Essay on what an academic really is

[jimbogumbo]

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/02/03/america_you_dont_understand_academics_at_all_150420.html

[ciao_yall]

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/02/03/america_you_dont_understand_academics_at_all_150420.html

This has got to be a troll.

According to this guy, academics are harmless because they are (1) totally out of touch with reality (2) eagerly encouraging your children to spend tuition dollars in preparation for low-paying, useless careers in academia.

[Parasaurolophus]

Hmm. Well, for what it's worth, I'm not particularly interested in talking shop with anyone. I'd much rather talk about world and life stuff. I do enjoy publishing, and do a lot of it, but I don't want to actually talk about it.

Except with students. I don't want to talk to them about anything at all!

[Wahoo Redux]

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/02/03/america_you_dont_understand_academics_at_all_150420.html

This has got to be a troll.

According to this guy, academics are harmless because they are (1) totally out of touch with reality (2) eagerly encouraging your children to spend tuition dollars in preparation for low-paying, useless careers in academia.

Well, there actually is a Marshall Poe with his biography linked to the byline. 

Honestly, this is not such an inaccurate editorial.  I'm guessing Poe just wanted to counteract the propagandistic stuff on places like Real Clear Politics by exaggerating academic harmlessness just a bit.

[Sun_Worshiper]

It is stunning how little the average person understands what academics do. If they did, they'd realize that most of their concerns are overblown and their missing many of the real problems.

[jimbogumbo]

I honestly think it is an accurate description of a large subset of R1 researchers. They are just not into much but the subject.

My colleagues and I were active researchers, but like Para actually talked and socialized about life. What we didn't do was try to make our students into little clones of ourselves. We focused on our subject matter, and ways of thinking about it.

[marshwiggle]

Two things are interesting:

• "Russian history" is about as stereotypically "academic" as possible, (unless you're actually in Russia,).
• Despite that, the picture at the top of the article is clearly a chemistry lecture, in a science-equipped lecture hall.

[jerseyjay]

I assume the story is accurate as far as it goes. That is, it reflects the experience of one professor, who in turn reflects the experience of a slice of the professoriate. I have met people like the author. I have also met people like "Dr. Trotsky". There are also other types. Russian history contains both types--as well as Dr. Strangelove and Dr. Rasputin. There are quite a few of Marxists in Russian history, who manage to publish and do all the professional stuff a history professor is supposed to do. There are also quite a few (more, probably, in the US) of anti-Marxists.

There are also professors who teach at community colleges, who are adjuncts, and who have completely different experiences than the author and would view the author's experience as completely out of touch.

I agree with the author that most Americans do not really know what being an academic is like. I would say that many academics (like the author?) do not know how many other academics live their lives--at other schools and even other departments.

Finally, for what it is worth, I am a history professor but I have regularly taught in lecture halls with Bunsen burners.

[Wahoo Redux]

Two things are interesting:

• "Russian history" is about as stereotypically "academic" as possible, (unless you're actually in Russia,).
• Despite that, the picture at the top of the article is clearly a chemistry lecture, in a science-equipped lecture hall.

Not everybody differentiates between academics working in different disciplines.  I had an English professor in grad school who would go home over the breaks and her family, none of whom went to college, would ask her things about how weather systems worked or politics like she was the professor on Gilligan's Island or something.  RCP probably just wanted someone obviously a "professor" doing abstruse things at a blackboard so the scene is easily identifiable. 

[Hegemony]

I remember watching an episode of the TV show Felicity, about a girl at the "University of New York." The professor lectures in a large lecture hall, and then the class files out. Then the professor takes out her lunch and sits down and eats it at the desk in the front of the room, waiting for her next class to file in. Clearly the writer had been to high school, but if they had been to college, they never paid attention. They thought college professors always teach in the same room and have a series of classes coming in throughout the day.

[RatGuy]

I remember watching an episode of the TV show Felicity, about a girl at the "University of New York." The professor lectures in a large lecture hall, and then the class files out. Then the professor takes out her lunch and sits down and eats it at the desk in the front of the room, waiting for her next class to file in. Clearly the writer had been to high school, but if they had been to college, they never paid attention. They thought college professors always teach in the same room and have a series of classes coming in throughout the day.

Or a bell rings and the prof yells out "read the Schmidt text for Friday as there WILL be an exam!"

[Ruralguy]

I mostly teach in the same room, and have done so for years. I suppose it depends a lot on discipline, and whether the room is geared for that discipline (such as is common in many STEM fields).

Back to more serious stuff:

Anyway, I did read the editorial. I mostly agree with the spirit of it. Whether or not we research a lot or teach a lot, or do some administrative/intense committee/programmatic work, we really are mostly just concentrated in our area (aside from those doing college-wide admin) and care a lot about how to reach students and how to add to the understanding of subjects in our broad (or maybe narrow) discipline. Its not that I don't care about society or how academic institutions can interact with community, I'm not into that from either a woke or anti-woke perspective--I just want average people to find out about science if they care to engage with it.

[Wahoo Redux]

Your average person, academic or not, is only tangentially interested in politics and society and probably has the majority of their human extra-family interactions on the job.  The difference is that every academic I have ever known works over the weekend on grading, class-prep, some oddball service work, or their own research. 

The right wingnuts just found an easy target in academics because of perception in the public eye of academics as elitist intellectual liberal snobs.  TV and the movies have not helped this.

[marshwiggle]

Two things are interesting:

• "Russian history" is about as stereotypically "academic" as possible, (unless you're actually in Russia,).
• Despite that, the picture at the top of the article is clearly a chemistry lecture, in a science-equipped lecture hall.

Not everybody differentiates between academics working in different disciplines.  I had an English professor in grad school who would go home over the breaks and her family, none of whom went to college, would ask her things about how weather systems worked or politics like she was the professor on Gilligan's Island or something.  RCP probably just wanted someone obviously a "professor" doing abstruse things at a blackboard so the scene is easily identifiable. 

Sure, but the thing about both of those disciplines, and an important point in this story, is that these would have existed 80 years ago, and would have looked largely the same. The most turmoil in academia is from the "Oppression Studies" disciplines that didn't exist 80 years ago, and many didn't exist even 2 or 3 decades ago in most places. But with all of the DEI initiatives, they have had a huge impression on the impression people have of academia because they get a vastly disproportionate share of the press, and basically suck all of the oxygen out of the room.

[ciao_yall]

Two things are interesting:

• "Russian history" is about as stereotypically "academic" as possible, (unless you're actually in Russia,).
• Despite that, the picture at the top of the article is clearly a chemistry lecture, in a science-equipped lecture hall.

Not everybody differentiates between academics working in different disciplines.  I had an English professor in grad school who would go home over the breaks and her family, none of whom went to college, would ask her things about how weather systems worked or politics like she was the professor on Gilligan's Island or something.  RCP probably just wanted someone obviously a "professor" doing abstruse things at a blackboard so the scene is easily identifiable. 

Sure, but the thing about both of those disciplines, and an important point in this story, is that these would have existed 80 years ago, and would have looked largely the same. The most turmoil in academia is from the "Oppression Studies" disciplines that didn't exist 80 years ago, and many didn't exist even 2 or 3 decades ago in most places. But with all of the DEI initiatives, they have had a huge impression on the impression people have of academia because they get a vastly disproportionate share of the press, and basically suck all of the oxygen out of the room.

In other words, alternatives to the art, literature and history of dead white men?