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Friday, May 06, 2005
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STORY OF U “Am I a snob?” UD fretted as she prepared to go to Rehoboth Beach for the weekend. She’d taught her last class of the spring semester 2005 twenty-four hours ago and was, she had to admit, a little tired. Not that she deserved two days at the beach -- her life was in every respect so privileged that she didn’t deserve an iota more than what she already so abundantly had -- but she wasn’t going to turn it down. The class had gone well, she thought -- good attendance, an attentive and lively group, and an intriguing final class session, during which one of her best students, a UD regular who’d taken her “Novels of Don DeLillo” course the semester before, suggested that UD was unfairly dismissive of “minimalist” American fiction. “Does my lack of respect for Raymond Carver and my veneration for James Joyce mean … I’m a snob?” she fretted as she filled her little suitcase with a swimsuit (“Madness. It’ll be much too cold to swim. A symbolic act.”), Neutrogena Dry-Touch Sunblock SPF 45 (“Again madness.”), and of course jeans and black turtlenecks galore. “I love this Ushuaia thing,” she thought, tossing a soft oversized towel into the suitcase and recalling that she bought it online from a French store. “Does my having bought this towel online from a French store make me a snob?” she fretted. And then she remembered what was really bothering her. “Does the fact that I cringe inside whenever a passerby asks if the topiary bull in front of my house is a chia pet mean I’m a snob?” UD for years had watched no television (“Does that make me a snob?”), but in her younger days she watched it, like everyone else, all the time, and she knew all about ch-ch-ch-chia pets. “Does the fact that I note a class divide between people who ask me about my chia pet and people who ask me about my topiary mean that I’m a snob?” She got so twisted up about being a snob that she took an online quiz, The Intellectual Snob Quiz. Her result: “You are 50% intellectual snob. Well, you didn't suck and you didn't rock. You might run with a pack of intellectuals, but you've got other friends out there too, who don't waste your time arguing about symbolism in Finnigan's Wake . You probably like to read, but you're also not oblivious to the wonderful world of theme parks and X-Box.” “Does the fact that I can’t resist noticing the authors of the quiz both misspelled and put an apostrophe in the title of Finnegans Wake make me a snob?” she fretted again (even though her score fell way short of definitive snobbery). And then, thinking of apostrophes, she recalled the raging controversy at the University of Minnesota about whether a new campus pathway should be named Scholars Walk or Scholar’s Walk: “Apostrophe boosters are in mourning at the University of Minnesota after it was decided to name a fancy new walkway the Scholars Walk, not the Scholar's Walk. For weeks, the issue has bedeviled those at the university and beyond who care a great deal about such things. English professors, e-mailers from across the United States, and even the Apostrophe Protection Society of England offered advice. Boosters argued to board members of the nonprofit University Gateway Corp. that an apostrophe would add distinction by suggesting that the walkway is owned by those it honors. However, the board voted 4-1 against the punctuation mark, worried that the apostrophe would make the four-block walkway appear exclusive at a time that the university wants to be inclusive.” “Yes,” thought UD, “whenever I see an apostrophized word I feel excluded. That’s why I can’t eat at Denny’s -- I think it’s only for Denny.” “Does the fact that I just had that supercilious thought make me a snob?” “But then again, doesn’t the fact that I don’t give a rat’s patootie about whether the university puts an apostrophe in suggest that I’m not a snob?” “Face it, baby,” UD heard a harsh voice in her head say. “The very fact that you’re a tenured professor makes you - in the eyes of most people - a snob.” In the online journal Adjunct Nation, a letter writer recently pondered efforts to get NYU professors to teach more classes: “Maybe in a few years I’ll be out of a job, but at least I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that the tenured snob down the hallway, who hasn’t been to a conference since Reagan was president, and who hasn’t seen an undergraduate since before he got tenure, will be back in the classroom again, where all faculty belong.” At Inside Higher Ed, a journalism professor unloads bigtime: “Journalists shouldn’t — and won’t — put up with ivory-tower snipers pointing AK-47s at their real-world heads. …[One] professor’s elitist drivel still sticks in my craw because his snobbery runs so rampant in the academy today… incorrigible academic elitism… academic elitism at its most basic and sniveling core … ” “Does the fact that I laugh inwardly at the phrase ‘sniveling core’ …....?...” |