Sarah Osment
@sm_osment
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Works at UChicago. Freelance editor & indexer. Views my own. She/her.
Chicago, IL
Joined September 2015
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Hi all: my fall editorial calendar is booked up but I'm currently taking clients for indexing and developmental editing for winter 2024. I don't yet have a website so I thought I'd do a brief thread with some recent titles I've worked on:
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today i asked my class to come up with a pair of terms that share a denotative meaning but whose connotative meanings differ and one student offered BUTT DIAL and BOOTY CALL anyway that student's the professor now
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I thought I paid off my student loans in Feb 2020 but apparently there was a 2 cent balance. I stopped receiving bills so I thought I was in the clear. Today I received a bill for $38.62, the interest that had accrued on two cents. Cancel student loan debt already ffs.
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incredible that, within mere hours, we witnessed brutal assault by the NYPD on students because of "outside agitators" while the LAPD stood by as they witnessed brutal assault on students by outside agitators
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All 5 New College professors going up for tenure were denied today, despite approval from the college's faculty and previous administration. Every academic should be paying attention to what's happening there, now. Florida is very likely your future.
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today I learned that Edward Said wore a bullet proof vest when he gave talks at The University of Chicago
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what's the value of having tenure if you can't even defend your own peacefully protesting students? how will you look them in the eye when they return to the classroom?
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you think you’ve seen every horror imaginable and then suddenly your tl is full of videos of burned, beheaded babies in Rafah
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no offense but an academic-only social media platform sounds like a fucking nightmare
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how to mourn an entire generation of scholars lost to austerity
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"is there a doctor on this plane" jokes represent academic twitter so succinctly it's almost beautiful: boastful, cringe, deeply unfunny
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nothing but respect to my former colleague Matt Lepinski for resigning from the college as a result of the votes
Today’s New College of Florida board meeting ended with a board member announcing he’s leaving the college:
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I will delete this soon but I cannot tell you how devastating it is to face the possibility of being shut out of the career I’ve devoted myself to for 16 years. I’ve been teaching college courses for 16 years. I’m good at this.
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This afternoon I learned that one of my former students went on Jimmy Fallon last night and mentioned how one of my classes impacted her. Imagine what I could do if I got paid to do teach permanently.
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if I had a tenure track job I would simply stop doling out unsolicited advice about how to get a tenure track job in a historically catastrophic market
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love how every Duke UP book is like Abolish Struggle Resistance and the press is like labor union? never heard of her
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good afternoon to the dog refusing to get out of the fountain at the Louvre
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The year is 2045. I've just finished my shift desalinating water in New Ohio and log on to find an advice thread on how to approach the academic job market. "Love what you do" it begins. This is helpful. A feral dog runs across the alley with something half-alive in its mouth.
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whoa this blew up who knew that others are saddled with debt. anyway abolish student debt and check out my sound cloud
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@molochofficial
@lint_ax
not the most urgent thing but also a good time to ask why I, as an AP exam grader in ~2006, was put up in a blood-stained hotel room in daytona beach while I graded thousands of ap lit exams in a week for like 800 dollars
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matched with a TT prof who's here doing research and he unmatched me after learning that I'm NTT 🤡
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good morning, asking for this much for a first round is unethical
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my advice to incoming grad students and also everyone:
u n i o n i z e
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.
@gabrielwinant
has clearly and powerfully articulated something I've been struggling with for the last two days (shared with permission)
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I’ve seen people say it before here but it bears repeating: requiring minimal materials —cover letter, cv, maybe writing sample—for the first round of TT searches would make an immediate & material difference in the lives of job seekers.
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someone just showed me this update from the academic jobs wiki and I can't stop laughing. truly incredible stuff
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It will never not be insane to me that some professors have tenure while many more live below the poverty line.
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mark my words: a Duke UP book will make this argument within 3 years
This is really silly but I don’t like how anti-fungus The Last of Us is. It feels reactionary to our future body possibilities.
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in honor of the first real snow of the season: David Berman
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may we all have the righteous clarity of this UChicago student
This guy, with absolutely spot on answers. Genuinely surprised this even aired.
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I've said this before in other contexts but: teaching at New College was among the most rigorous & rewarding experiences of my career, & I've taught at a handful of the most elite institutions in the nation. Students & faculty there are serious, & deserve the very best.
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I've watched and taught John Berger's Ways of Seeing approximately 888 times and it's still so charming
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I'm finally starting to feel like the years I spent adjuncting, often in multiple states & at multiple universities, often making less than 30k/yr with a PhD, wasn't time wasted or a source of personal shame but an education in labor politics in higher ed.
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Today I learned that in order to retain library access while between academic appointments, an undergraduate and former student at my former employer has been manually overriding the system every single morning since May 15th. I cannot tell you how moved I am by this gesture.
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there's a man on my street cracking a whip and screaming "i am covid"
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they don’t tell you this when you adopt an animal but you will find yourself singing songs with titles like “who’s the little baby in the ring today?” and “who is the softest boy in the world?” and the answers to those questions will always surprise your animal
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if I were a tenured academic in a world-historically awful job market I would simply not moralize to job seekers under the guise of "free advice"
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we’re on our way home
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Good morning! Did I mention that the writing instructors at the University of Chicago won our union election yesterday, after a year-long, hard-won campaign?
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if someone asked me to sign a letter and my one and only job for which I was compensated handsomely was close reading I would simply read the letter closely before signing
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@beenootandaboot
idk you kayla but you’re angry about the right things and you have my solidarity
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pleased to announce that I will stop tweeting about job stuff forever because I just got a jahbbbbb
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what no historical materialism does to a mfer
As academia became more competitive, high-achiever types flocked to it & outperformed the weirdos who used to populate it; the result is widespread unhappiness, bc academia is more suited to ppl who obsess over Aristotle's theory of sleep than ppl who want to change the world.
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just saw a grown man dump several books by Agamben into my Free Little Library and then run away
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6 weeks into being securely employed after bouncing from year-to-year contracts & with healthcare for the first time in 18 months & I knew this intellectually before now but:
this has been totally intellectually & emotionally transformative & every single person deserves it
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big ups to all the men sending me DMs explaining the difference b/t dialing and calling what would i do without you
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it's NOT a job, you're NOT workers; you are SPECIAL BOYS whose teaching and research HAVE NOTHING TO DO with labor AT ALL
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administration literally laughing in the faces of the faculty whose careers they're about to end
The condescension in the WVU General Counsel’s voice after a faculty member asks a reasonable question about people losing their jobs is so gross.
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get fucked
New College of Florida will be hiring a large cohort of new tenure-track faculty in the following departments. Help me find the best people who are committed to our mission of restoring the classical liberal arts. Drop me recommendations, links, and CVs.
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sorry for being cringe but it is genuinely so fun to watch someone who is good at teaching lead a class
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saw a job advertised in 2016 for a millennial governess: 6 days/week, 12 hrs/day. 100k + benefits + manhattan apt. duties: live-in tutor/nanny/part-time chef/maid/dogwalker & advisor to family ancestry project (???). ivy phd required.
Just learned that the dude in this video who gets sent to fetch ingredient for Sophia Coppola's daughter has a PhD in ancient philosophy
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will probably cut a novel but this is the reading list for my Climate Fiction course, in case anyone's interested
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academia (and academic twitter) would be infinitely better if academics accepted that they are not exceptional
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imagine being this unbothered and happy etc and the next day your picture is on the burbank pet hospital website for dog obesity
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I spent an entire year of my teaching career deprogramming students who'd been seduced by him and OOO, just the absolute fucking worst
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guess whose application was approved
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perhaps the surest sign that I was a graduate student ca 2008 😓
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unfortunately by tweeting "dj ben lerner" I was passed over for a really prestigious academic job making 38k on a one-year non-renewable contract
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epigraphs from Said’s 1979 Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims
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if you’re mad about the Princeton grad worker stipend increase wait till you hear about literally every other facet of academia
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imagine having your heart broken by Picasso & attempting to mend it with help from Lacan
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within the diegetic world of Seinfeld is Seinfeld a good comedian
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my dream for twitter or whatever we call it now is that we stop sharing memes about how accomplished we are, or what counts as "privilege," and start fucking organizing for students who deserve higher ed and the faculty who teach them, because we're next
The Department of World Languages at
#WVU
is recommended for dissolution, eliminating ALL programs, grad and undergrad, and reducing faculty to ZERO.
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I just called my pharmacy asking why the price of an rx was so high and the pharmacist literally said "most people don't ask about it but since you called I can lower the price by half" and then lowered the price by half and this is truly the essence of healthcare in America.
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thinking about when I was teaching at RISD and a student wore overalls every class and on the last day of class she said "do you want to see my pet rat, she's been here the whole time"
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@Nicole_Cliffe
during my first week working at a fancy Italian restaurant, unfamiliar with food discourse and the proper pronunciation of “anise,” I nervously described a dessert to a table as having “just a whif of anise”
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Maisie passed with what the doctors think was leptospirosis. I am completely gutted with grief.
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This is one thing I find missing from the quit lit I've read: the toll that endless application materials takes on one's capacity to think thoughts that are supposed to take years to develop. It's taken me over two years off of that grind to find some semblance of it again.
I was writing cover letters and job application materials for the better part of 9 years and it warped my thinking
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who knew that being in a new city and walking 10 miles a day and seeing art and being outside until the sun sets and going on a nice date and NOT WORKING would make me feel better
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this year brown is giving honorary degrees to nancy pelosi and shaggy hahahahahhahahaha
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all love and solidarity to the brave students at Columbia—faculty, where are you?
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once again I am asking you [Microsoft Word] to make comments on footnotes possible
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As you know, the writing instructors at UChicago are forming a union—88.64% of our unit have signed cards! If you have a connection to UofC or academia in general, please consider signing and circulating this community support petition.
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FB reminded me of my greatest course poster of all time, from 3 years ago
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thousands more students are being radicalized tonight watching this brutality
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I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by austerity
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Ashbery wrote this poem when he was 19 or 20 so most of you should probably pack it in
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😓
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writing academic things when you have no sense of your place in the profession beyond May is a real act of faith, even delusion
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one thing I am learning this term from a very skilled teacher is that you don't always have to underscore/translate a smart student comment—letting the students process it with a few beats of silence does a lot more than one would think
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