Kate Maltby

Maltby: Not a joking matter

The Shrew's Tale

“Did you know that nine out of 10 people enjoy gang rape?” That’s what one of my male friends gleefully told me over dinner last night. It’s an old joke — too old to score many shock points — because I’ve heard it five times this semester. At least.

Maltby: You (should admit me) Tube

Taming of the Shrew

By Kate Maltby

Tufts, Tufts, Tufts. I’ve always been fond of you. Perhaps it’s the cute little name — a tart monosyllable fading away into a soft fricative, leaving an image of uneven hair implants on balding comedians, or patches of grass on a sparse lawn. Perhaps it’s the University’s free digital library, the Perseus Project, which explains every word of almost every classical text. I always judge an entire university by the first person I’ve met. (The first Princetonian I met was an eating club officer, a cappella queen and double legacy, so my system seems fine.) The first Tufts student I encountered was a sweet-faced freshman, backpacking in Paris one summer, on his first trip outside the United States. “Just coming here, to Paris, has made me realize how much I take for granted in America”, he gushed. “I just thought, today, for the first time — somewhere like Africa, just having a plastic bottle to carry your water in, would be a really big, big exciting thing, but when I finish a Polar Spring bottle I just toss it away. I’d never thought about Africa before.”

Maltby: An unequal tenure

The Shrew's Tale

By Kate Maltby

Earlier this week, Timothy Ellison ’10 masterfully articulated an anxiety that haunts young academics, and even ambitious undergraduates: the horror of the tenure process (“A trying time for tenure,” Feb. 14). Recently I watched as an inebriated first-year grad student delivered an improvised sonnet on the issue, pausing between segments to blow smoke rings from a cigar. The Byronic vision which haunted him, he claimed, was the elusive figure of tenure review, a temptress who could lead onto to the idyllic ivory tower, but in an instant damn him, with one spot from the pen of the Machiavellian faculty chair. Hyperbolic students aside, tenure causes anxiety even to the most rational of academic minds, of all genders and races, and from New Haven to Palo Alto. Ellison did not mention, however, that the tenure process at Harvard and Yale differs from their Ivy peers in one crucial regard, a difference that systematically discriminates against women.

Maltby: Prisoners and guards

By Kate Maltby

Last week, after trawling through depositions about dangers posed by Lizardfolk, phantom funghi and godforsaken creatures that go by the name worgs, the Wisconsin Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ban on Dungeons and Dragons in Wisconsin jails. Yes, Dungeons and Dragons.

Maltby: Yale’s choice, not ours

By Kate Maltby

After a generation of supposed student apathy, many will breathe a sigh of relief to see Yale students returning to their traditional, earnest roots.

Maltby: Facebook statuses don’t win elections

By Kate Maltby

With the election over, we can get back to the important things in life again. Remember Facebook? There’s a reason I make Facebook my procrastination destination of choice.

Maltby: Forced diversity a disservice

By Kate Maltby

I burst into laughter when I sat down at dinner last Monday and, for once, it wasn’t just because I’d caught sight of the table tents. Rather, I was enjoying the absurdity of the idea that Helen Keller had been appointed dean of Yale College in a move to demonstrate the University’s commitment to women and to the deaf-blind, as the News wrote in its annual joke issue.