I
University Diaries writes about the male humanities professor who has a single-minded focus on research and a talent for bureaucratic maneuvering, and hates teaching. That formula, except for those it works for, gives us the washed-up, frustrated, ineffectual professor one sees in many popular representations.
Reading this, it struck me that these were precisely the people who have most advised me and this is how they have strongly suggested I need to be. As we have said, it is not a formula which works well. It also feeds into the popular belief in the dichotomy between research and teaching, in which I do not believe. Yet many academics believe in and trust this formula. Others merely feel they should. They carry its oppressive weight with them, believing it is “reality,” unaware that it is an unnecessary source of malaise.
So I have been told time and again to be precisely this type of male humanities professor. Get that right at last and you will be successful and have the life you want. But the model does not work well, even when it works as best it can, and its propagation is self-serving.
II
I have also often been told I do not hang out with enough professors – “or at least, lawyers” – and that too many of my friends do not have postgraduate degrees. It is a sign of low self-esteem, I am told, but I think it is a sign of high self-esteem: who, after all, would like to hang out with the kind of person University Diaries describes?
Anyway, yesterday I was hanging out with one of these low-life friends I have, a mere Bachelor of Science with a mere construction firm, and we were discussing our interest in creative writing. He likes it and considers himself good at it, he says, but is too lazy to follow through and finish anything. I like it and do not know if I am good at it, but I am secretly working on it although I should be writing more scientific texts.
Who knows, you might make money at it, said my friend. Yes, said I, but I know what the university would say – I can also make money by getting a raise and grants for doing more scientific writing. It is not sensible to spend writing energy on other projects.
That is self-serving, said my friend. They want to tie you to them, and not have another life or write your novel. This was astute, I thought, and a professor would not think it. And that is probably why I am told I should not talk to so many non-professors.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
At the same job at a university where the MSW type told my lowly BA self that I did not have the credentials for writing literature reviews, I also was chastised for taking time off on most days to sit in the staff lounge with the administrative assistants and eating lunch with them. I was even known to laugh occasionally. So I guess I did not know my place, too lowly to hang out with or do the rarefied work of those more degreed than I but too high to have lunch with the non-professionals.
Lord. So petty. I just found a post from February which distinguishes between the university of production and the university of vanity, and I discern that every “real” job I have had has been in a university of vanity, and this is a large part of my malaise.
Many people, though, cannot produce and would therefore rather be in university of vanity, smoke and mirrors.
Semi-related rant, re professors who hate to teach – I was taught that you couldn’t afford to be female and say you liked it because you’d be categorized in the wrong way and not get ahead. Which was true in some ways at the time. And I actually do *not* like to teach for the reasons many do, namely, to have authority, preach, and so on.
The other reason I still mistrust people who say they like or “love” to teach is that they turn up their noses when I tell them how *much* I teach, or when they realize that half my large teaching load is sophomore level and I only have one graduate seminar a year (such are things here).
This having been said, the imperative to hate teaching really is counterproductive, as UD’s post (and the one it quotes) point out.
Some professors are cool and some people outside of academe are not, but one thing for sure is that if you hang out with a range of folks, you soon discover that many professors are incredibly boring to hang out with. That might be another self-serving reason they discourage fraternizing with “outsiders.” When people ask me why I don’t find a lover in academe, I have to just shake my head and say, “You don’t understand…”
Argh. My father was a professor, so I was immersed in that whole mess from a very early age. The arrogance about social connections would be farcical, except that living within a farce is no joke.
I wish I could say that I’ve never been tempted to go into academics. But even now I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding because I’m 40 and I’m not publishing.
Professors, boring, yes.
“…living within a farce is no joke.”
And that is the truth! It takes far more strength of character than what is normally required to do that and not get twisted.
And yet: the work itself is so interesting, and is not in and of itself hard, and that is the great paradox. What I would like to know is, what I would think about it without all that I transferred onto it from Reeducation, and had I not also come from an academic family that was conflicted about it for its own reasons. What if I had been and remained pure?
I also think a job in an R-1 department, not just an R-1 university, is a whole other world. People say it is not, but I have good judgment and more experience than many, and I say it is. I’ve had visiting gigs like that, and I can *tell* – even in the worst of circumstances people are not so ground down. They are also a lot more innocent, I find – they remain more pure.
My other complaint, and this *is* about research and scholarship and I would think it no matter what, is the ploddingness and conventionality. That part of the work *is* hard to deal with, and it applies across the board.
I’ve thought very seriously about leaving and almost done it, but have not. I will be interested to see what I think of it all without the added burden of Reeducation – which is my real disability around all of this, I keep thinking. Although the problems of academia itself do not help.
Other random thought: people who do it, and do it well and are happy, have a lot of support for this, even if it is not in the conventional form of a wife who is maid/R.A. But most people do not have support, and do have *negative* support, including from their own institutions.
The thing to do I suspect is read a lot of parodies and satires, ideally from centuries past so one remembers that the problem is not entirely new, and have some decadent habit other than alcohol (that just feeds into the stereotype).
What I am starting to see myself do, however, is parlay all of this into some grand insightful tome. I think. And – without Reeducation, and with a good job, I might well never have seen what I have begun to be able to glimpse about the system, and it is interesting to know.
And yet I have just talked my youngest brother into going to graduate school.
And Tom – I think I’ve got a boil-down. Getting closer to the bottom of things, both academia and Reeducation since for me they are intertwined – I have the feeling that I will soon be able to shut up on the matter here and write a book.
Anyway, the boil-down: The issue is the contradiction between the atmosphere of competition, scarcity and hierarchy, and the idea of leisure to explore and free exchange of ideas … in which people are expected to be able to participate when really they are living in precarious and uncomfortable circumstances and fighting, often against each other, for their lives. It cannot but be bad.
This is why I do not like the academic advice manuals which now proliferate: they assume that everything is all right, and everyone will be all right if they just get the correct instructions.
P.S. (see what you’ve unleashed, Tom, a whole meditation) – I think that for my case, there have been just too many factors conspiring against my liking it. I also think though that I have more appetites and desires than most professors, who tend to be happy with very limited lives or so it seems to me.
I am still trying to figure it out.
I have been trying to figure out what is the golden key to unlock it but I think that is a misplaced search – right now I am focused on trying to live the days as pleasantly as possible, which for me means primarily, not getting on my own case about how I should be doing things better than I am, and being happier and more chipper than I am.
Whoa. I like the boil-down, and the comment about “limited people” seems accurate. It would be very kind of somebody to write a book that … I dunno. Laughs in the face of that “here are the rules” approach?
Not that those aren’t the rules … for some limited, mechanical game that has rules. But people come to worship the damn rules! My father, in his last year before retirement, was still desperately following those rules. What did he imagine the reward was gonna be? But I guess the rules start to seem so high, you can’t get over them. so low, you can’t get under them.
But, I mean, what if we touted the rules for dating (“don’t talk about yourself too much” etc.) as the “rules of love?” They’re not wrong … just “wrong planet.”
I have a friend in a research faculty position out west, who seems relatively immune to all this crap a lot of the time. He does it by not giving a shit, just playing hooky as much as possible. Oh, well, er, and alcohol too.
What the . . . ?
Excuse the type, I am tired. Been working with very young students today, as a recovering theory reformist it has been great. I saw what teaching is about for the first time, so your post rings true on many different levels.
And so,
I am starting to wonder if my whole academic career or non-career has more to do with me not being able to handle the social norms of the university than my actual ideas. I am also seeing that it was not me but the “perception of me” that doomed my good start when I cringed at such embarrassing questions as “I am not sure what you read?” posed by the head of the Africana Studies Department.
What did he mean? I thought I was suppose to read everything, in the spirit of Faulkner.
I mean really Zero. The look on my face doomed me, and I am glad that the re-education did not stick.
But I do wake up and wonder if or when a doctorate will come my way. And believe me, there is more to it than just the research, a knotted tongue is the first two pre-requisites.
The other is a sandblasted Ego caused by the denial of the Id.
Don’t quote me on that ;).
Baleine, yes it is the social norms.
Tom, the further West you get in the U.S., the more everyone will just let you be yourself, and the more research oriented your department and your institution are, the more they just let you be yourself.
I have only been in Mexico 16 hours and I already feel so much more like me it is shocking. Being in the uptight East of the Rockies culture, and in the uptight U.S. academia, leave me in a state of constant mental and physical tension – you can’t relax because people are so invasive with so much B.S. I am so used to this that I tend to think it is just I who have lost my touch for life. But it is the environment.
I realize this all sounds terribly prejudiced but it is based on long observation. And all of the messed-up professors and graduate students where I studied were transplants from the neurotic and oppressive East.
No offense meant to the many charming Easterners who read this – I am speaking in very general terms, from the perspective of my culture.
P.S. also – on (my) search for the Root Problem, the one golden key – *that* is inappropriate, actually, as I should know as a student of literary avant-gardes!
And also – the insight from Tom, the parallels between dating manuals and academic manuals, following The Rules, is brilliant. Brilliant.
I am amazed at how often colleagues who write fictio n or creative nonfiction, if they are literary types, will see this as transgressive and a really daring move. Apparently only those anointed with an MFA or specialty in creative writing are allowed that latitude. This just confirms your point, of course.
Undine – oh yes! Officially it is because writers are a company gods we are not qualified to join, and/or they are not intellectuals. And the fear is, said professor will be a bad writer. And one is supposed to be spending one’s time writing criticism. But what I just realized – writers are also the RAW MATERIAL we are supposed to be exploiting! You wouldn’t want to become raw material – and you certainly wouldn’t want to become second rate raw material – so you shouldn’t try…something like that.
Tom: “the rules start to seem so high, you can’t get over them. so low, you can’t get under them.”
Yes! And everybody, go up and see the Funkadelic video Tom links to, above!
Also, P.S. to Tom – a successful professor I know, to whom professordom gave a good financial situation, advised insistently:
1. Never put any effort into teaching, you get no credit for it, so just try to get through it and forget about it, do not prepare, do a poor job, go in and say some B.S. and do not care.
2. Publish a lot, you do get credit for this, and publish whether you are interested in what you are publishing or not, and whether you believe in what you are saying or not. It is a racket and everything is false, so just produce some B.S. and do not care.
He was against doing anything with any kind of sincerity, interest, or care, or so he said repeatedly. He made exceptions for dissertation students – he took their work seriously – and service and administration, which he also took seriously and was ethical about. But he was completely cynical about research and teaching and, although this did not permit him to enjoy he career, he claims to this day that it is the only way to be.
Part of my problems have to do with having had him repeat points one and two so often, from when I was very young.
I could say more but it would start to identify me. But what I notice as common themes in what I have said here and what I have not said, is the odd value placed on suffering for its own sake, and the disrespect of other people and of one´s own work – with the exceptions noted above, of course.
Anyway I think this attitude is not limited to that person and it is among other things, amazingly un-spiritual, un-philosophical, etc. All of these Mexica and other pre-Hispanic artisans whose work I have been looking at would not dream of thinking of it in such a way – and so much of their work has such a happy feel….
That is a stripped-down version of the Rules. I’m sure the attitude is not limited to that one person.
I got the rules in a little more dilute form. I think I was lucky.
The system makes us feel guilty for doing the right thing.
Well, I was able to ignore them in their first presentations – or just take them under advisement.
After Reeducation, which caused me to have trouble working, I got the Rules recited to me many times by well meaning friends, who thought my trouble could not be Reeducation, it must be not understanding the Rules.
I started to believe that in fact I ought to be following them, and I no longer could explain why I found them so depressing and counterproductive. I thought that not liking them was another personal failing of mine. That’s why I’ve thought about it all so much – trying to get the weight off!
🙂