I sort of gave up on a program at another college several years back that kept giving me real small classes... but at cut rates ("Hey, Vlorb... we'll have to cancel this unless you want to do it for practically nothing... whattaya say?"). It's a blast working with a class of three... it may be pretty close to ideal... but at the end of the day one is not only an Ivory Tower Intellectual (wannabe) but also a struggling member of the Working Class and this finally skirts too close to scabbing after a while. Okay. But this was a different kind of thing altogether.
I've got an awful lot invested in doing the one thing in the world I can be said to do at all well; much of whatever peace of mind I've got left seems to come from the times I can "get in the flow" of a math problem with an audience (a fellow worker-on-the-problem is of course better still—much better)... also, despite my downward mobility and my the-company-is-always-wrong attitude, I've got at least the remnants of a pretty fierce work ethic.
I was raised among talented and hardworking people by very talented and hardworking parents. I've been given lately to saying that Indiana University is, not only my University (all three degrees, indeed) but my very hometown (most of my public school peergroup had University connections... often a professor father like mine). Partly the point here has to be sheer sentimentality... I feel there's something poignant to be understood about my life by blending the "Alma Mater" vibe with that of the "hometown"... maybe because of whatever it is in me that led me never even to seriously consider going to school anywhere else.
(Okay. Bartending school. Also I interviewed a few of the faculty at Big State U as a prospective candidate for a [nother] doctorate but chickened out as maybe I always knew I would. These are too short [a couple-few weeks] or too late [after Indiana wouldn't have me anymore] to count. [Plus another time I forgot. Ignore this. Compulsive truth-telling.])
Anyhow, I'd like to feel that one of the attractive things about the Academic setting would be crossing verbal lances with well-informed articulate opponents about whatever comes up. But lived to find out... again.. today that I can get caught up in wanting an audience and allow myself to act sort of asshole-ish.
Cause there's this new guy, "Gary" we'll call him, that's just the kind of articulate opponent I sort of wish I unequivocally wanted to run into a lot more of. So today, I'm doing some textbook-bashing. This is an area where I'd cheerfully admit I've frequently been known to hold forth. So I say something like "They're all bad in the same way; they all copy each other" and Gary sez "No, really what's going on is that they're all shooting at the same set standards" (kinda thing; not even a good paraphrase but the general idea... I have a tin ear for dialogue as I've observed elsewhere... please don't take quote marks too seriously in this passage) and I acknowlege that "what California and Texas wants, everybody gets" and then go on to put my foot in it: "it amounts to the same thing".
At this point, I seem to've felt unconsciously that Gary ought to know that I mean that "meet such-and-such standards" is just another form of "copy the one that got the grant". Because I sure didn't say anything like this. Just felt like, okay, we're in basic agreement anyway, let's change the subject.
And we did. Sort of. I toss out a sort of trial balloon and allow as how it would be an interesting scholarly project to do a sort of genealogy about ways-of-doing-thing-wrong in math texts... "Forget the reasons things happened anyhow... you can't look into human motivation in a scholarly way..." and some other stuff and Gary comes back with "Are you saying Sociology isn't scholarship then" and no I'm not saying that at all but "well, probably there are a few sociologists doing what I'd like to think of scholarship but mostly it seems to be about quantifying everything and studying these ghastly statistical models" and then it's like, "so now statisticians aren't scholars either" and the conversation's completely going to hell.
So I'm all, "what is this, just disagree-with-Vlorbik-on-principle day?" and at this point it's clear to Gary and presumably everybody else in the room... except me... that I've become very defensive about having my stated opinion questioned at all but I'm still flailing around trying to find some way to continue to deny this perfectly obvious fact and end up accusing him of "bad faith"... something like "it seems to me there's a common notion of scholarship that I ought to be able to just invoke; you asking me about that feels to me like you're just disagreeing-on-principle" or something; at which point "Well I disagree" is about the only thing one can say I suppose; anyway thank god he does say that, so I reply with "Fair enough; let's leave it at that". And buttonhole him shortly after out of the office to debrief; but enough.
Now, I'm determined to get along with everybody. I've recovered from much worse embarassments then this during the getting-to-you stages with at least a few of the others in this... and seem to've been forgiven by 'em all. I get along with Naomi, for hecksake, and she's a rightwing Repubican. I have blown up in her face (to the extent that I couldn't face her for a couple days) and sometimes I have to tighten up my grip on myself when politics (specifically, you guessed it, labor relations) come up. I'm reasonably confident of getting along swimmingly with Gary... probably there are lots of very pleasant conversations in our future. Being able to disagree about nearly anything in a civil way is an academic ideal I treasure; I'm willing to work for it.
The guy I want to be would welcome, not only a rival for my self-hallucinated title of "the guy who always has something interesting to say", but a flat-out new uncontested office champ. Evidently that's still quite a ways off. Here we go.
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