[Previous entry: "Recent Referals"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Friday Listening"]

08/27/2004 Archived Entry: "The Gloom and Doom Chronicles"

The Gloom and Doom Chronicles:
Collin offers an insightful comment regarding the Chronicle's persistent gloom and doom first person accounts of academia. Read the Chronicle as "truth," and you're bound to think that all academia is infighting, mistreatment, boorish profs who are older than 30, an environment in which nobody can get a job, and so on and so on (Dennis Barron's columns are usually the exception). This is also the theme of many "pseudonym" blogs and invisible adjuncts incorporated, who want us to believe that academia is the exception in the general category of labor, and that outside academia everything works so much better in the workforce. Ok then. Keep believing that.
Today's installment of the Chronicle's first person account is no exception. Cabals/secret sides/blah blah blah. Yes, the author realizes in the end the error of his initial ways, but he doesn't dismiss the cliché of the roaming gangs of department members who size you up and include you in their secret groups....(ARE YOU ON OR OFF THE BUS?)
Maybe academia would be better if we really were gangs out to do each other in. Warriors, come out and play-ay… Why not adopt a Two men enter, one man leaves mentality complete with Texas Chainsaw Death Matches in the Dusty Rhodes tradition....
But I digress (sort of). We do love gut wrenching stories, right? Whoa is me...I'm no good...and academics love the self-deprecating stories: "Excuse the quality of this paper I'm about to give; I wrote it on the plane." "My work? Oh, it's no good." "Forgive me if I ramble." "I don't know what to teach." “I’m too busy to be human.” Melville had The Confidence Man. Do we have the No Confidence Wo(Man)? Then there are folks like me who, whatever confidence I may project, still read these columns even though I find them mostly to be rubbish. Every day. Is it the “I gotta look” syndrome? Is it the mirror complex? Both?
Maybe there should be a collection of essays put out by NCTE called Fear and Fear on the Academic Trail: Tales of Self-Abuse, Insecurity, and Nothing Goes Right. Or the Chronicle could just publish it themselves. I’m sure there’s a good market for that type of thing. I’d read it.

Posted by collin @ 08/31/2004 04:51 AM EST

"Warriors, come out and play-ay… " I thought I was the only loser who has actually seen that moving (more than once!). What a classic.

Posted by B @ 08/28/2004 12:52 AM EST

I'd read the Chronicle, but I'm too busy.

Oh, and I think you should rename your weblog WHOA IS ME.

Posted by cbd @ 08/27/2004 04:21 PM EST