So, now that Hallowe’en is over, you need to start thinking about Christmas. Wondering what to get an academic friend? Check out the facebook app Shite Gifts for Academics, where you’re sure to find something worth giving.

Ok, not really. It’s one of those meant-to-be-funny-but-actually-kind-of-annoying facebook sites where you can “send” something to someone. With a click of a button, you can give a friend one of 212 presents such as “two big male egos in a departmental meeting,” “second wave feminist with an axe to grind” and “non-academic friend who thinks you have summers off, right?”

At this point, you’re rolling your eyes and asking, “This is trite – who cares”? Well, the nice thing about facebook apps is that it’s all about metrics. You can always see how many times someone has sent each gift. And as such, this particular app is an interesting window into the psyche of academics. Since each gift is clearly ironic, it actually functions as a rough-and-ready guide to what it is that academics (ones on facebook, anyway, meaning in the main young-ish academics) dislike the most about their jobs and lives.

So, here we go: the top five gifts on Shite Gifts for Academics (as of November 3):
1) Eighty freshman composition papers (gifted 42,003 times)
2) Sentence in outrageous academese (41,662)
3) Students texting in class (40,944)
4) Boring faculty meeting (31,569)
5) Enthralled class (with an accompanying picture to make it clear that the class is in fact unenthralled) (31,283)

One other entry (overbearing maladjusted colleague) gets over 30,000 “gifts,” and then there’s another couple between 25,000 and 30,000 (“unnecessary Freud reference” and “vengeful student evaluation”), but after that the numbers tail off pretty quickly. That top five really seems to nail what peeves our group of young-ish, facebook-inhabiting academics.

Obviously, one shouldn’t read too much into this, but it’s interesting how much the focus of their peevishness is students and teaching, isn’t it? That can’t be good.