coldhearted scientist وداد

Servetus says being a scholar …

* is about having a question or questions you need to answer. Not want, need to answer. For you or for the world. Not for your tenure committee or to fill out your vita. To inform the world. To change the world. To find the truth. Your truth, whether continent or eternal.
* is about watchfulness, about seeing the detail that changes the meaning of the picture.
* is about seeing the big picture. Your big picture, no one else’s.
* is about telling people who need to know. They might not be the people who “matter,” but they still need to know.
* is about integrity, about craft, about fashioning a perfect thing.
* is about joy, about the delight in watching the mind work, about delight in watching the minds of our interlocutors work, about delight in the process of seeing students’ synapses–or our own–connect and lightbulbs go on.
* is about power. Power to determine what is real, what is important. Power to tell our OWN stories as we see fit.

I am trying to get in touch with this. I know how to teach other people to be like this but not really how to be like this. When I got back to Maringouin from New Orleans last night, I had the academic raven sit down on me again. It reminded me that being an academic (note that I am not yet saying scholar) was about repression, suppression, service, duty, drudgery, sacrifice, lobotomization, self-abnegation, drudgery, punishment, guilt, shame, hopelessness, incarceration, pain.

WHAT I LEARNED BEING A PROFESSOR

“We will not let you survive here if you cannot renounce your intellectual orientation,” is the message I have received in more than one academic job. I wanted to leave academia because of this. When I was talked into staying, one of the elements in the discussion – an element I accepted at the time, after some effort – was that I expected too much from life and had not dedicated myself sufficiently to pain. “I suffered greatly in Racine, Wisconsin. I still got my book out and managed to get hired in Jacksonville, Florida,” was the sort of sentence I listened to.

I always said helplessly, “But I do not want to live in Jacksonville, Florida. I want to live in Miami, New York, Houston, Chicago, Los Angeles, or New Orleans.”  Then people said, “Dear, dear. Do not be so snobbish. Are you interested in nothing but money?” I was unable to make people realize that it is not money I want, it is urban life, sidewalks to walk on. Urban life, an intellectual orientation, and often also college level teaching are the desires I keep trying to repress.

Notice that academia does not promise urban life, but it does promise intellectual life and college level teaching. Two out of three is the standard academic formula for good enough, and that is why I originally thought things would be all right. In the worst case scenario one would not get urban life during the academic year or week, but one could get it weekends and summers. I did not imagine renouncing the other two elements. My attempts to do enough violence to myself so that I can fit in such small spaces have not done me a great deal of good.

For academia’s sake I also repressed the desire for autonomy as a person. I accepted a situation in which one must indebt oneself to support one’s professional activities, and remains otherwise dependent for everything upon the apron strings of an institution which approves or disapproves of one and one’s small requests. This is simply unhealthy. It goes against my grain. It is worthy of further discussion (in a later post).

WHAT I LEARNED ELSEWHERE, AND ON THE MARGINS OF SCHOOL

I liked college and graduate school a lot. It was generally assumed there that one was already a scholar, and was now learning to be a better one. Upon first looking into Servetus’ post, however, I realized with wild surmise that I never realized I would be allowed to come out in public as a scholar. Scholarship, as it applied to me, was something one did secretly. When one did it in public it was to:

* prove to brunette graduate advisers that not all blonds were vapid, and then
* prove to senior male colleagues that one could publish while female.

I had learned that only other hallowed people could be scholars. The rest of us, including all women, could only put on puppet or ventriloquist performances and earn a living that way. We were to remember that the object of the game was not to produce worthwhile things, but to produce things which would be counted in a certain way. The main objective was to keep one’s health insurance.

I thought this was a very sour and negative way of being in the world. I was tired of being made fun of for my comparative lack of cynicism, however, so I became quieter and quieter. I tried to learn that this way of being in the world was not sour and negative, it was realistic, and that any attitude I would have thought more practical  was in fact self-indulgent and generally unworthy. I tried to learn that positive people are self-indulgent and unworthy. It seemed that if one first suffered enough, one would be seen as worthy at last, and not to be criticized any more for self-indulgence. It seemed that one must emulate the Velveteen Rabbit.

CONCLUSIONS

This shows that ultimately I do FEAR SUCCESS, and that the reason I fear it is that I want to live. If you succeed,  they will kill you, not just torture you, the next time they drag you off to the chambers. If you succeed, you will not have a second chance at life. Furthermore: to want to live is an insufficiently cynical attitude. Show it and you will have withering scorn heaped upon you. You have to remain in the shadows until the coast is clear. You can have a creative life so long as it is invisible. In public you must be seen to toil and suffer. Only this way will you be allowed to continue to live.

Let us now sweep all of this away. Écoutez et répétez. Not only scholarship, but also life:

* is about having a question or questions you need to answer. Not want, need to answer. For you or for the world. Not for your tenure committee or to fill out your vita. To inform the world. To change the world. To find the truth. Your truth, whether continent or eternal.
* is about watchfulness, about seeing the detail that changes the meaning of the picture.
* is about seeing the big picture. Your big picture, no one else’s.
* is about telling people who need to know. They might not be the people who “matter,” but they still need to know.
* is about integrity, about craft, about fashioning a perfect thing.
* is about joy, about the delight in watching the mind work, about delight in watching the minds of our interlocutors work, about delight in the process of seeing students’ synapses–or our own–connect and lightbulbs go on.
* is about power. Power to determine what is real, what is important. Power to tell our OWN stories as we see fit.

Axé.