In my rant-fuel post yesterday, I made a brief reference to one of the things I think is tearing academia apart (other than the arrogance that was the title of that post): the changes between old schooling and new schooling. Today I want to expand a bit on that.
Full disclosure: part of my argument here will look like my boss/colleague/friend/brother-in-arms’ elevator speech for our program. I didn’t take it from him; it was my philosophy when he found me. But his finding me is all that saved me in academia. I was spinning my wheels pretty hard trying to find traction before I realized that there were people who thought the way I think. He also says it better than I do, with less judgment of other stances.
So here’s the deal. There’s this image of a professor. Tweed, elbow patches, shelf of ancient, impressive looking books. Well spoken, glasses and probably facial hair (unless a woman, then power suit and impeccable hair). This sort of professor is a particular beast. I’m not going to name names (that’s one of my rules for my blog– I don’t name names of anyone I didn’t talk to about mentioning them, other than the people who live in my house, including my dogs), but I worked with someone who WAS the poster-boy for this sort of professor. So I’m just going to describe him.
As I started my career, there was a full professor one year from retirement in the department where I worked, at a small school with a small faculty (I think there were eight tenured English professors and probably 15 of us adjuncts– all I had was a BA at the time, but they needed me). He was fairly well-known and was a premiere scholar in what he studied, but he’d make some mistakes in his career and ended up being a superstar on a small campus instead of a big shot on a larger campus. His specialty was Chaucer. And here’s the thing: this man KNEW Chaucer. Up and down. Left and right. He could quote any piece, he could tell you about various critiques and theories written referencing Chaucer’s work. He would walk the halls mumbling the Canterbury Tales in Old English. He was entitled and was misogynistic, but other than those things, he was delightful, good at trivia, not an unrefined teacher (though he looked down on me because I was the person teaching the faculty how to use digital technologies and he thought computers “diluted” writing. I once made a joke about Walter Benjamin and he didn’t get it because, smart as he was, he was a Chaucer guy). He was super-intelligent. I don’t want to insult his abilities. But here’s the problem with a professor like him: all the eggs are in one basket. They learn literally like climbing an Ivory Tower. And his tower was labeled Chaucer. He got to the top, and he could rain down nuggets of Chaucer knowledge. He was a walking history of that man’s work, a library-on-feet.
When he was trained, that was the aspiration of a professor. Being known as THE scholar who was an expert on something, or among the top people who knew a topic, was the road to a successful career, job security, and the ability to do what you loved. But during his lifetime, the world changed. Academia is slowly seeing this, but here’s the thing that happened: technology changed how we use and encounter, find and deploy information.
That professor, at one point, was the best resource I knew for the Canterbury Tales. I sat in his office and he told me all manner of little trivial nuggets about Chaucer while also exposing me to a great deal of theory about Chaucer’s work. But… this guy wrote books. I own those books. I can pull them off the shelf and all of his usefulness is in my hands. I can hold the sum total of what caused him to be a great expert on my lap and leaf through it. This has been true for a long time. But once that stuff became digital and someone could type “Chaucer” and some other boolean into Google, the way we make knowledge changed.
I trained among people who tried to do various versions of what that old school professor did. My current boss calls this “silo” education, where there’s a single vertical that you fill up (I call it Ivory Tower Syndrome, but I like castle metaphors). As I built my career, one of my peers in graduate school chose to build a career as a Marxist theorist. And that person is doing pretty well today, but the sum total of that person’s scholarly work is regurgitating and re-applying versions of what Marx said and wrote years and years ago. Some of it has a whiff of “new scholarship” scent, but in reality, it’s just re-affirming old things we’ve known forever. That person, though, who I actually think fairly highly of, can recite Marx quotes, can call on Stuart Hall (who I teasingly called “Stewart Little” in grad school), Deluze, etc. It’s kind of a nifty skill to have.
But I consider myself part of the new school. I know how to access information. Because I know that, I don’t memorize the works of specific scholars. I don’t try to always carry one theory I’m good at employing to use on everything. I draw across areas and across theories, and I tear down old ideas and take the pieces I want like a Lego builder on a mission in a room full of old projects. I consider knowledge to be a field– a horizontal. To be truly intelligent and to make new knowledge, to be well rounded and to prepare people to work and lead in this world, you have to be able to move laterally, to draw across ideas. You have to know spacial logic and be able to question things that people will present as monolithic. You have to look at everything from as many angles as you can and treat the battle like you’re a sniper, studying and planning for your shot, and not an artillery soldier with a machine gun just peppering everyone with your (in my example above) Chaucer bullets.
My philosophy on this has led numerous students who have worked with me to get jobs ahead of other candidates. I have a folder of thank-you notes from people who were able to employ this methodology of approaching the world and approaching knowledge and making and hence achieved their goals. And it’s worked fairly well for me.
But sometimes I run into brick walls. The most frequent one is that when I’m talking about some theory I’m working with, some project I’m in the middle of, or if I’m giving a “job” talk as we often do in academic fields, people often get super antsy when I reference a scholar they’ve heard of but I expand on one of that person’s theories. The big one I get lately is with Baudrillard. I use the idea of simulacra frequently in my work, but I don’t use it with the political baggage that the original text had. And I specify that, but people don’t always hear me. They are quick to call me on the carpet about using Baudrillard wrong.
I want to tell you a secret: if you’re not buying into the old school theory of monolithic scholarship, there isn’t a “wrong” way to read theory. There are sub-optimal ways to utilize theory (you can try something that fails), but human beings are by nature pattern recognizing, problem solving machines. This applies to how we interpret theories, too. If any of us are honest with ourselves– and while I have no data to show this, I’ve found it to be true in literally tens of conversations with other scholars– we start tweaking theories the second we read them. Sometimes people run back to the root text in fear and try to determine exactly what that author meant, but that’s not what I consider making new knowledge.
I realize a part of this is deeply cultural. As I mentioned in a recent post, I work with an Indigenous rhetoric and methodology. And if you’ve ever known a Native American, one of the things that many (not all, but most) tribes are noted for in early history is not having the European sense of ownership. If you bring a knife into a camp and you stop using it, and someone needs to cut, they come and take the knife and use it. White people insult each other by using the phrase “Indian giving,” but that’s actually just a difference sense of ownership.
With the arguments that rage currently about IP law, I have always proposed that we think of ideas the same way. I don’t mean steal everything and plagiarize, but why does an idea crystallize and become the property of one person? Why should we climb an Ivory Tower? I can access all the ideas that are in print. Why wouldn’t I take the parts I wanted and forge a new lens to study with? Why would I ever limit myself to simply re-applying someone else’s thinking?
And that’s what we need to become as scholars. We need to be more concerned with making– making things, making ideas, making knowledge– and less concerned with trying to be human databases. That’s why humanity built databases and maintains libraries and the like. Why waste our energy memorizing someone else’s work so we can recite it? Instead we should be doing new things.
That’s why when someone asks me what I do, the conversation is long. I can’t just say “I’m a Chaucer scholar.” Because a single sentence doesn’t encompass what I do, nor will it ever encompass what I want to teach or what sort of students I create. I tell people who don’t know academia that I help people who want to make the world better learn how to make the world better. I make knowledge for a living.
And I’m not the expert on anything. But I’m an expert at teaching people to look at everything and be critical thinkers. That seems like a better contribution to the world than standing atop my own tower like a feudal lord, dropping little puddles of my intellect.