Snip!

It being the last day of the month, I checked my bank account and lo and behold, Yeditepe paid me my July salary – pro-rated to take into account the resignation letter I couriered to them last week. So it appears they got the message, and I am now officially outta there. The cord has been cut, as it were. Phew. What a saga that was.

My teaching schedule is gossamer-light this week, and next week (ceteris paribus) I have no students at all. I have been taking advantage of this to get some of my own work done in the Bogaziçi library. And it's been going great. It got me thinking how I did not leave Yeditepe (solely) because of the students' alarming inability to reason; nor, more generally, did I bail on academia because I lost interest in the intellectual life. Quite the opposite: There is a certain kind of work I want to do, a certain stamp I want to leave on the world, and it's intellectual work; but academia was proving to be exactly the wrong environment I needed in which to do it. So I shoved off. Spinoza ground lenses, I can teach the SAT for a while.