coldhearted scientist وداد

Thursday night my mother fell such that she is now in the hospital, and my colleague’s mother committed suicide. I am still grading, and today I am creating and hosting the department party.

My general thesis appears to be that academic advice exists not to advise, but to suggest to people that events can be perfectly controlled and if they are not, one has only oneself to blame. Do this, don’t do that, and no, I will not answer your actual question are the three sentences I feel like punches, harder every time.

Here is an interesting piece on César Vallejo I ran across, only to discover at the end that it cites the article that sums up everything of actual interest I had to say in my half-manuscript on this poet. At the time I wanted to publish more such articles, through which process I would surely come to see the shape of the book I would like to put out.

Academic advisors told me this was procrastination. I told them it was method. I lost, but I was right, and the proof of it is that the first of my planned articles keeps getting cited.

The assignment I got was to recast and expand the entire manuscript in Gramscian terms within five months, during which I would also teach three new courses. This was not at all what I wanted to do with the project but I was being obedient. I wanted to say no directly but instead did so in a slow, passive agressive, and very self destructive way.

It took me a very long time to realize that my disagreement with the project was legitimate, because my training did not emphasize the idea that one might have something valuable to say, but rather foregrounded the importance of saying the right words so as to survive.

I have gotten so much done this busy semester by insisting on a small amount of time each day to think about my current project that I awoke this morning with an awful thought: had I, back then, spent a half an hour each day looking at Gramsci and the manuscript I had, and seeing where that led, I could in fact have come up with the said book quite quickly — not the one the press had assigned, but one that would have satisfied me.

What would I have had to know to work along these lines: that you can get extensions from presses, and that you can continue to negotiate with your editors: when you sign a contract you are not in fact making an irrevocable promise to revise exactly as you have been told.

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Why I so dislike academic advice: because I asked everyone I knew for this information. All they would say was that to think the deadline was short and to disagree with the project were procrastination techniques. I should be quiet and write the specified text to deadline. It was impossible that the deadline could be unrealistic, and disagreement with the editors was really “fear of success.”

But I imagined the job interviews in which I would have to say I never believed the things I had said in my manuscript, or find ways of avoiding saying this in those words. More immediately, writing the specified text seemed like doing violence to my own work and I could not face doing that. Nobody said you could extend deadlines and disagree with editors, and everyone said that any form of disobedience was “not knowing how to write” or “procrastination.”

Me cago en la leche.

However: had it not been for Reeducation, by which I do not only mean that anti-intellectual therapist but also battering with inappropriate academic advice, I would in fact have spent half an hour a day for those five months actually looking at the manuscript and Gramsci. I would surely have gotten an article out of this. I would have come up with a new counterproposal, or decided to withdraw the manuscript right then instead of wait longer.

And I thought of these things at the time, because in fact I knew what I was doing. And did not do them because I kept being told it was not possible I could know what I was doing.

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This is the kind of thing I mean about gate-keeping. During graduate school, it appears that basic information on research and writing is withheld from many, although it was not from me (and I came in with it). Later, information on how things really work is withheld while the basic information is repeated and repeated. I dislike academic advice because of its inappropriate suppositions of extreme ignorance and also malingering.

This is the point I want to make to people in my book of advice: they are in fact experts and they have the right to negotiate like older people. As I say, I could in fact have spent half an hour a day for those five months actually looking at the manuscript and Gramsci. I would surely have gotten an article out of this. I would have come up with a new counterproposal, or decided to withdraw the manuscript right then instead of wait longer. I would then have gotten much more done, enjoyed life more, spent less money and been paid more.

Finally, I strongly suspect that had I been a man, I would have been much more likely to receive answers to the questions I had, back then. I feel martyrized and stymied by academic advice because it presupposes the kind of incompetence men tend to ascribe to women. Perhaps the true problem is that many people have degrees from programs that do not teach their students nearly as much as mine did me.

Axé.