Another semester is over, thank goodness. I turned in my last term paper yesterday and am now enjoying a brief "rehumanization" period, during which I'm rediscovering the joys of doing things like eating real food, going outside, talking to friends, doing laundry, and sleeping. In a few days I'll have to start gearing up to write a massive lit review essay that's due on January 15 (my department's version of comps). But not just yet.
In the meantime, I'm mulling over this essay by Walter Russell Mead entitled "The Ax is Laid to the Root of the Tree" (probably my favorite Biblical metaphor of judgment and destruction, fwiw). He argues that the current university system in the US is wasting precious resources by producing scads of research that nobody will ever read. The majority of books and articles are produced, not primarily to disseminate knowledge, but to advance the careers of poor wretches who are trying to make it through the tenure process or otherwise advance their careers, usually at the expense of their teaching, mentoring, and other important forms of academic service and engagement (to say nothing about their personal lives). Here's my favorite chunk of the essay:
"Teachers must be evangelists for knowledge. We have a society that produces an ever growing torrent of unread “research” while fewer and fewer people know or care anything about the cultural heritage that the “research” ostensibly aims to examine. This is idiocy and it is madness, and the expense can no longer be borne. It will change."
I'm not sure that I agree with all the changes that he then goes on to propose, but I do hope that the system changes for the better. It bothers me that academics spend so much time producing work that seems to have so little impact in the real world. I want my work to matter. I love the idea of being an "evangelist for knowledge." I want to spend my professional career converting people to the sort of engaged critical humanism that (the best) anthropology has to offer. I don't want to get lost in pointless intellectual busy-work.
In the meantime, I'm mulling over this essay by Walter Russell Mead entitled "The Ax is Laid to the Root of the Tree" (probably my favorite Biblical metaphor of judgment and destruction, fwiw). He argues that the current university system in the US is wasting precious resources by producing scads of research that nobody will ever read. The majority of books and articles are produced, not primarily to disseminate knowledge, but to advance the careers of poor wretches who are trying to make it through the tenure process or otherwise advance their careers, usually at the expense of their teaching, mentoring, and other important forms of academic service and engagement (to say nothing about their personal lives). Here's my favorite chunk of the essay:
"Teachers must be evangelists for knowledge. We have a society that produces an ever growing torrent of unread “research” while fewer and fewer people know or care anything about the cultural heritage that the “research” ostensibly aims to examine. This is idiocy and it is madness, and the expense can no longer be borne. It will change."
I'm not sure that I agree with all the changes that he then goes on to propose, but I do hope that the system changes for the better. It bothers me that academics spend so much time producing work that seems to have so little impact in the real world. I want my work to matter. I love the idea of being an "evangelist for knowledge." I want to spend my professional career converting people to the sort of engaged critical humanism that (the best) anthropology has to offer. I don't want to get lost in pointless intellectual busy-work.
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