I’m Jason Michael Wester. This is my personal web space where I write about the things I enjoy the most. There’s something like fifty Jason Westers living in the U.S., but I’m the only one who has secured jasonwester.com, obviously.
Piled High and Deep, the blog’s title, is a reference to an old joke one will sometimes hear bandied about, that a Ph.D. stands for piled high and deep (with bullshit). Not only is that mostly true, but it encapsulates the American distrust of intellectuals, something intellectuals have earned. Americans ought to distrust them more, not less. I have a Ph.D. in English, in the sub-field of composition studies, which is a completely bullshit domain. Completely, and I regret having spent so much of my life having pursued it. This is my dissertation. Why did I do it, then? Because in my late teens and early twenties I was an idealist who pursued his passions without a single thought about how he would earn a living. Getting a college education was good enough. Then, married, child on the way, the need to earn a secure living became very real, and one can’t advance in academia without the Piled High and Deep behind his name, so I continued down the road I was on. Path of least resistance.
The training I received was about the close-reading of texts and learning to compose with academic jargon. My natural tendency to be a disagreeable son-of-a-bitch, a contrarian, enabled me to find copious absurdities lurking everywhere in the discipline’s scholarship. If you don’t know, composition studies theorizes the blue-collar domain of teaching freshman composition, one of those core courses all college students must take. If there’s one thing that professors truly hate, it’s students. These teachers-turned-theorists sought to elevate composition from the plebian basement of merely teaching undergraduates so that they could publish theoretical papers and thereby ameliorate their academic standing and gain coveted tenured positions like their colleagues in Victorian literature. Absolutely nothing from this body of scholarship, and I mean not one single thing, is useful to anyone outside of that context. No writer has ever consulted the scholarship from composition studies to learn anything at all about writing. It’s comical, if you think about it. Writing is something one does, you see, just like working on engines is something one does. If you study this body of scholarship as I have done, you will find that composition studies gets ideologically captured by every single educational fad that emerges, and continues to emerge, from the educational theory mills. This is the clearest indicator that it isn’t a legitimate discipline. It doesn’t have any bona fides that compose an idelogocal core, not even truth-seeking as in the hard sciences. The hard sciences resist capture because of that, because at the end of the day their work needs to be able to be replicated. Composition just follows fads.
In a course I taught a few years ago called Introduction to Composition Studies, I traced all of these captures along with my students, what are often called “turns”, as in, the process turn, the Marxist turn, the feminist turn, and when I had brought my students up to the very present moment, I indeed found another pretty significant turn, but it hadn’t yet been named, so I dubbed it the activist turn in lieu of the woke turn, that composition studies had been completely captured by the wokism. The only papers that have been published in this field since about 2016 have been woke, and often these papers make arguments like writing teachers ought not make their students write (I’m not joking), and writing teachers ought let students grade their own papers (again, not joking). I could no longer in good faith teach any of that bullshit, so it was time for me to make my exit, and after about six or seven years of plotting my escape, I managed to leave academia in 2021.
Words delight me. Food delights me. Movies delight me. I write about Ole Miss athletics because I like the lore. When I write about technology it is usually to record a fix I’ve found. I’m an avid user of Linux, and this site is based on Jekyll. Stoicism is the best collection of tools I’ve yet discovered for aiding my endeavor to get through life, and I write about it from time to time. If you’ve made it this far, let me extend my welcome to you, dear reader. You’re a rare bird, indeed.
Jason