Worst Professor Ever

WoPro’s note: I woke up Tuesday to find this in my mailbox. Apparently, Dr. $hiraz was, um, inspired by her conference…

I went to a conference recently at the University of Mordor.  UMord is the institution that granted the Worst Professor Ever her Ph.D., a document, which – in keeping with its infernal origins – burst into flame some years later.

In fact, I fact first met WoPro at UMord, when we were both minions in the subterranean orc-manufacturing plant beneath the Department of Evil Studies (that is the ivory tower with the fiery lidless eye at the top). Eventually, I slipped away unnoticed while all the male main characters were out the back smoking, sharpening their swords, and guffawing at each other’s jokes, but WoPro stayed, which to a large extent explains why my experience of academia,¹ is so much more positive than hers.² (Here is where I would compare the Ph.D. advisors I ended up with to Galadriel, except they might read this and kill me with their mysterious and terrifying elfish powers.)

I spent my weekend at UMord nervously scanning the horizon for predators, but as WoPro’s mentors had recently glutted their appetites on a feast of M.A. students and gelflings,³ I escaped unscathed.

Anyway, back to the conference. I was excited to go, not only because UMord is actually located in one of the best cities ever, and because I would get to catch up with some of my favorite people, but because the program promised an utterly unconventional conference. Many conferences are very dry, highly hierarchical, and formal, but this sounded like it might be … fun. The paper titles were intriguing, the mood anarchic, and the pop-culture references rife. The purpose seemed designed to wrench our often esoteric discipline (let’s call it Symbology) into the 21^st (or even 22^nd) century. Pokemon and the Panopticon? Bring it on!

One of the conference’s central themes was the need for us (liberal arts academics) to prove our worth to the world. This is something that WoPro makes me think about often, (Editor’s note: Sorry!) and I do think we should ask ourselves what we are doing that is valuable, useful, and helpful. (That is part of what I was thinking through in this post.) Like many of the presenters at the conference, I believe that we have all kinds of awesomeness to unleash and that we should a) do so and b) tell the world about it. It’s about there, though, that the similarity ends.

The conference’s prevailing tone was militantly, fiercely, joyously fatalistic. We – the humanities – are under siege and are fighting for our very survival. Chancellors, politicians, pro-Science university administrators, and sundry dark lords, are all out for our blood. Arm yourselves for the final battle! Grab some scientific terminology and a pitchfork! March on the castle shouting “kill the monster!” Oh, right, we are the castle. (Maybe we should offer some outreach classes on monster studies to the villagers and then steal their pitchforks while they are taking the final.)

It’s true that times are bad for us, but they are bad for everyone.  I am not denying the stupidity and shortsightedness of, for example, the cuts at SUNY Albany or the loss of “The Last Paleography Professor” (Prof. David Ganz of King’s College, whom I heard repeatedly and vaguely invoked, although never named, like some kind of panda mascot). And, yes, we feel threatened, and we (especially those of us without tenure) worry about our futures. Nonetheless, I cannot buy into the apocalyptic thinking. I am reminded of what Jon Stewart said at last week’s Rally to Restore Sanity in D.C.: “we live now in hard times, not end times” (video).

Here’s the thing (and it’s relevant, I swear): my students love zombies. They looooooooove them, as do others. They are eagerly anticipating the zombie plague. I have tried to figure out the appeal of apocalyptic fantasy and I can’t. I don’t want to rough it. I don’t even like camping. Some of my students like the idea of being pioneers in a dystopian future, but I don’t want to survive and single-handedly reconstitute culture. If I did, our intellectual heritage would consist of a lot of particular ideas about history, a pretty good margarita recipe, and, after one muddled attempt to explain thrust, the assertion that planes fly by magic. (Editor’s note: the margarita recipe is actually awesome.) I’m only useful in a much wider community, and it will need to include a whole bunch of people who are not in the arts and not in academia at all.

Also, I am just not very brave when it comes to ravening murderous supernatural armies.

Anyway, some of my students don’t want to fight zombies – they want to be them, because it sounds really fun. Of course, the zombie apocalypse is fun, because it’s not real.  (We all know there are hardly any zombies, or Undead Americans, as they prefer to be called, and that they are far less infectious than previously thought.) My students reported seeing a lot of zombie costumes this Halloween (along with some terrorists and Chilean miners) and the gleeful academic millennialism seems pretty similar to these college kids lurching about the streets and shedding putrefying body parts, except instead of shouting “BRAAIIIIIINNNNNZZZ!!!!,” they talk about “post-humans queering the hegemonic discourse through appropriation and embodiment of the vehicles for consciousness.” That is, they use bigger words and more of them.

I met lots of interesting people at the conference and enjoyed talking to them. The crowd was social, friendly and talkative. Some of the presentations were original, engaging, and thought provoking. In those terms, the conference was a success. Many of the talks, however, gave me a severe case of prefix buildup.  Prefix buildup is when the “trans,” “meta,” and “post” fall off words to which they have been carelessly affixed and get stuck in your ears.  After it happens, you can’t hear the rest of the talk and after repeated exposure over a short period you lose the ability to attend talks at all. In severe cases, one may be forced to seek a drinking establishment far from the conference hotel where the risk of further exposure is low. The problem was compounded by the rampaging hordes of parentheses, hyphens, slashes, ellipses, and quotation marks, which galloped across all available printed material leaving trails of randomly broken words and titles entirely subordinated to pointless puns. The desolation is hard to describe. Or rather de-scribe or de/scribe. See what I did there? Yes, it really was like that.

Here I feel like the reactionary monstrous offspring of an ungodly cross between the late William Safire and Stanley Fish (arrrgghhh! horrific mental image), but if I had been a spy sent out by some evil pro-Science anti-liberal arts provost to observe this self-justification of the humanities, I’d tell her to cut the program. I’d relegate the humanities to the campus of Ultima Thule where classes are held in yurts with no wifi and interlibrary loan arrives via reindeer.

I thought about what made me so mad and it is this:

You are justifying your utility to the world in language that the world cannot understand.

You are, therefore, seeking to prove your worth in a way that demonstrates your irrelevance.

As I tell my students, language is not a blunt object thrown in the direction of meaning. You are not pushing the limits of expression, as did Thucydides and Foucault. Wordplay is not a substitute for reason, argumentation, and evidence. I suspect you are cloaking banal statements in layers of neologism. If you are saying something brilliant, then do it the justice of expressing it in a way that people outside the university can understand.

Yes, I guess I’m old school after all. I like language that communicates meaning. In the real world, people use it that way.  It doesn’t get them tenure, and it doesn’t get their articles published in The Journal of Super Excellent Studies, but otherwise it seems to work fine. Yes, occasionally you might need to create new words and, yes, you do have to wrestle language into submission to force it to convey complex and novel ideas with clarity. It’s a battle and it’s called editing.  Stream of consciousness outpourings may indeed subvert the conventions of grammar and the production of meaning.  That is exactly why they undermine our cause.

If you want to be relevant to a wider audience, start speaking a language that intelligent adults who haven’t been to graduate school, or even to college, can understand.  More to the point, speak in a language that reasonable human beings can tolerate listening to.

I was discussing the issue (i.e. bitching) with a friend and we decided that we should start a parody journal for the field. The problem was how to distinguish it from the actual journals, but then it occurred to us that we wouldn’t have to. Hence the concept of the sar-chasm, that is the gulf between those taking the content at face value (or however they read academic stuff) and those who realize it is satirical. Accordingly, the journal will be called Sar-c(h)asm or perhaps Sar/c(h)asm: the journal of meta-post-trans-ironic studies, the dark arts, and ferret keeping. (Of course, there is a small possibility that the existing journals are themselves parodies, in which case, well played symbologists, well played.)

Also, BRAAAIIIIIINNNNNZZZ!!!!!!!

1. I refuse to call it academe. Academia sounds more like a nut.

2. Grad school hint #18, find advisors and a department who don’t wish you would just curl up and die already.

3. Yes, I know that I am mixing my fantasy realms, but sometimes only a skeksis will do.

Tags: academic jargon, academic talks, anti-intellectualism, conferences, dr. $hiraz, humanities, humanities under fire, last paleography professor, lit crit, literary criticism, monster theory, mordor, postmodernism, presentations, queer theory, stanley fish, suny albany cuts, symbology, we live in hard times not end times, william safire, zombies