ACADEMIA

by Hugh M. Lewis

Academia is a paradise of mixed blessings. It has always demonstrated that nothing that is perfect can ever be had without some human cost. It is as much the neurotic's escape from human reality as it is the center of the intellectual pursuit of the ‘really real.’

Academia is a place where people gang up on one another and where the loner is bound to become a loser. People form cliques and small parties not merely for the pursuit of mutual intellectual interests but for the pursuit of power and for the sake of mutual protection. There are always more than a few academic sharks on the prowl of university corridors preying upon hapless and helpless victims. It demonstrates how great and ideal humanity really is in Academia when everybody watches but nobody comes to the aid of the victim. Unfortunately, I've been both victim and witness.

The values of academic competition and success can only lead to an ethos and pathos of success rooted in an obsessive fear of failure. In such an atmosphere, one person’s success becomes interpreted as another’s failure, and in order to better one’s chances of success and to assuage one’s anxieties over the prospects of failure, many people become very adept in making other people’s losses their own gains.

In Academia, there are people in positions of authority whom one will never meet but who can and will make completely arbitrary decisions regarding your future success or failure within the system. A person can be shot down without much cause by someone completely anonymous for a reason that has little to do with that individual’s life. People can invest many fruitless years of their life within the Academic System without ever being told that they never had the slightest hope of success from the start.

Class structures Academia as much as Academia reinforces the class structure of our society. Academic equality, opportunity and fairness become empty rhetoric when one takes into account the influence and implications of class in the ethos and pathos of Academia. The ideal of Academic social mobility becomes then an exception rather than the rule for the lower classes, and the benefits of receiving a higher education becomes the prerogative of the wealthy and well connected. Academics, if they are any good at being what they are, know what class they owe their allegiance to and who's who among themselves.

Academics have been quick to point their fingers in blame and easily criticize virtually anything under the sun that suits their convenience. A great deal of their liberalism and radicalism amounts to so much false consciousness, and in the last analysis becomes mere hypocrisy when one considers their cooption within the System and where they get their pay checks from. The espousing of values contradictory to the predominant society can only be allowed in forums where they make no difference in the world and where they can be shown to be false anyway. If all professors genuinely practiced what they so often preached, few would survive very long in the Academic marketplace or in the world beyond. This academic dichotomization between the said and the done even becomes more contradictory when some of the most popular and liberal acting professors turn out to be some of the most fanatical upholders of the status quo of the Academic System. Almost a decade of successful academic work has only led to increasingly reinforce these beliefs, and almost no contrasting evidence has served to disconfirm any of these views.

If Aristocratic values, class snobbery and feudal relations survive in modern industrialized societies, then it is in Academia where they may be found most to flourish. In this regard, Academia represents one of the most conservative social institutions of human civilization—even military machines must of necessity reform and renovate their social organization in order to keep pace with the development of modern warfare. Democratic values have hardly entered into the way things get done within Academia, and academic authority, even if severely circumscribed and limited by even more autocratic administration, nevertheless remains virtually absolute and autocratic.

Academia remains a realm of social contrasts and ideological contradictions. It combines the best and the worst, the most open and the most close-minded, the most liberal and the most conservative. Great talent, virtue and humanity is to found alongside of mediocrity, hypocrisy, minionship and fanatical true believers. It is frequently the case that things, and people, in Academia prove to be the opposite of what they appear to be.

It is especially true that in Academia, a book cannot be judged by its cover.

The end of self-honesty and social humility is the beginning of hypocrisy and egotistical hubris. Academia is the proving ground of human character and spirit, where everything is only hypothetical.

Any school is only as good as the people who compose it. Great resources, great reputations, great test scores and great plans can mean next to nothing if the average student remains disinterested, uninvolved and distracted in the normal curriculum. A school may be poor, lacking in renown, good students or high class administrators, and yet still out perform the best and accomplish great things if its faculty are able to tap into and mobilize the fullest potential and spirit of the student body. Nothing is more defeating of human potential and deadening of the human mind than the run of the mill and ‘business as usual’ routine and attitude in the classroom and corridor.

It is proving to be a grand paradox of my life that though I’ve always hated and resented Academia, it remains practically the only arena of the world in which I have much hope of accomplishing anything significant. For me Academia has always been something of a love-hate relationship—rarely have I been able to experience its everyday ethos with neutrality and disregard for the things going on around me. Almost everyday I come home from school I’ve been extremely upset and angry at something somebody did or said during the day. Only on rare occasions do good things occur, and it is usually for reasons which I could never have predicted or planned for. I long for the day when I can sit through the whole class period without utter disinterest in what is going on.

An ‘A’ professor is one who invites open discourse in the class, does not mind criticism or contradiction, and always takes the time to talk. ‘B’ professor expects all students to tow the same line, doesn’t really like too many questions, and always seem to be in a hurry. ‘C’ professors have a small following of a group of students, never quite remember your name, never have the time to talk, and seem to be trying out for popularity contests in the corridors. ‘D’ professors are young, bright, upwardly mobile, highly motivated, and seem to be trying to win a beauty contest. ‘F’ professors are divorced, frustrated and treat all students like misbehaving children. In my many years as a student, I’ve come across only very few professors whom I would give an ‘A’ to.

In Academia, the nice person will finish last, and everyone else will come in second to last.

During the last decade, schools have been organizing themselves increasingly along the lines of big business. For these schools, the goal of academic administration is minimizing costs and maximizing profits, and the job of education itself becomes of secondary importance. It is unfortunate that in a business world organized around a military industrial complex, the business models that the schools have adopted for their own administration come straight from the models of military organization. It is unfortunate that because Academics have usually not been in the military themselves, and usually despise the military, that they are blind to the parallels of some of their own practices. In this regard I found the student rating scale and evaluations and the file kept on each student by the department in one university to be very similar to the same kind of evaluations officers of the Marine Corps regularly made of their men of their command. After about four years of such evaluations, from at least half a dozen different officers, I came to conclude that the decisive factor of such evaluations was not my own behavior, which remained fairly consistent, but depended almost entirely upon the subjective opinions of the evaluating officer. Evaluations turned on whether that officer liked you or not, which in turn often depended upon how many affinities you shared with that officer and how much you kissed up to them. Now the same kind of thing has been happening in universities, with the decisive criteria of a person’s grades and evaluations being increasingly the subjective opinions of the particular professor. More than once I’ve attended classes in which I knew that no matter what I did, I would receive at best only a B because I crossed the professor on intellectual issues or there existed a basic conflict of personalities.

It is unfortunate that universities should fall into a blind routine following a principle of organization coming from a domain of social order which has long been noted for its anti-intellectual orientation. The most that can be hoped for in such institutions is the cultivation of spuriousness, blind obedience and student sycophancy, and ultimately, the leveling of an insufferable mediocrity that holds ‘routine operational efficiency’ as its supreme value. When professors become more concerned about dead-lines than with discussion of ideas, we have ended up by putting the cart in front of the horses in higher education.

The most dangerous intellectual is the self-righteous reformer who has all of the answers to the world's problems but none of the worldly wisdom to get us there. Academics may be more enlightened than the lay public, but they are certainly not necessarily more emancipated.

Nowhere else is the dichotomy between the mind and the body, knowing and being, ideal ends and practical means, the said and the done, greater than in Academia. As as nowhere else, it is in Academia that the intellect and ideas of mind become systematically and purposefully separated from the real world context in which intelligence and such ideas have their primary reference and ultimate origin. In Academia good thinkers and true believers do not necessarily have to be great human beings.

Academic organization is not that much different from military organization in its promotion of conformity and preservation of the status quo. The main and most basic difference is that where military organization promotes conformity of the body and turning off the mind, academic organization is oriented toward promoting conformity of the mind and turning off of the body. Besides this basic contrast, the only other essential difference seems to be that military organizations must occasionally fight wars, while in Academia it is just an everyday battle of the ego. The thing about aggression is that the student just doesn’t know quite what to do with it at the end of a long school day or at the end of a long week or a long semester or year, just as a soldier doesn’t know what to do with his mind at the end of an exhausting day of drill, exercises and field operations.

It used to be that higher education was an important investment in one’s future. In contemporary American culture at least, it seems that education has become just one more thing to be consumed. We can always use our diplomas as bumper stickers on our shinny new cars that we use to drive to the end of the unemployment line.

American Academia, like most sectors of American society, has become characterized by an increasingly top heavy administrative super-structure that accomplishes nothing except increasing the controls and constraints upon people’s freedoms and which costs a great deal to maintain. Education for independent thinking cannot but become compromised by such unbalanced administrative overhead.

Thoughts cannot be spoken freely in open forums when everyone is afraid of her or his job or grade. Fairness becomes a fiction of those who fail.

I have been on five different university campuses in different parts of the country during the last five years. In all five I saw the same things occurring—less money in the budget, increasing costs of tuition, the building of parking lots and new expensive facades of buildings by private contractors, and the taking over of vital academic services by national chains and the private sector of the economy. In all this ‘development’ very little has been done to develop human potential or new teaching techniques which will better tap into the unlimited potential of the human mind. The universities may be improving physically in their appearance, but mentally they are quickly becoming an administrative quagmire and a professional nightmare. The education of the intellect cannot profit by becoming big business.

Like the military, Academia is quick to punish and often painfully slow to reward.

Educational equality has been compromised for the sake of enhancing political economic efficiency of what amounts to pen pushing, paper piling self-legitimization, instead of meeting the very real and substantial needs of the ultimately incalculable human mind.

The paradox of this is that educational efficiency has been traded off in the name of greater social equality, which rhetoric itself is based upon the blanket administration of double-standards.

My accumulating GPA has been my piling up of special credits to get into Academic Heaven rather than the piling of money to buy my way into the establishment. I’ve been waiting at the gates for several years, and no one has yet come to open them for me.

In education there is always some point of diminishing returns beyond which the extra effort and investment has decreasing net effect. The trouble has always been trying to figure out exactly when this optimum point is reached, and if surpassed, whether one should continue playing one’s hand or just retire from the game. In Academia it is all or nothing.

I have found little to compare to the experience of sitting in class after class, day after day, hour after hour, semester after semester and year after year just waiting for it all to end. Students sit silently, directed towards the head of the class or in a circle towards its center, constrained in one place so that they can move about very little, if at all, and can only speak when spoken to. More often than not lectures are half-baked and boring to listen to. I have found little more effective than this except perhaps television, and increasingly, the Internet, in systematically eroding one's active involvement with one’s effective environment, encouraging passivity and stultifying the creative imagination.

The best thing that can be done is to open up all key administrative positions to periodic general election by the faculty. Only in this way can the real academic interests of the students and their professors be best served, and the cooption and direction of school policy from above be effectively prevented. It is a paradox that our society has rather middling managers who earn as much or more than most national presidents and high level government officials. The answer to improving the quality of our education and the freedom of our society has always been in achieving more democracy and not less.

American academicians and administrators would do well to pay less attention to the welfare of the ‘student body’ that has always managed to take care of its own needs, and to give more interest to the condition of the ‘student mind,’ the needs of which commonly go increasingly unsatisfied.

The most rewarding intellectual experiences I’ve had have been when I’ve been in a genuine dialogue with professors or other students on ideas and things of the world. I have learned as much from such discussions as from any monotone lecture or stuffy textbook. The interests of the young students are not well served if they are not permitted enough ‘quality time’ in interpersonal contact with their professors. Administrators impose superficial cattle classes and distance education with an eye to account books, but do not weigh the immeasurable. The measure of the quality of any education is directly proportional to the amount of time each student gets to spend talking with her/his professors. Not much is going on if everyone acts like they are too busy to take the time to talk to one another.

The social needs of students are inseparable from their intellectual requirements. If a student’s body and emotions and psycho-social identity won’t co-operate with the Academic system, there is little the student’s brain or behavioral discipline can do to control the situation. Growing up, becoming an adult and seeking wisdom in the world has always had its own independent schedule that must be heeded regardless of the Academic deadlines. The most successful and highly rewarding students are those who are able to put the maturation of their social and personal life on hold long enough to get their degree in hand. More than anything else, this requires that the student have come from a background of socio-emotional and economic security and stability that fosters a healthy and unthreatened sense of ego identity to be developed soon enough to keep the student in check and on schedule until they are able to finally finish their degree.

The best students are returning "nontraditional" students who have been in the world and have some measure by which to weigh the teacher's words.

Professors should be allowed to pick their own courses and schedules, and should not be subject to a popularity contest.

The virtue of having to teach is that we are forced to learn—often for the first time.

The academic priesthood is but one pathway to enlightenment. It is frequently a very straight, narrow and hypocritical one. There has always been another avenue to seeking wisdom in the world. This is the way that is seldom straight, never narrow and always full of disillusionment, but it is always open and unending. Needless to say, the two paths rarely intersect and learning to walk along one road in life tends to make one ill suited for traversing the alternative route. The paradox is that the road less traveled is the most rewarding intellectually.

One should not underrate the role of serendipity and intuition in the quest for understanding. Our noses follow our pathways of intuitive interest and curiosity as much as our interests are led by our noses.

The mark of didactic education, whatever its external trappings, is that it teaches its students to say nothing rather than to risk making a mistake that will bring punishment. In any such system, students are encouraged not to make mistakes, and not to learn anything by making mistakes. In our own Academic system, the encouragement of conformity of belief and behavioral obedience goes far in advancing a student ahead of the class. Perfection of performance is rewarded in competitive contexts versus the acquisition of new skills, and the fear of failure is frequently the primary motivation for getting anything done. It is to be wondered that, given such an ethos, our own Academic system has advanced very far beyond a prescriptive, didactic approach.

To know is something of an illusion concealing all we don’t know. Learning always dispels that illusion of our own ignorance.

The more I learn the less I know. The more I know the less I learn.

The hardest part about living is not knowing that we will eventually die, but in not knowing how best to use the limited time we are blessed with in life.

Everyday I sit in class, I learn something a little more about the world I didn’t know before. Every school day is a lesson in my own ignorance and narrow mindedness. Everyday I sit in class, is a day I miss in the world.

Thoughts are absolutely free until they are voiced. Once spoken, thoughts become imprisoned in the words that speak them. Words are the chains of the free mind. That is why a loquacious professor is often one who thinks the least.