reel hot pashun
Scottie Bowman (bowman@mail.indigo.ie)
Sun, 26 Jul 1998 18:08:48 +0000
Good try, Jim, good try.
The thing about academics is not the number of books they've
read. It's the nature of their experience outside of these same
books.
There are at least two aspects to this: the kind of people who
become academics & what the academy does to them once
they're inside & the drawbridge has gone up.
A life in scholarship attracts the bookish, the obsessional,
the squirrels of the world. It holds out the prospect of long
holidays & work where the hands are not dirtied & the days
pass sitting in a quiet library or holding forth to immature
& impressionable minds. It sounds a life of civilised ease.
One will face no great challenge from one's peers. Those bastards
not hanging on one's every word will, nonetheless, offer no real
threat since their progress depends finally on one's approval.
That's how it all looks from the outside.
Once inside the ivied walls, of course, things begin to feel
a little different. The world contracts to a competition where
the compulsion to publish is as urgent as the compulsion to
defaecate. One's little heap of produce must be protected &
eaked out to its very limit. The fear of plagiarism demands
the construction of guardian walls against prying eyes.
The atmosphere becomes ever more claustrophobic & paranoid.
Increasingly, one resents just how low the intellectual is held
in public esteem. Government is sees as indifferent. A sense of
security leaks away down the same crack as the sense of proportion.
Bitterness rises inexorably. Life grows frightful......
I've been a family doctor in a small village, a shrink in a booby
hatch, a child psychiatrist, a medical officer on an RAF flying
station, an analyst in London - & for the past 35 years I've been
in private practice in a university town where a quite
disproportionate number of my patients have belonged to the academic
staff.
Don't try to tell me about the Olympian wisdom of your friendly
neighbourhood prof.
Scottie B.