WE'RE THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN | 2006-06-01
I wonder if you caught the undertone of JOY I felt in discussing my grouching and Mark and Shari coming back hard.
As I said, I went back to grad school for a semester in 1992 just to see how things look now. I really wondered if it would be worth the trouble and expense.
It WAS.
I could not believe how the process of academics turning into standard and packaged bureucrats had progressed in the decades since I was last a grad student or conducting a seminar.
Nowadays no student would DARE do anything but be agreeable.
Even a generation ago by the time you were a grad student in a seminar you were an A student and confident, even cocky. Today the sort of outright battles we had between the professor and the grad students would be absolutely unimaginable.
No professor then could even imagine downgrading a student for just plain being combative. It was a matter of honor: A professor would NEVER allow himself to be SUSPECTED of downing a grad seminar student for coming in swinging.
Now it is assumed that the professor will do just that. It is part of the modern prep for the academic bureaucracy: Go along and get along.
As in so many other cases, I am about the ONLY person who got to see the process up close and personal many years apart, and I have this unique talent of REMEMBERING.
So I CONDUCT this seminar. I don't TEACH it.
You think I'm pretty good, or you wouldn't BE here.
But you take no crap.
So when the crowd in the seminar I was conducting came back on me being crotchety and tasteless, my response was NOT that I was being beaten, it was a feeling of nostalgia.
And, above all, a feeling of JOY.
We are the only real seminar left.
Which means I am about the only academic left who can CONDUCT a seminar.
That is a VERY big deal to me.
I am proud of me, and I am proud of you.
In that order, of course.