[lbo-talk] yakking about the right

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Wed Apr 4 18:05:17 PDT 2012


At 10:37 AM 4/4/2012, Michael Smith wrote:
>
>
> > Dennis: [Academic] "hatreds develop for the opposite reason... i.e.
> careers are
> > at stake and somebody, somewhere, when you least expect it, can shoot
> > you down with a review of your work, among other means."
>
>No doubt; but careers are at stake in the corporate world
>too, and there's plenty of jostling for the plums and
>backstabbing there as well. Yet in my experience of the two
>worlds, the level of deep personal hatred and malice is
>considerably less in the corporate than the academic.

I think they're about the same. but one thing I don't get is: what money, what power, what prestige. if you are talking podunk university, seriously: what power? etc. I saw these silly little games get played out, i'm here typing at you because my career was at the hands of people having ridiculous fights over fat almost dead white guys vs race/ethnicity/gender studies and before that it was a war over the theory people v the research people. In the English Department, I saw creative writing students (and others) shredded in the crossfire between Mas'ud Zavarzadeh and Don Morton vs the "textual studies" wing vs the Creative Writing profs.

Maybe there was some money in it for the creative writing profs at that uni, but the rest I observed? I didn't see it. I didn't see it at the podunk unis I taught at. Even the elite liberal arts colleges, people had at it, but there wasn't any result for them.

In fact, one of the things I noticed was that one of the saving graces of university life is that it's _university_ life. Thus, while my department feasted on one another, ruining lives and careers, in terms of where you were *at* that university - advancing to full prof, for instance -- you could be treated like total shit by the winners in the war, but the fact was: you were still someone amongst your peers outside the particular university.

I used to kind of laugh at how it worked: they would go at each other, do all kinds of bizarre damage, make people's lives uncomfortable to the point that one prof just held all of his grad and upper level courses at his house, he was that uninterested in interacting with the rest of the faculty.

But these guys - four of them who'd been shat all over locally - simply turned to the wider academic community where they still had prestige. I mean, you can go on all you want about race, class, and gender in the curriculum and punish the profs who didn't want to throw over the fat almost dead white guys. But in the long run, if where it was at in the wider academic world was with the fat almost dead white guys? You were still a big cheese in *that* world and those were the audience to whom you published your research, where you networked for funding opps, where you culled the grad studs who'd come work with you.

The possibility of being shat on locally, while treated like a hotshot by the rest of academia is built into the very instituion itself (in the sociological sense). Thus, the reason why a dissertation has readers from outside the department - from different disciplines altogether - is culled from the ideal of a university: where knowledge is universal, beyond the merely local. So that a discipline within a particular uni doesn't get too incestuous. (another reason why unis no longer hire their own grads: the incest problem :)

It's the same reason why I could have a professor from another university altogether on my committee: knowledge wasn't supposed to be rooted in the particular institution.

So, these guys could survive the bullshit because they found their sustenance elsewhere.


>--
>--
>
>Michael J. Smith
>mjs at smithbowen.net
>
>http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org
>http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com
>http://cars-suck.org
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