Because I’ve successfully stopped reading TMZ, much less Gawker, I missed this whole thing about the writing professor who e-mailed his graduate students to announce that his wife was leaving him to be part of the “collection” of a famous media mogul (also see follow-up here). Every so often a fellow traveler in sociology will say something like, “Wouldn’t it be cool to have a sitcom set in academia?” To which I can only reply, “Yeah, but we flatter ourselves if we think it is going to be based in the social sciences.” I mean, the obvious reason that academic farce novels tend to be centered on English departments is that this is the home turf of people who write novels, and yet I think it’s also true that they honestly have more crazy drama there (after all, remember the article on having sex at conferences by an English prof in the Chronicle, in which sociologists were relegated to the parking lot). At Indiana I remember there was a tenured English prof who, for mysterious and presumably unfortunate reasons, started a second job as a desk clerk at a prominent local hotel. So the parents of grad students would come visit and it’d be, “That guy who checked us in? He’s on my committee.”