...and it feels so good.
Today I wasted several hours after work. And then I felt bad about myself. And then I took a bath. And I was trying to read Blood Meridian, which is good but I wasn't very good at paying attention. I wanted to be reading, but something else. So I picked up one of my academic books from my stack--one I intend to use for BA research--and after a couple of pages my brain began to wake up. Thoughts! Deconstruction and theorizing! Words like "discursive" and "dichotomy"!
Maybe it doesn't seem like the most riveting of writing, but it was exactly what I needed--a reminder of how it feels to think in the unemotional, hard world of academic writing.
My university is stressful, scary, and usually destructive to the self-esteem. But it's also reassuring to know that there's a place in my life where things are extremely meritocratic, the truth is pursued relentlessly, and you don't win unless you have a damn good point.
Last year, via C., I found this: Andrew Abbot's "Aims of Education" speech. Every year the new students get one. It's meant to ruminate on why their education has a value equivalent to the massive loan they're likely to incur four years hence. Afterward, a professor is dispatched to each house for a post-speech discussion. My year, the speech wasn't so great. But this one, if you take the time to read it, is excellent.
I love this cornerstone.
3 comments:
Nice speech but I couldn't totally agree with it. The problem I see is that it gives you license, (and indeed how DARE you not take hold of the opportunity and save everyone a lot of money) to simply bail out and take your education in the bohemian style, eg through book clubs and coffee shops and poetry groups and internet blog discussions. Why aren't you doing that?
No she had it right on the topic of canon. Maybe it is a little more vague today, but there's a prerequisite body of background thoughts you need to have had before we can meaningfully interact. In college it feels like you're just having them but if you spent the same time behind the counter at Taco Bell, you wouldn't be.
It's paradoxical because getting all the stuff he refers is based on you going to the University of Chicago (the degree seems important)--his argument seems to be that once you get in, you can do whatever you want for four years. Of course, that's only because fully 99% can be relied upon to study their asses off or at least be diverted by highly intellectual and produced side projects. They can be relied upon to want to think.
The canon topic is interesting but probably a lot more varied than it ever was before. For example, because of the U of C social science requirement, I still think and talk about dead, bearded social thinkers like Durkheim (collective effervescence, division of labor) and Marx ("alienated from the product of your labor" immediately comes to mind) and in the U of C community, these things are shared and understood. You probably have a whole canon that applies to Avidyne in the world of computer science that I wouldn't understand (like you potentially don't know Durkheim or Indian history). We could probably talk a little bit, vaguely about Marx or Shakespeare on common academic grounds.
Maybe American intellectual canon now is more based in current events and politics, the only thing we all definitely share as members of the same country? With the distinguishing factor being rational discussion?
productive, not produced. (I wonder why there is not an edit option?)
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