Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 08:13:56 +1000 From: InfoDesign <info_design at dingoblue.net.au>
At 05:08 31-05-01, you wrote:
>That is exactly why I decided to go to college - and was quite open about
>it to the great disappointment of my old folks. Except that I was quite
>good at "something else" - I was supposed to be an electrical engineer, but
>the engineering crowd scared me, too much "in the box" thinking and
>admiration for authority - hence I switched to the humanities. True, their
>propensity for bullshitting, endless citations, and names dropping was
>quite irritating, but it was a much lesser evil than the fascist mentality
>of the engineering profession (although I still admire the engineers'
>ability of making material objects as opposed to humanities' paper
>pushing). And of course, the prospects for getting an academic job (= no
>bosses and factory discipline) was much greater. So here I am - farting
>in a chair at a prestigiuos university, having enough time to subscribe to
>listservs, not having to punch in and out - ain't life great?
>
>wojtek
Maybe sociology departments are healthier than literature departments. I found a much greater tendency to admire authority (or, let's say, express admiration for authority) among my most successful humanities colleagues at Hopkins than I do among the hardware and software developers I've been working with for the last seven years. The former read all the most accepted secondary literature in order to find out how to read the primary texts, parroted the pomos whenever prompted, and when Le Grand D. stood wearily amongst them and lectured them on their own relative boorishness (apparently the natural outcome of the fact that he was French and they mere Amerloques) they were grateful. What was worse, while they scrambled over each other for recognition they pretended to be high-minded, independent thinkers. You don't find that sort of rampant self-delusion in R&D departments, where respect and rewards are in proportion to creativity, functional output and the ability to work with others; where workers tend to be highly critical of management; and competition is above board.
Maybe it has to do with the fact that engineers are making things, whereas lit-critters so obviously are not (and suffer from a kind of neurosis of futility), but I always thought the shameless ass licking, bullshitting and back stabbing prevalent in lit departments resulted mainly from the size of the financial pool available for humanities salaries relative to the size of the pool of applicants for humanities jobs. The ratio is better for IT workers. Makes for better human beings, overall. Erst das Brot, dann die Moral.
cheers Joanna S
my site www.overlookhouse.com news from down under www.smh.com.au