One might have thought of sight, but who could think
Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?
Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,
But the dark italics it could not propound.
And out of what sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur,
Merely in living as and where we live.
–Wallace Stevens
Sometime I will write a funny post, “Fallacies of My Reeducation.” One of the more amusing of these was: “Do not do what seems right. If it seems right, it is surely wrong, because what seems right, is always the vestige of an evil past.” I would listen to this sentence, marvel at its rigidity, and then ponder the of question how broadly I should apply the rule. Did it mean I should start running red lights? Stop believing in gravity? Not show up for class?
Here are some slightly less amusing, yet still simple fallacies of my original education, easily identified, and easily debunked.
Because you are light-haired and from the coast…
1. I know that you will not take your Ph.D. examination on time.
2. How is it that you have taken this examination, and done so well?
3. I know that you will not finish your dissertation.
4. I am amazed that this dissertation draft is already finished, and that it is good.
Because you are a woman…
5. I know that you will spend too much time teaching and not publish.
6. You should spend more time on teaching than on research.
7. It is inappropriate that you are outpublishing the local men.
8. Your strong publication record indicates that you are a poor teacher.
9. This record of successful teaching is evidence that you spend too much time at it.
I had just unlearned all of these fallacies when I went, in triumph, to meet for the first time my Destructive Therapist, on the theory that he would help to sweep the last of certain other shadows away. That was how my infamous Reeducation started.
The major fallacies of my infamous Reeducation were these:
a. It is a problem that your life is going this well.
b. Specifically, your interest in research is indicative of problems far graver than you realize.
c. Your interest in ‘foreign’ cultures is only an escapist fantasy.
d. Most specifically of all, the nature of your precise research area, and your interests within it, show that you have been wounded very deeply in the past, far more deeply than you are willing to understand. Everything you have achieved up until now, is no achievement, but a mere symptom of that past. Renounce who you are: only in this way can you hope to become whole.
Argument (d) was the one that finally got to me. It was, as you can see, massively irrational. I had by then, however, already been convinced that rationality and calm on my part were not rationality and calm, but indicators of the unfeeling nature that must accompany my intelligence (since thinking and feeling cannot exist in the same person, you know). To defend against the accusation of coldness, I began entertaining irrational arguments. Partly to defend against the supposition that I had suffered a terrible, incurable wound, and partly in case that supposition were true, I did my best to renounce who I was.
Who I am, I mean. Who I am, despite the fact that, as the poet said, we all have many selves. And now, I am almost finished. That is, I have only a very few more things to say on these matters.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
We have so much in common. Fifteen years ago, a graduate student adviser met with me the day after I found out in passing in the hallway that I was being de-funded. “Perhaps you should just get out of academe,” she said, stabbing me in the heart with her dull sword.
I had finished all my classes and all my comprehensive exams (including an extra one on race I volunteered to take). I had had four chapters of my dissertation accepted by my committee, so I was now a Ph.D. candidate instead of a student. I had just won both the Department Graduate Student Teacher Award and a campus-wide award for my teaching. And I had four articles on revise and re-submit.
But I didn’t even ask why. I just walked out, bleeding, and died.
Perhaps there will be a new ending to my story, as well.
Axe.
* CS, we even coincide temporally in these events! What I call ‘reeducation’ also started 15 years ago.
* These things have to do in large part, I think, with isolation. Where I went to graduate school, people got de-funded all the time, mostly for budgetary (and sometimes micro-political) reasons that had nothing to do with them personally, and we all knew about it. We also knew where the alternative funding sources were. And we knew the difference between lucid professor-speak, and silly professor-speak. Someone would have said to you, that advisor is out to lunch, do not listen, check out other funding, over here.
* When I first got into graduate school, I was told I would probably not be funded. The news came in a form letter, with a hand-written note pencilled onto it by the professor who had signed it. “Come see me and I will explain the meaning of this.” I went, and he said look, you’re not funded now because we know you are already in town. All of the funding offers have gone to people who were accepted from other schools. We are required to do this so that we do not seem insular. We also know that not all of these people will accept our offer. Therefore, do not worry about a thing. Your funding offer will arrive next month.” (It did.)
* This was menschlig of him, and it was also good teaching practice. I learned that academia was bureaucratic, and that one should find out what memos (and comments in the halls) actually mean before taking them at face value. That man is still alive and publishing. Some of his initials are JP.
* Later on, when I became an assistant professor in less populated places, I knew enough to know that local advice was not as trustworthy as JP’s. I did not yet know enough to know where to seek such advice.
* Now, I get advice by calling people like JP, but then, it did not occur to me because all such people I knew, were not in my precise field. I did not realize that for the sorts of questions I had, field did not really matter. And my peers were no longer confident graduate students familiar with every corner of the institution. They were (justifiably) nervous assistant professors, wracked with confusion because in addition to job weirdness, they suddenly also had family weirdness, as tends to happen around the age of 30. They had plenty to say, but as advice, much of it was patently unreliable, motivated more by fear and competitiveness (not necessarily with me, you understand, just generalized competitiveness) than by concrete experience and know-how.
* So there were no guides, and when there were, they were often not guides but mis-leaders. It sounds as though this is what happened to you in graduate school.
* I have screwed up enough times that I would have thought I’d have struck out by now. Aber nein. That academic beast is tenacious, and it does not let go. That is what I say to myself, and while it is a fun sentence to say (especially in Spanish, where the word tenacious is “tenaz”), it is not entirely accurate. Having seen quite a few resumes in my time, and read the writings of quite a few people, I would say, it is very difficult to fall off the game entirely if you’re good. You may fall down, but you won’t fall out (as long as the economy doesn’t collapse, of course, but that’s a different issue).
* The question I am pondering for an upcoming post is in tune with some of your wonderings, as well. What is the value of academic writing? I know all of the neurotic reasons why I do not do more of it by heart. But part of the reason I am so well versed in these is, they are a standard piece of academic culture. We KNOW what its value is, we learned that in SCHOOL. If we are having TROUBLE, it must be that we have an INDIVIDUAL PROBLEM.
* I intuit, however, that for my own case at least, the standard reasons one has for not writing more academic stuff, and also my reasons having to do with personal history and current (virtually library-less) situation, are not the most interesting ones. The way I have reached this intuition is, I have tried to overcome these standard problems, with solutions I know from personal experience, do in fact work for them–when the standard problem IS the problem, of course. I have also considered the question, how interested am I, really, in this? I suspect, though, that the more enlivening answers lie elsewhere…somewhere, perhaps, in the strange disconnection which exists, although it “ought” not, between letters and life. I am not at all sure about this, but I have thrown the question to the skies, and something may come to me.
And, in the meantime, I (in my eternal attempt to skip some of the supposedly necessary bases), have joined a national writers association and will attend a conference in the spring to pitch my books to agents and publishers. My thought, of course, is that when I’m sitting on Oprah, I won’t care any more about what my graduate student advisor said. And I will find my niche in academe, which I’m already working on, anyway. (Hah!)
What a child I am.
C’est fantastique! Go Changeseeker! –Z