platonic noise

Rereading J. Peter Euben's Platonic Noise. It's a great book but probably not spectacularly useful unless you're interested in academic discourse about the interaction between ancient and modern texts. Conveniently enough, I am. I remember picking it up in the shop, reading the preface, and feeling like I'd found a kindred spirit. Euben operates very much along the lines of Stanley Fish in that the individual reader determines the significance, the utility of each text, but Euben's application is even more exciting for me because he's effectively combining this resistance to "utility" and methodological applications with classical reception (still a sort of dirty word in my field).

As for academia's insistence that scholarly work (especially in the Humanities) must be "useful", Euben has this to say:

The demand that our work be practical usually means that it should be useful. The problem is that those who judge what is useful are those who hold cultural, political, economic, and academic power. The call for practicality can be theoretically radical, but it is more often a counsel of docility and adaptation to professional norms.


More than this, if it is true that the conditions of our lives are never transparent to us, then the demand for practicality, like the demand for relevance, is a recommendation of ignorance. Oedipus (in OedipusTyrannos) is a very practical man. As such, he translated everything he encountered into a problem that he could solve. But he was, as Jonathan Lear suggests, so impatient for an answer that he never fully grasped the problem. And it was, as we know, one hell of a problem.

It's just genius, really. This obsession with utility, with relevance and practical application is so ridiculous in humanities research. Not that a methodological framework isn't important, but how can we define what's useful in any real sense when utility today might mean something completely different tomorrow. If however, by utility, you mean to question not whether the research provides some quantifiable addition to the body of knowledge (another favourite quote of Professors in the Humanities), but whether the research is useful in that it opens up new paths worth following instead of leading simply to dead ends. So don't ask if the (somewhat absurd) question about whether television comedies can play a role in contemporary America analogous to the role Aristophanic comedy played in democratic Athens is "practical", but instead ask only whether it leads anywhere interesting. Then go and follow.

Like Nietzsche insists of classical texts, their "usefulness" lies in their capacity to surprise and provoke. Knowledge must exist for life, not just for practicality - don't be fooled into thinking these are the same thing. As Euben so eloquently expresses, "the search for knowledge must be driven by passion and need, by a hunger to understand, a sense of absence, and a profound engagement with the fact of mortality." If, as a scholar of the humanities, you're always being asked to justify the utility or practicality of knowledge, how can you allow for the fact that sometimes knowledge is neither useful nor practical. Indeed, it may be anything but useful: surprising, provocative, beautiful, enlightening, but in no way practical. It all veers dangerously close to the commodification of knowledge and maybe we can't avoid such a thing in the corporate world, but thanks to people like Euben and Fish, hopefully it will never come to such a thing in the halls of academia.

Happy Easter. Now go read some Plato.

Something's rotten in the state of academia

Being a 3rd year PhD student, I've spent a fair amount of space (on this blog and elsewhere) bemoaning the state of academia in this country: the under appreciation of academic culture, coupled with the totally inappropriate and frankly bizarre class snobbery lurking underneath the surface of much of the hostility towards academia in this country is something I simply do not understand.

At least, I thought, I'm fairly insulated from much of the drama at King's College - one of the UK's best academic institutions. Alas, the last few months have proved this assumption to be foolishly naive. With a horrid Principal, Rick Trainor, who cares more about the acquisition of new buildings and getting fashion designers to update academic gowns for graduation, rather than safeguarding the academic reputation of his institution by nurturing its departments and staff, things look more than grim for King's.

Trainor has claimed that the international academic community - who have mobilised to act vocally against the cuts at King's - don't understand the current financial situation and the pressure faced by major UK institutions especially after the financial fall-out associated with the baking bail out.

Does anyone else see a problem here? The government finds it perfectly acceptable to use a staggering £850 BILLION pounds of UK taxpayer money to bail out the banks, but can't be bothered to prioritise funding for one of its most important social institutions. The hypocrisy and carelessness is absolutely chilling.

And yet, Trainor could just as easily fight the government. He could be leading the way in calling for reforms to the projected cuts and protect the outstanding reputation of his institution. Instead, not only is he damaging its reputation, but his actions will quite literally damage its capability to produce outstanding new research. Not only will it be difficult to attract high-quality students to King's with a significant decrease to departmental faculty, but it will also make it incredibly difficult to attract (and even retain) new staff members as well - would you want to join an institution with so obvious a lack of concern for its faculty. Of course not.

What makes this all so laughable is that Trainor anticipates King's will receive £40 million less in funding from the government, which is approximately 30% of King's operating budget and the equivalent - according to Trainor - of about 700 lectureships!! It was only late last year that Trainor closed on an aggressive deal to purchase the East Wing of the nearby Somerset House for an estimated £20 million. The incredible cynicism of a College Principal in prioritising the purchase of an unnecessary building at the cost of 350 academic jobs is wholly and utterly inexcusable.

Yet another thing which makes the protest campaign so difficult is that the general public often misunderstand the concept of tenure and think academics have no right to bitch about the loss of their cushy 'jobs for life.' First of all, aside from the fact that tenure is increasingly rare in many Universities, which are now being run as if they were corporations with the sole aim of turning a profit, it also discounts the enormous amount of time and effort that goes into the obtaining of an academic job in the first place.

By the time you finally get a lecturing position - these days, anyway - most academics have completed a 10 training period - longer than most surgeons or lawyers. Also, unlike doctors or lawyers, professors are definitely not in it for the money. Just a brief comparison: our dear Rick Trainor receives a salary of well over £200,000 per year, while the average professorial salary is between £30,000 and £50,000. You tell me what's wrong with this picture...

Unlike Trainor, the vast majority of academics aren't in it for the money. Generally, academics work in Universities because the love knowledge and information and they care passionately about the discovery, analysis, dissemination, and safekeeping of this knowledge. As for tenure, think about the US Supreme Court. There are nine justices and each one is appointed for life. There's a very, very important reason for this: it's to avoid the politicisation of the law. The law is above politics and should not be corrupted/influenced by current social concerns of contemporary politics. Imagine if justices were subject to being fired by the President or a 2/3rds majority of the Senate: Roe v. Wade and Miranda v. Arizona would have most likely had very different outcomes were the justices subject to political pressure for fear of losing their jobs.

Tenure is the same concept only applied in an academic context. Tenure is the foundation which guarantees intellectual freedom in academic institutions and is absolutely necessary to maintain the ability of all academics to conduct research without fear of reprisals if the government or whoever disagrees with the results of a study or the conclusions drawn about a historical civilisation, etc. There can be no intellectual freedom without a safety catch: tenure is that safety mechanism. This is the whole point of research Universities.

You may disagree, but in my view the role of academia is to acquire, analyse, and disseminate knowledge and information. Unfortunately, this is simply impossible in a culture which demands not only the politicisation of such institutions, but the commercialisation of them as well.

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when i grow up

There's this relentless drumming voice inside my head. It goes a little something like this: PhD thesis submission in eight months. Over and over. You know how often men supposedly think about sex? That's how much I think about my PhD. It's frightful, really. The funniest thing though is that everyone seems completely astonished that I would rather stab HB pencils in my eyes than stay at King's for another year. I finished a four-year high school degree in three years and I finished a four-year University degree in three years. There is no way in hell that I'm finishing a three-year PhD programme in four years. I love my research - I love research in general - but I don't want to still be doing it this time next year. I've finally, pretty much, mostly decided that I don't want to stay in academia anymore and now that I've realised there's this whole, huge unexplored world out there - I can't wait to figure out what I want to do next. To think that I'd have to wait another year before being able to get out there and make some noise doesn't really appeal to me. And besides, I don't have any reason to stay another year - apart from the fact that I changed my topic after the first year and had to throw a year's worth of work away - but let's not speak of such things. When I was first starting, a friend of mine said that the most important part of doing a PhD was the research - not the teaching, not the paper giving - just the research. I took his advice quite literally and hardly did any teaching or conference-going, and now that I've finally, pretty much, mostly decided that I don't want to stay in academia (I adore the research element, but find most of the rest of it fairly restrictive) I'm so glad that my PhD primarily comprised three years of solid research.

I suppose my biggest problem with the academic world is that it encourages an extremely limited field of interest. I don't understand when or why research came to mean restriction. This is certainly not true for all of my colleagues, but I'm regularly astonished by the lack of interest academics show for any field or even subject outside their immediate research interest. As the kind of person who wants to know everything about everything, I don't understand why anyone would purposefully choose to cut themselves off from so many other areas of interesting information. The other thing that drives me crazy is a distinct lack of collaboration. Again, this is generalising to some extent, and if you work in a lab I'm sure the experience is quite different, but the closest most academics get to creative collaboration is jointly organising a conference or putting together an edited volume of papers. There's something profoundly clichéd about this, but working on a weekly magazine has introduced me to the joys of interacting with a team of incredibly bright, creative and dynamic people. It's such a nice thing to sit down together with people who have ideas and are knowledgeable about a variety of subjects and can bring all that knowledge to the table in order to enhance the quality of their professional work. An awful lot of academics don't have this breadth of knowledge - hardly surprising given that they've been working on the same, focused subject area for the last 15 years.

It's important that my work lets me to be creative, work with a group of inspiring people, and gives me free rein to pursue a wide range of interests. What that will be, I have no idea. But once I finish this damn PhD, I'll have plenty of time to figure it out. Having said that, suggestions on a postcard are most welcome...

utility sucks

"To the question 'of what use are the humanities?', the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said – even when it takes the form of Kronman’s inspiring cadences – diminishes the object of its supposed praise."

~ Stanley Fish

My least favourite part of modern academia is its continuing commodification: the necessity for an education to mean something, to confer something, to be anything other than what it is and ought to be. And it's not just because I'm a classicist that I lament the demise of the humanistic education. It's because at least then we as a society felt we knew what an education ought to be and what the goal of a good education was. Now, because of the diversification of subjects into mainstream academia - hello film studies and hotel management, surely these things do not belong in modern universities? - we are less sure what should constitute a good modern education.

I'm not entirely sure when utility as a measure of judgement seeped into British Universities, but I'll wager it was sometime after 1970. The advent of the research councils in the late 90s meant the complete death of academic freedom in the UK. A contentious and controversial statement for sure, but look at it this way. Most students in this country do not complete a PhD unless they receive funding - in my case it's the AHRC which provides funding for Humanities students. A student will not even be encouraged by their department to submit an application for funding unless it is likely that the student will actually receive funding, as each department has a limited number of possible funding allocations per year. As the department knows that the AHRC only funds a certain kind of research, this is inevitably the kind of research that gets put forward and funded by the AHRC, and is thus the kind of research carried out in British Universities. Utility is one of those buzzwords greedily devoured by the AHRC and its funding panel - how does this add to the subject, to the canon, to the body of research - they want to know. This means that graduate students rarely get to tackle the big, important, interesting ideas as they're too busy analysing one sentence of an obscure text no one gives a damn about - but at least this obscurity guarantees 'utlity'.

I realise that Universities must find some method by which they can support themselves, whether it's by raising fees or through alumni donations, I certainly don't have an easy answer. But academia has always been about research and big ideas, but most importantly, about providing an environment of freedom and safety in which to carry out research and have these big ideas. As soon as the Universities start putting a price tag on ideas - and utility carries its own price tag, believe me - they quite obviously cease to be free. Learning is exciting, stimulating, and enriching. When did Universities move away from promoting these ideas?

In my second year viva last week, one of the main criticisms of my work was that I wasn't careful enough in 'preserving the conventions of academic presentation.' The marker actually said, 'Crystal must preserve the conventions of academic presentation' and I couldn't help thinking - is this what we've really come to? Are we, as academics, more concerned with the proper citation of footnotes than with the big ideas? Sadly, I think for many the answer is yes. And for the next generation, who may arrive with big ideas, we're browbeaten into submission by the current staff, so that by the end of the process we've just given up. And the saddest thing is that this focus on technicalities only disguises the fact that what's really missing are those very same big ideas. This obsession with utility and convention and presentation only leads us farther away from truly revolutionary thinking - from making those big breakthroughs. You might think that in a field like Classics there aren't really any breakthroughs left to be made. But, for example, most of the old guard are too busy lamenting the death of Greek and Latin teaching in schools to even discuss the merits and possibilities of learning via translations of classical texts. While the rest of the literary world is running away with classical discourse and debate, stealthily stealing it straight out of the classicists hands, Classics dons are getting hung up on the fact that their students are occasionally using poor grammar in their essays or reading from the translation instead of the original. So what!

Academia has become, well ... just so boring. It used to be that the most brilliant minds in all fields came from within the academic tradition: the Cricks and Watsons, the Eliots and Wittgensteins, but none of these people would stand a chance in today's academic culture. First of all, these days a paper without footnotes would get thrown straight in the fire, and forget any sort of academic career if you aren't publishing regularly. It's just all a bit depressing. But thankfully, I've at least least come to one conclusion: this is my PhD. These are three years of my life and my future we're talking about. I'm not about to let any 'conventions' or ticked boxes get in my way. You can stuff your obsession with utility. I'll take my big ideas any day of the week...