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campusreview.com.au
Say what?
You would believe
Shit Academics Say.
By Loren Smith
I
s there a funnier university-related Twitter
account than Shit Academics Say?
Sarcasm even seeps into its bio
disclaimer:
Retweets are not endorsements.
They are performative engagement
markers that intentionally confound
direct alignment with ironic promotion,
ambivalent reflection, or personal
brand management so as to reveal
all or nothing of one’s authentic
perception depending on the observer.
— Shit Academics Say (@AcademicsSay)
6 Apr 2018
Creator Nathan C Hall says he initiated
the account, in September 2013, as a
social experiment. He noticed other parody
accounts were hugely popular, so he
presumed that an academic-themed one
would be too.
An associate professor in educational,
social and health psychology at McGill
24
University in Montreal, he has “never
been completely comfortable with the
peculiarities, predilections or pretentions of
our profession”, as expressed in an op-ed.
He wanted reassurance that he wasn’t
alone in finding some of academia’s oddities,
well, weird and often hard to fathom. The
account served as a lighthearted outlet for
that discomfort.
“What I quickly learned from Twitter was
that my personal academic experiences
were not at all unique, and more importantly,
that it could be worse,” he wrote.
To date, @AcademicsSay has 304,000
followers.
If you can’t say anything nice¹
_____
¹Say it in a footnote.
— Shit Academics Say (@AcademicsSay)
11 Jan 2019
Jokes aside, Shit Academics Say rapidly
grew into more than a sounding board for
academics’ frustrations – it became a forum
for their requests.
“To my surprise, followers who I had
assumed were there just for the jokes
seemed to very much appreciate referrals
to informative hashtags, resource
accounts, or professional-development
blogs (for example, #ScholarSunday,
#GetYourManuscriptOut and @SUWTues),
with single tweets crashing websites and
prompting unsolicited social network
analyses or blog analytics,” Hall explained.
Additionally, he realised Twitter could be
leveraged for professional networking and
even as a research data source.
Interested in the psychosocial elements
of achievement, Hall used the account
to recruit nearly 7000 participants from 60
countries for studies on procrastination,
impostor syndrome, work-life balance
and burnout.
“Perhaps the most important part of this
experience for me has been the sobering
realisation of how deeply and widely these
psychological challenges resonate with
other academics and that I am in a unique
position do something about it,” he reflected.
Hall was unavailable to provide comment
for this piece. Perhaps, between juggling
Twitter, his job as a tenured professor and
his family, he simply didn’t have time.
Yet it is clear that even in the past few
years, in keeping with this turbulent
era, his account has changed. Now, he
intersperses his usual, witty posts with
retweets of serious articles, like one on
advice for faculty on career mentorship
for grad students, and another on sexual
harassment in the sciences.
However, Hall maintains a sense of glee
about it: “It’s hard to describe the giddy
grade-school excitement of jumping into a
rapid-fire fray of remarkably creative, clever
and brutally honest tweets from academics
around the world —
a uniquely engaging
and not-often-enough experience unlike
anything else in academia.”
Yes, Twitter can be toxic, and it can
encourage, as Hall claims, oversharing and
groupthink, yet it can clearly be galvanising
too. Andy Tattersall, a social media
consultant and researcher at the University
of Sheffield, put the utility of Shit Academics
Say and its ilk in his own words: “Despite the
silliness of [such] accounts, they do often
discuss issues in the academic community
rarely touched on so publicly ... When [they
are] done well, [they] can be profound,
hilarious and even add quality to the
academic conversation.” ■
Do you like academic parody Twitter
accounts? We’d love to hear from
you about which ones you follow and
what you like about them. Write to us:
loren.smith@apned.com.au