Following the national trend, Fred’s University is eliminating its Philosophy Department. Annoying suggestions for what philosophers can do with their now almost useless degrees are not appreciated by the department.
No, they do not want to recycle the heavy cotton paper of their Ph.D. certificates into child craft projects. No, they don’t want to donate their old papers to be shredded and turned into house insulation. Nor do they want to refashion their colorful cloth graduation hoods and tassels into scarves and hair wraps to sell on Etsy.
Professors in the former Philosophy Department were particularly outraged when the Dean decided to use their Socrates Lecture Hall for a motivational speaker who is coming to campus to promote his bestselling Inspirational Housework book.
The Dean replied to the angry philosophers in a lengthy blog post urging them to review the literature and see what an excellent academic opportunity there is in the growing field of Motivational Housework Coaching.
In his post on the Fred’s University site, the Dean pointed out that:
Until recently, housework has not been a fertile ground for motivational speakers. Racism and sexism are the underlying reasons for this gap. That’s because almost all housework is done by people of low status in society.
Paid housework is overwhelmingly performed by women of color, and immigrants. Even in Western countries, housework is sometimes performed by enslaved or unfree people.
Check your privilege, philosophers!
As for unpaid housework, it is mostly performed by women. The likes of the wives of senior faculty who helped put their husbands through grad school back in the bad old days.
Housework literature directed at women is usually designed to make women feel bad about their dirty homes to guilt them into buying stuff (soap, vacuums, more stuff). Both editors and advertisers have often used a patriarchal guilt trip to sell their program. The emotional crippling of women by consumer cleaning society has directly benefited old white men in dying fields who have leveraged their generational power to manipulate everyone into serving them.
Check your complicity, Old White Males who want to keep lecturing everyone while other people clean up!
Where housework overlaps with a lucrative advertising category like home decor, there is a lot more content generated. Marie Kondo makes a spiritual practice of arranging your house and keeping it tidy and beautiful. The likes of Martha Stewart showcase the aspirational and artistic aspects of housekeeping for the upwardly mobile middle-class shopper. Both advocate for curatorial consumerism and elevate certain household tasks.
But what about a motivational framework for cleaning the toilet? Degreasing the oven? Where is the poetry of washing out the Diaper Genie or removing mold from the vegetable drawer?
The Dean asks the philosophers to contemplate this question.
Cleaning TikTok takes up some of this space with inspirational cleaning and therapeutic cleaning as popular subjects. There is plenty of research to show that a cluttered space can impact mental health, and evidence for the power of ordering home environments to promote mental health.
Aren’t these the deep human questions we should be contemplating?
A popular TikTok meme shows a space being cleaned as the background to a personal narrative of discovery or an educational exposition.
Have the philosophers watched any of these videos, the Dean wants to know. They are surprisingly good.
If only the philosophy professors had seen the connection between their field and self-care, perhaps their profession would not be dying.
The former professors declined to go on TikTok, which they persistently spelled Tick Tock. Case in point says the Dean, of how philosophy has become cloistered and stodgy and shows again why it was the right thing to get rid of the department!
While the displaced professors refused to attend the event in their former lecture hall, the motivational speaker made an example of the abandoned desk of the former Philosophy Chair.
Over the course of his talk, the speaker scraped away decades of gum students had placed under the front edge of the desk. He then donned a hazmat hood and used bleach and a sandblaster to clean a drawer where a mouse had died in a shocking puddle of guts.
While the audience watched, he sorted years of the professor’s mouse-urine-soaked periodicals into two piles. The pile that sparked existential despair was relegated to a recycling bin which quickly filled up with discontinued journals and conference papers. The second pile was items that sparked economic interest. This pile included several rare vintage issues of Playboy Magazine which a quick internet search showed were worth money on eBay. The speaker took those home with him.
As a demonstration of the tedium of mundane tasks, the speaker then waited on hold with the Buildings Department for 45 minutes in an attempt to reach someone to come pick up the desk and send it to storage. As the audience listened to the hold tone, the speaker blasted Rihanna’s “Work” on the sound system and encouraged everyone to dance.
One of the motivational speaker’s most popular ideas is that isolating tasks would be less demoralizing if we collectivized them.
A professor who passed the hall was annoyed by the sound level. When a student gave him a link to the song (1.4 billion views) he said he didn’t see how it was relevant.
It turns out the motivational speaker was really disappointed not to meet the Chair of the former department, as he is an amateur philosopher himself. “Young people are really into this Meaning of Life stuff,” the motivator told the student newspaper. “In a few years, those philosophy books are going to be worth something.”
The Buildings Department crew never came for the desk, but the motivational speaker hired one of the unemployed professors via Taskrabbit to take it to the curb where another professor collected it as a souvenir of 35 years of service to philosophy. He was really pleased by how clean the desk was and noticed that the motivational speaker had also managed to remove a stain in the carpet of the foyer where a student had been stabbed in the 1980’s.
A student who happened by when the retired prof was carting away the desk noticed he was humming Rihanna.
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**Starred Comments**
MyLitReview
There is technical literature for specific tasks such as cleaning ceiling fan blades, and sweeping behind fridges, especially where it can be commodified in the sales of Magic Erasers, Swifters and chemical wipes. I sincerely doubt that the Dean, a man who earns over $200K and whose wife runs his household, has ever seen those videos.
But the spirituality and beauty that Kondo and Stewart bring to their crafts are not seen in the grunt work literature or Youtube encyclopedia of How To. It would be a worthwhile addition.
Unfortunately, the talk at our beloved Socrates Lecture Hall by a shameless huckster who goes to the same country club as the Dean did nothing to elevate the conversation.
And FYI there is a much easier hack for removing gum on desks if you want to search it on Tick Tock. Ooops! TikTok!
UnemployedProf
We don’t want to go on TikTok because that’s our job now. Our only source of income is TikToks that repurpose our old lectures to dance music. There is no fun in it anymore.
AngryPhilisopher#798
Check YOUR privilege, Dean. You have an assistant writing your posts while a team of workers scours your office suite. Look closely and you’ll see some of them are grad students you promised a bright future when you took their hefty tuition.
The rest of those cleaners who you don’t notice work three jobs, supporting families back in their home country and don’t have time for your inspirational content. Thanks so much for cutting their benefits in your recent budget revision.
Please don’t talk down to us. Our moral superiority is all we have left.
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