"Geez, talk about depressing."
So writes Archidamus, a graduate student in the history department at UVA, who finds my postings too full of "angst" and my side-bar too "dreary." Dreary?! Well, damn. I was going for a different effect altogether: fun, flirty, and feminine, but with a serious side. Maybe I need a new colour scheme?
Though Archidamus admits that he himself has "plenty of complaints about the academy," he wonders "if all this doom-and-gloom is a bit overdone." Placing the issue within a broader historical perspective, he makes an observation that strikes me as entirely correct, then draws a conclusion that strikes me as fundamentally wrong-headed in its refusal to consider present and future contexts and concerns:
"Historically, people have never been able to make much of a living doing the sort of stuff modern academics in the humanities do, which is why one used to have to be independently wealthy to write history or work on poetry or whatever. If this is a real issue for anyone, they should probably just go make a living doing something else."
Anyway, he is right, of course, that this blog is not exactly upbeat in tone. And I shouldn't really give him such a hard time, since he's new to the blogosphere and says he still has misgivings about the whole business of blogging." Welcome, Archidamus. Now hit those books.
Posted by Invisible Adjunct at May 10, 2003 12:18 AMHey, aren't we taught to be critical thinkers? And doesn't "critical thinking," after all, mean hating any and everything we see?!
Posted by: John Lemon at May 10, 2003 04:55 AMYeah, critical thinking is usually reduced to that by students (I was one).
At a little prestigious oasis of books and bards, I figured out fast that critical thinking usually meant being able to take apart arguments that disagreed with one's fundamental stances towards life and folks around you (your preconceptions). I never saw a whole lot of self-criticism (though I witnessed some pretty good verbal fireworks, in addition to the sorry drumbeat of intelligently phrased dogma).
Ya gotta be able to synthesis and build, in addition to analyzing (which is why having to make something work in a real engineering project can be so instructive to a snarky post-lit-degree punk such as myself).
There are worlds beyond the stereotype of critical thinking that you can go to. But you can't come back with any trinkets to sell (usually).
Blah blah blah... so yeah, Doom and Gloom. Dammit, bring 'em! Tell the truth about the knowledge factory, and the lip service we pay to "valuing teachers," when in the press and on the political bully-pulpit they're being hacked to pieces without regard to decency at every turn, and being blamed for every failure of the Nintendo Generation to comprehend a goddamn good read!
Mind you, I'm not in academia (or the other kind of institution, ;)). But call a spade a spade. Use a big word and nine-tenths of the world thinks you're fucking Lex Luthor, Lexicondevil, or some kind of warpmeister from a "Hunter" rerun. Bite me! But don't offer me "a course to teach on the side" "with 30 students" that when you turn your back blossoms into 45 like a cat someone gave you, telling you it was male. I'm not in academia, and one of the few things I'm sure of is why.
I don't see what's so doomy and gloomy about this plagiarism stuff, though. I think it's kind of cool. It's sort of a carp, but it can be pretty funny. Maybe I wouldn't take it over a Gilligan's Island rerun, but I am enjoying it richly for the moment.
Then again, this is by contrast to my dreams last night (worst in ten years, bah), and news reminder of a quotation from Watchmen--something the Comedian says about the World Situation.
Hell, I'm reading All the President's Men for pleasure now.
Have a fun weekend folks!
Zoot Organizing Kit
backup shortstop, ufobreakfast.com
To Archidamus:
I reserve a special loathing for historians who use one evil to justify another and call it "a matter of perspective." How about I beat the crap out of you and say, "Stop whining, be grateful. At least I didn't kill you!"
Go Invisible Adjunct!
Posted by: Thomas Hart Benton at May 10, 2003 11:36 AMWorking with engineers saved me from the intellectual torpor of "critical thinking." There is no better tonic for self-important cynicism than having to get something done at cost and on time. That and my brief hands-on sojourn into demolition. There are more than a few self-described Marxists whose engagement with materiality would be improved by an afternoon learning how to break up rebar with a jack-hammer.
Posted by: Ghost of a flea at May 10, 2003 11:39 AMNo violence please, Mr. Benton! I've already declared this blog a fusillade-free zone. Of course, there are links to a couple of your essays on my sidebar, which is part of what makes it so "dreary." Have you considered a new colour scheme? perhaps something in a light floral?
There are of course many ways in which history can be used and abused.
Posted by: Invisible Adjunct at May 10, 2003 03:48 PMMr. Benton writes:
I reserve a special loathing for historians who use one evil to justify another and call it "a matter of perspective." How about I beat the crap out of you and say, "Stop whining, be grateful. At least I didn't kill you!"
******
Errhhhhh... it strikes me that the excessive reliance on adjuncts and graduate students to handle college teaching loads is a bit different than physical beatings.
You may have your "special loathings," but I've never liked it when historians compared apples and oranges.
Posted by: Archidamus (W. W. S. Hsieh) at May 10, 2003 04:55 PMArchidamus,
I think your observation was a form of comparing apples and oranges. Yes, research and writing were once the preserve of an elite with the wealth and leisure to devote themselves to scholarship. But was this not prior to the professionalization of academic disciplines? Graduate school is in itself a very different kind of thing than the gentleman-scholar thing of an earlier age: so how can invocation of an earlier gentleman-scholar ideal provide an adequate response to the problems of graduate school, deprofessionalization and so on? Or if we are going to return to a version of the academic as someone who is independently wealthy, at the very least grad. programmes should say so upfront. Otherwise, they are pulling a massive bait-and-switch.
If the content of Mr Benton's analogy was a bit strong, the analogy still stands. Here's another example:
Historically, plagues carried off millions of people. Indeed, the Black Death claimed the lives of roughly 1 in 3 people in Europe. So why should we worry about SARS?
Posted by: Invisible Adjunct at May 10, 2003 05:43 PMAh, the historical analogy. As a Professional Historian (tm), I never quite know what to make of the general public's use of the past to justify or condemn the present. On the one hand, there's the sort of thing being discussed here -- the decontextualized analogy. It doesn't matter if two events happened in radically different contexts; if they are both about some shared general theme (persecution, discrimination, class warfare, family life...) they must be able to speak to each other.
But... at least this approach seems to recognize that the past is something worth paying attention to, and that it has some connection to the present. I have more problems with the "geez, what's with this rehashing of old stuff? Haven't we been there, done that?" attitude so beloved of late.
Then there's the historian-as-fortune teller approach: "Oh Professor of Presidential Politics, studier of a myriad past elections, can you tell us how this one will turn out?"
And don't get me started on the "History is just boring -- it's nothing but lists of names, dates and facts" crowd...
Posted by: Rana at May 10, 2003 06:40 PMInvisible Adjunct wrote:
Or if we are going to return to a version of the academic as someone who is independently wealthy, at the very least grad. programmes should say so upfront. Otherwise, they are pulling a massive bait-and-switch.
My point was not that we should return to the gentelman-scholar ideal, it was more that we haven't and cannot depart from it as much as some (including myself) would like. Humanistic work will always depend on some kind of either public or private philanthropy, since it's simply not self-supporting in any economic sense. Besides, even now, if we took a survey of humanities PhDs' socioeconomic backgrounds, I don't think you'd get a good reflection of the general population.
We will always have to find someone willing to pay for our work, and plenty of alumni donate money to their alma maters for this sort of thing, along with institutions like private endowments and some public funding through state universities and the like. But all this is in effect charity. And it'll never be enough to fund everyone who wants to be a scholar.
As for Mr. Benton's analogy, if he were to beat me up, presumably he wouldn't have given me a choice in the matter. I've never heard of anyone being coerced into graduate school.
If we were talking about academics thrown in the clink for expressing unpleasant opinions, then I think that would be an analogy that would have worked better. And even then, the crime would be for violating an individual's right to speak their mind, which has nothing to with occupational status.
Posted by: Archidamus at May 10, 2003 07:28 PM"I've never heard of anyone being coerced into graduate school."
Now you have. Nobody held a physical gun to my head. Plenty of people, not least myself, held metaphorical ones.
Posted by: Dorothea Salo at May 10, 2003 08:41 PMDamn I'm enjoying this.
Bring the Doom. Bring the Gloom. The night is howling, "go read Watchmen again, be gloomy you pontificating old bastard!"
Oh my, I'm laughing out loud. This is what happens when you can't crank up the guitar at night.
Archidamus can do better than to dismiss an analogy for its difference in magnitude. Harrrumph! But I mean it. To insist on speciating when the similarity of kinds is spelled right out makes an unconvincing rebuttal.
Positive suggestion: Meet the analogy with one you like better.
As for nobody being coerced into graduate school. No one coerced me to go a concert yesterday; did that license anyone there to pick my pocket? No one coerces me to cross the street; but when I do, does that license the S.U.V. to run the red light and take me out in the crosswalk?
By comparison, does the power of coercion by an organization that gives me a credential [diploma, doctoral degree...] to make or break my future chances in my chosen profession have the right, because I freely walked in the door, to exploit my labor for unliveably cheap pay rates, cheat undergraduate students out of their tuition money when I can hardly speak the language I am to teach in, and on and on and on? Does it license hiring under false pretenses? (see above, in my previous comment, about phony-baloney class size promises--if you think that's trivial, try teaching 45 students on time budgeted (and remunerated) for 30, all on a wage that makes MacDonald's look attractive when you average it out).
No matter where you go, there you are.
And here I am, way the heck away from academia, and glad to be. What's my stake in it? The short answer is, I prefer to live in a world where I have someone to talk with, and where I can debate with them and learn from them rather than bore myself to death with all this closed-minded cheerleading of "go team" for the monkeys who are mouthing my opinions the loudest. I want to live in a world that doesn't completely make me sick.
I'm worried that the denigration of teaching, from the K-through-12 level all the way to full Professor, is going to cheapen my life because it's going to cheapen the people who go through this establishment (which is a lot of people), and produce some really strange popularly-held ideas about how to steer our country through the world, when these people get (as Alice Cooper prophecized in his little song) elected.
Well those aren't personal stakes, are they? But this "democracy" [curmudgeons: yes, "republic"] thing needs tending-to. I'm not saying we are running it into the ground; but if I see a turn I think is in the wrong direction, it behooves me to howl about it.
Just imagine where our lucrative biotech industry would be, for example (and where the money would be, other than here), if everyone thought evolution was "just a theory," and couldn't understand biology as a result.
Just imagine how many quadraplegics will remain quadraplegics for life, because someone thought stem cell research should stop.
I also have a sixth sense that the glues that hold nations together, societies together, make them thrive and prosper, are not bottled, or are not kept in marked bottles, and that by concensually devaluing and driving people from careers in academia, it is possible that we are removing one of the flywheels, so to speak, that store creative energy in our society. Some of that energy will be thermal (wasted), like the irritants some have tarred as "tenured radicals." (oh, and I've had my trouble with them)(but cf. CEOs, whose value might as well be an issuance of scrip, as far as I can tell [do think about that & its interpretations-- I didn't. ;)])
But some of this energy will be "mechanical" (put to work): the next LASER, the next hologram, the next PET machine. Or it will be as valuable, without a financial formula to back it up: the next Winston Churchill or the next Zora Neal Hurston...
Is this like a bank account? A reserve of savings?
The quality of life in the institutions of learning matters, whether it's obvious to us on the outside or not.
But that's just my take on it, and I've been writing a lot longer than I budgeted time for, and as usual, I'm going to cry "sleep"! [the little doom] and "too late at night!" [big gloom, long since sun turned away] and return the floor to nicer people again. You know, instead of coming to a proper conclusion.
Have a cool week folks. No tornados.
Zoot Organizing Kit
blogging on the shoulders of giants
"We will always have to find someone willing to pay for our work, and plenty of alumni donate money to their alma maters for this sort of thing, along with institutions like private endowments and some public funding through state universities and the like. But all this is in effect charity."
To call it charity is to suggest that the benefits run only one way. Does teaching and research contribute nothing to society? If this is what academics now believe, then we are in bigger trouble than I had realized.
Posted by: Invisible Adjunct at May 12, 2003 11:52 AM"The quality of life in the institutions of learning matters, whether it's obvious to us on the outside or not."
Yes, it certainly does.
Posted by: Invisible Adjunct at May 12, 2003 11:53 AMWow, ZOK. I am in awe. I hope you copy that comment, later to expand upon it and enshrine it somewhere even *more* public.
Posted by: Dorothea Salo at May 14, 2003 01:32 PM(chuckles and grins brightly)
Thanks, Dorothea! I was worried I was howling a little too loudly. But it was more fun than doing the dishes... ;) (guess what's waiting in the other room for me now)
Best to ya,
-Zoot Organizing Kit
rhythm guitarist,
UFOBreakfast.com