In September I left academics for the second time to put my family before my career. The first time I took the year off before my Master's to support my partner while he did a year-long education degree in Fredericton. The second time, which began this September, I am home taking take of our newborn before beginning my PhD in English Literature. Both leaves have given me time to pause and reflect upon this thing I, and so many of my friends, do and aspire to do for the rest of our working lives. Now, I could rant about how I love it, how I look forward to hours of coffee-drenched hours in the library, how I love the scent, the touch, of the books to which I -- like Hermione -- so "desperately cleave," but how even more I love the words. I love to roll another writer's sentences in my mouth, and best of all, to discuss books with some of the most brilliant people I have had the privilege to meet. I could spend this post talking about how rewarding it is to help younger students write better, read better, and how fantastic it is to spend my days writing and considering text. But instead, I want to write about perception, and how other people perceive what academics do, their expectations of us, and our expectations of ourselves.
Often I meet with the stereotype of the absent minded academic, the academic that cannot keep track of their every day finances, or remember to wear their shirt on right-side-in. And I do not want to rebut this. (However, I can tell you I know more than a few academics who are both incredibly fashionable and put together, and very capable of being organized). I am horribly disorganized. I am so scattered that I walk into things because I am more present in the thought I am thinking than the place I am going. I walk into rooms and forget why I am there. I get out of the shower and realize an hour later that I did not wash my hair.
I often get asked how I can be so apparently smart, and yet be so incredibly ditsy. The other day, I got asked by a friend of mine "what is it that you are good at, actually?" in response to being informed that I had received a prestigious fellowship. I don't mind saying that her question gave me pause. Yes, what is it that I am good at? I read books...I like books...but is that all I do? Read books and think? But I am not smart enough to understand the basics of money management, and the most basic math gives me the sweats. But I think.
Recently what keeps bothering me is this notion that we don't DO anything, us academics. We point out the problems of our society but so often do not have any solutions. Even some of my friends who are academics have an existential dilemma about what it is they do, as if they didn't live in the real world, as if they sit in their ivory tower and never get their hands dirty. This "real world," I wonder...where is it? As if the University is not in the world, it is somehow outside. Or, even worse, it presupposes that us academics never leave the university and carry on lives in the world. While it is true that there have been days I, and many of my fellow grad students, have not left campus, I assure you we do go home and have lives -- partners, arguments, our fair share of existing of ramen noodles, families that require our attention and so on. And so, with this in mind, what do we have to offer the world in which we exist?
Thought. Perhaps, as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek posits, what we really need is more philosophy, more thinking, and less impulsive action based on emotion. We see that change needs to occur -- and I don't dispute that it does -- but the most meaningful action will occur after sufficient thought and rational discourse. The time for action needs to be put on hold, and there needs to be more emphasis on engaging in thought. Boredom, reflection, consideration, quiet, these things have gone missing in our society. Young academics are desperately trolling for jobs, frustrated and bitter and angry, posting in forums about what to do to make yourself more hireable. While I don't discredit the necessity to find gainful employment, this ramped marketing of oneself in place of doing what it is we do as academics and intellectuals makes me sad.
I do not need a university in which to think. It is, instead, a place where other people who do what I do hang out. It is where thoughts are born and breed and grow bigger. The arguments I have had over carbs and beer with people in my department, or people outside my department for that matter, have made me not only a better scholar, but a better person. Maybe I am a romantic, and you can call me naive (the you out there in the Internet void) but knowledge is a privilege, and as scholars we can and should nurture it and share it. We can ask the hard questions, and we shouldn't feel guilty about not having the answers. Once the right questions are asked, the right answers come more easily. So, I think, thinking needs to be the new marching...at least for now. And us academics should take pride in our ability to think -- HARD -- about things that are important to our world in which we DO live.
Perhaps it is our thinking that keeps us questioning ourselves, what we do, and why it is relevant. But there can hardly be any doubt that keeping ourselves mentally sharp by asking the questions we want to ask about the things we want to ask them about (even if it is about the significance of buttons in Jane Austen), is vital to maintaining an advanced level of social and cultural discourse about a great many things. So, dear academics, intellectuals, scholars, grad students, aspiring grad students, we are important; our research is important; our teaching is perhaps the most important of all. And, hey, you're beautiful.
Thought. Perhaps, as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek posits, what we really need is more philosophy, more thinking, and less impulsive action based on emotion. We see that change needs to occur -- and I don't dispute that it does -- but the most meaningful action will occur after sufficient thought and rational discourse. The time for action needs to be put on hold, and there needs to be more emphasis on engaging in thought. Boredom, reflection, consideration, quiet, these things have gone missing in our society. Young academics are desperately trolling for jobs, frustrated and bitter and angry, posting in forums about what to do to make yourself more hireable. While I don't discredit the necessity to find gainful employment, this ramped marketing of oneself in place of doing what it is we do as academics and intellectuals makes me sad.
I do not need a university in which to think. It is, instead, a place where other people who do what I do hang out. It is where thoughts are born and breed and grow bigger. The arguments I have had over carbs and beer with people in my department, or people outside my department for that matter, have made me not only a better scholar, but a better person. Maybe I am a romantic, and you can call me naive (the you out there in the Internet void) but knowledge is a privilege, and as scholars we can and should nurture it and share it. We can ask the hard questions, and we shouldn't feel guilty about not having the answers. Once the right questions are asked, the right answers come more easily. So, I think, thinking needs to be the new marching...at least for now. And us academics should take pride in our ability to think -- HARD -- about things that are important to our world in which we DO live.
Perhaps it is our thinking that keeps us questioning ourselves, what we do, and why it is relevant. But there can hardly be any doubt that keeping ourselves mentally sharp by asking the questions we want to ask about the things we want to ask them about (even if it is about the significance of buttons in Jane Austen), is vital to maintaining an advanced level of social and cultural discourse about a great many things. So, dear academics, intellectuals, scholars, grad students, aspiring grad students, we are important; our research is important; our teaching is perhaps the most important of all. And, hey, you're beautiful.
As one of the decidedly non-academic people, I found this useful in considering the academic type. I usually find myself thinking of those in academia (or indeed anyone with a job which confines them to an office) as some sort of "other". Someone who must be tolerated and coddled not unlike a petulant child. I should probably remember that the academics do the thinking and the planning because that is what they are suited to. I have never question the importance of the role in society, but may have forgotten their importance in our society specifically. Myself and a VAST majority of people in roles similar to mine tend to forget that we do what we do because we are suited to it. Academics are suited to what they do, and though they stay warmer in the winter and likely have less aches and pains In the morning, they work just as hard, usually for less pay and less recognition.
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