Margaret Soltan recalls a Stepfordesque seminar in which a standard-issue unintelligible talk was greeted with an equally unintelligible rote refusal on the part of the audience to recognize that the talk was unintelligible:

One of the most surreal experiences Iíve had occurred after a well-known feminist theorist gave a talk to the summer faculty seminar I attended (I mentioned this seminar in my recent Prolegomena post) many years ago. The talk - delivered in the Mitford girls patois of British-educated academic Marxists - was, although heartfelt, unintelligible. When our seminar group reassembled a bit later to discuss the talk, we did not, given its inexistence as discourse, discuss it. Instead around the seminar table a drama staged itself in which excited shared knowing grins and breath-gulping wide-eyed nods mixed with bits of dialogue (ìBrilliant...blew me away... marvelous...sheís incredible thatís all I can say...transformative...î) to create a hypnotic mise-en-scene... The pleasant immateriality of the moment made me feel light... ethereal... a Rosetti painting floated in front of my eyes...I saw... silken hair .... Juliaís clothes .... liquefaction... sweetly flows...sweet Afton... swee-ee-ee-eet FORgiveness...

Here's a story from just three days ago: One of the characters in a book by a Vietnamese-American author was indicted by the class for her phallocentric American "desire to know" (I guess vaginocentric non-Americans just want to loll around in loose shoes and ignorance--exactly how is this bullshit supposed to promote tolerance and human happiness?). The character discovers that her mother's life in Vietnam had been brutal rather than idyllic, and that the Vietcong were as lousy as the feudal overlords, if not worse. I pointed out that it wasn't the character's "American need to know" that uncovered the truth, but her mother's unprompted confessional letter. Was that evidence, then, of a "Vietnamese need to tell"? One woman sitting next to me nodded enthusiastically (she hasn't been fully indoctrinated yet) and said, "That's great" but everyone else glared at her until she looked at her shoes, suddenly knowing she'd made a gaffe. The woman across from me said (rolling her eyes, neener-neener voice), "Yeah, well, I'm really uncomfortable with her mother's 'story' [makes scare quote hands] about the Vietcong. Doesn't that just reproduce American ideology about the supposedly savage, evil North Vietnamese?" The professor nodded and agreed it was "uncomfortable," and several other heads nodded, but I wouldn't give up (fuck it; I'm out of here anyway). I said I didn't understand why it was good for Americans to de-mythologize their golden past, but bad for Vietnamese to do it. Isn't it the same thing? Isn't it better to know the truth than to gild the turd? And if the "need to know" is American, then what explains all that American mythologizing about the Frontier? Isn't that the same kind of turd-gilding?

The professor looked extremely concerned--it was one of those furrowed-brow looks that says, "Do you need your medication?" She made a few remarks about how those were, um, interesting points, but that maybe we should move on to the issue of the author's portrayal of Vietnam as a raped female body (for which, of course, there was only the flimsiest textual "evidence"). That led to more pointed questions from me, but I'll stop the story here.

I just can't do this for seven more years. I'll start yelling. I'll start insulting people. I'll get kicked out, so I'm leaving before they bounce me.

If you want to make a room full of well-meaning faculty trying to write a "mission statment" all sit up, use the word "bias" in an unexpected way. A quiet "Actually, I think there's some humanities bias in what you've written so far," induced near panic.

I often say you can't make this stuff up. But of course you can, and writers like Francine Prose, David Lodge, and Richard Russo have become the faithful anthropologists of the self-parodying aspects of academic culture. Russo's Straight Man in particular is hilarious. But to say that academic activity is often a joke is not to say that there is anything particularly funny going on. Quite the opposite.

Dorothea Salo comments today on the sunk human cost of grad school gone wrong, offering some particularly wrenching, if veiled, thoughts on the moral opportunism of those academics (i.e., most academics) who manage never to acknowledge their own role in the massive exploitation that is the academic labor system. And John Bruce continues his ongoing analysis of how the tenure system is a cartel--begun months ago at Invisible Adjunct--with an absolutely devastating post on the pyramid scheme that is academic work. Both are worth reading in full.