying about how evil the community had been to her.

And, I'm not a well known blogger at all. I'm just a professor in the arts in Arizona, occasionally blog about painting, culture, and academics and I have a great job, great colleagues, am well respected under my own identity, and I refuse to be minimized or mocked here anymore.

I suppose the flounce might have been taking more seriously if she'd remembered that she'd advertised herself as an english professor for years and used many of that fields language conventions for years among a community of people who are apt to pick up such things. Still, she felt the need to make her flounce official by writing to the moderator to confirm her flouncing and of course to delete all her previous posts before someone could point out her contradictions.

Bets on how long it takes her to come back?


ETA: Fixed HTML

ETA the 2nd:

From the comments about the deleted kindle post...

Katie has written some mighty goofy shit in RYS and CM, but her post started out with, "I'm not ready to marry my Kindle, but I let it go to second base." And she expects to be taken seriously, for her mind? I glanced at her post this morning, but didn't have time to add a comment that made much sense, that being a challenge with a post like hers: I was thinking along the lines of, "Between the cats and the Kindle, Katie really ought to get out more," or maybe just echo Beaker Ben, "There is no need for us to be this intimately acquainted."