That was the title of a famous essay by George Steiner on a rather different topic but I am talking about things in school that are hard in terms of work, grades, publishing, and so on.
When I was an undergraduate, the scientists thought the humanities were “easy” for two reasons, one real and one not. Real was that grades were not curved, so that if you made the already set standard for a certain grade, you actually got that grade, no matter how many others also did. In the sciences, the standard would move up if the class did well; they kept doing better and better and the standard moved higher and higher.
They also thought the humanities were “easy” because they involved no rigor or research. They would make C and D on papers and try to say it was a freedom of speech issue and an injustice. Finally I figured out that their problem there was the same problem they were having in O-Chem, which they claimed was “pure memorization.” It wasn’t pure memorization, it was merely that things were contextualized somewhat and could not simply be deduced.
I like to simply deduce as much as anyone, which is why I like foreign languages and mathematics, and why I avoided all science courses. Science has labs, and labs happen while the Rare Books Room is open, so they ruin your real research projects. Also, premed students sabotage other peoples’ experiments in labs, and in the days when there was no Internet to back journals up they would enter the library with razor blades and cut the articles relevant to your paper out of the most recent journals, just to keep you from being able to do it.
Those are some situations I consider actually difficult. On the question of publishing, I was once interviewed by a panel, mostly of people in other fields, where someone asked: how hard is it to publish in Spanish?
Professor Zero: What do you mean? Publish in what subfield of Spanish, in what kind of venue?
Panel: Anything, in any peer reviewed journal.
Professor Zero: Well, when you consider the size of the field and its international nature, with Spanish being one of the world’s most spoken languages and largest cultural producers, you realize that there are a great many journals. If you have written a respectable piece, and you are not concerned to place it in one of the very most visible, very most famous, very most prestigious and competitive journals, but merely in a respectable journal, then you are almost guaranteed to be able to publish it within a reasonable amount of time if you keep trying. So from that point of view I would say that publishing in Spanish is relatively easy.
Person on Panel, with longing: I wish my field had that many journals.
Do you see? Not to have many journals is hard. And getting into a really top journal is hard. But we all know this, and I thought we were trained to work for this. How is it possible to have earned a Ph.D. strong enough to land you a job at an R1 and not to have learned this? How is it possible to have gotten into that Ph.D. program not already knowing it?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 