Why can't we all just get along?
Below are some excerpts from an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education. I will have to think about the author's final analysis on the function of dysfunction. As it stands, I came into this essay more properly on the side of the author's friend, although I don't usually put it into exactly those words. I am more sympathetic to the kid who retreated from the social scene of primary and secondary school than this phrasing (below) seems to be, although the sympathy has some rigid limits. One is that we are not children anymore. We're grown ups and should be reasonably expected to at least TRY to have a perspective which incorporates that fact and which is wider than our own shoulders. The author seems concerned with exonerating the shitty behavior of his cohort, but then I suppose I would be too if I were to stay in academia. It's the other extreme of the spectrum, the opposite of the bitter pill/sour grapes phenomena.
The Function of Dysfunction
An associate professor ponders the cause and effect of academic infighting
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As I was describing our latest departmental dust-up to a friend who is not an academic, he interrupted with an observation. "The problem with professors," he said, "is that they never learned to get along with others." According to my friend, your typical professor is the socially awkward kid from high school who didn't fit in anywhere outside of the library. Unable to cut it in the real world, we just opted to stay in school. Eventually we ran out of classes to take, so we had to start teaching them. But at no point did we acquire basic social skills.
One of my faculty colleagues (who actually has pretty good social skills) offered another perspective. He pointed out that academics, especially humanists, are wholly invested in the idea of intellectual exchange. "Look at our classes," he reasoned. "What do we do? We circle a bunch of people around a table and talk. What we want more than anything is to create and participate in intellectual communities."
2 comments:
I'm not sure if this is what the faculty colleague was getting at, but when one of the primary demands of one's job is to effect collective debate, one becomes quite good at playing devil's advocate -- which makes one quite unpopular in non-academic circles. What does Miss Manners (or some such) say about polite conversation? Avoid discussions of religion, politics, and... er, can't remember the third. Academics walk into a dinner party and immediately start talking about verboten topics, and nobody knows what to do with them. Add that to the fact that academia is essentially Hollywood, with brains as the basis of value rather than beauty. People are destined to become insecure about the content of their craniums (crania? help), and that shows up as the behavioral equivalent of excessive cosmetic surgery: desperate and disturbing to others. No wonder you want to leave.
Yeah, I always go right to the forbidden topics too. I think those topics can be discussed but only if the people talking are not overwhelmingly socially inept. So many ways for the ineptitude to shine through too, you know? Desperate and disturbing is a good catch all.
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