coldhearted scientist وداد

BANE: Do you know what it is to manage a course with a complicated textbook, an online activities manual with hundreds of pop up windows between which you have to keep navigating for each student, a test bank with very long and complex, but not very good tests in it, and WebCT? It means you and the students peer endlessly into screens of administration. This takes up large amounts of time which could have been devoted to consideration of the material at hand and the people involved. Things can be done so much better and so much more simply. We could dump our expensive textbook, for instance, and all these clunky pieces of software, and just use this, which is free.

MY STRANGE CAREER: This year I have experienced the fifth heartrending November (the first was in 1995, so it is not every November) in which, after I had finally decided I would abandon all hope of improving The Program and dedicate myself entirely to my own work, a new faculty member arrives and says there Is Hope. Thereupon comes Administrative Work. “You’ve caught me at the wrong time,” I always start out, but I get convinced to join the bandwagon. It is more difficult each time because each time I have more experience of seeing Hope Smashed.

What I am told each of these Novembers, among other things, is that we are members of an ancient guild and must carry its torch. I think it would be nice if this were true but that we really are no such thing except in our hearts. Real conditions are that we are either hot members of the Academic Industrial Complex with hobbies of our choice, or tutors to the privileged classes with hobbies of our college’s choice, or activists in popular education with hobbies resembling the day jobs of hot members of the Academic Industrial Complex.

For an academic career, I am only really interested in the first mode, although I could engage nicely in the third mode if necessary, and if conditions were right. But I would be more likely to seek, in that case, an actual movement job that paid enough to support me and my shoe habit. So why did I lose interest in academia? Because I was destroyed by Reeducation? YES. Because I “wisely” put off, once again, my own research project in favor of one the university smiled upon more in its fickle way? YES. Because I discovered that, unless I were in a sufficiently rarefied atmosphere, I was much more interested in history and the social sciences than in anything involving belles lettres? YES. Because I did not know that being a professor meant teaching primarily lower division courses, and having less communication, input and autonomy on goals, methods, and materials for these courses than I had as a T.A.? YES, YES, A THOUSAND TIMES YES.

Meanwhile, as we know, my present book is the research project I have been putting off since 1985, and is about history and the social sciences. So if I escape Reeducation more fully, and keep writing this book, then I will have solved most of my mysteries. This has been decided and it could have been decided many years ago, except that I keep standing back. “Come back to belles lettres! The atmosphere will rarefy soon!” say the sirens, but my response is that I am not rejecting belles lettres. I am just decentering them. Yet the sirens are not the only reason I keep standing back.

I keep standing back and in Reeducation they would say that was a refusal to grow up or something like that, but when I try the Reeducative technique of coming out of  ‘denial’ and ‘admitting the truth’ I see below me a mirrored spiral of destructive illogic into which I do not wish to descend. I think ‘once burned, twice shy’ is the better explanation. I may be growing Nietzchean. Last week someone asked for a copy of an old article and I realized I did not have one. Today it arrived via Interlibrary Loan, and I reread it for the first time in a long time. It might be the best thing I have done. It was written before Reeducation and it fairly breathes confidence and freedom.

IT SNOWED LAST NIGHT: Snow covered everything. The cat is only eight, so this was his first snow. It was the most disconcerting experience of his life, seeing the garden covered in glittering fluff. It was warm then but now we have a hard freeze. There are icicles in the birdbath.

Axé.