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and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Thursday, June 28, 2007

A Woman's Calming Touch...
...is so what's needed in this anxious masculine analysis, by William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar, and Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Ed, of eros in university life. Both men worry at length about the pathetic emasculated male humanities professor, as he's portrayed in popular culture, and as he may well be in real life -- a "pompous, lecherous, alcoholic failure," as Deresiewicz writes, a man who's all about "moral failure and the frustrations of petty ambition."

Deresiewicz cites an absolute ton of films and books over many years consistently portraying professors like this -- humanities professors, that is:


'It seems that in the popular imagination, “professor” means “humanities professor.” Of course, there are plenty of science professors in movies and books, but they are understood as scientists, not professors. Social scientists are quoted liberally in the press, but generally under the rubric of “scholar” or “expert.” Stereotypes arise from the partitioning of complex realities — academics play multiple roles — into mutually isolated simplifications. Say the word professor, and the popular mind, now as in the old days, conjures up the image of a quotation-spouting bookworm. And it is that figure who has become an object lesson in the vanity of ambition.

In the popular imagination, humanities professors [Deresiewicz, again, means male humanities professors] don’t have anything to be ambitious about. No one really knows what they do, and to the extent that people do know, they don’t think it’s worth doing — which is why, when the subject of humanistic study is exposed to public view, it is often ridiculed as trivial, arcane, or pointless. Other received ideas come into play here: “those who can’t do, teach”; the critic as eunuch or parasite; the ineffective intellectual; tenure as a system for enshrining mediocrity. It may be simply because academics don’t pursue wealth, power, or, to any real extent, fame that they are vulnerable to such accusations. In our culture, the willingness to settle for something less than these Luciferian goals is itself seen as emasculating. Academics [again, he means male academics] are ambitious, but in a weak, pathetic way. This may also explain why they are uniquely open to the charge of passionlessness. No one expects a lawyer to be passionate about the law: he’s doing it for the money. No one expects a plumber to be passionate about pipes: he’s doing it to support his family. But a professor’s only excuse for doing something so trivial and accepting such paltry rewards for it is his love for the subject. If that’s gone, what remains? Nothing but baseless vanity and feeble ambition. Professors, in the popular imagination, are absurd little men puffing themselves up about nothing.'


Here are a couple of typical observations along these lines. The first is a charming bit of self-awareness from a professor commenting on McLemee's piece in IHE:

"I’ve learned to accept that my students tend to see me as some sort of quaint loser, somewhat along the lines of a Disney dwarf. If that’s the price I have to pay for not racing with the rats, no problem — well worth it. I suppose I’m protected from the Viagra thing [McLemee calls these desperate, not-very-impressive lechers "Casaubons on Viagra"] by being fat and jolly."


The second is from Gillian Rose's autobiography, Love's Work, in which she describes herself at a faculty meeting one day:

"I found myself in a routinely tedious faculty meeting... On this particular occasion, I was aware of an intense aura emanating from someone whom I had never seen before, an intense, sexual aura, aimed precisley and accurately at my vacant being. 'A man,' I wondered, 'could there be a man in this meeting?'"


(Of course the room was full of men, all castrati as far as Rose was concerned; she's describing the appearance of a new faculty member, actually recognizable as a real man.)



How much of a problem, though, is this, really? We're talking only about male humanities professors who haven't gotten with the program. What program, UD? The program that, later in his essay, Deresiewicz describes in this way: "A single-minded focus on research plus a talent for bureaucratic maneuvering." This is how most academics in all departments, at least at competitive schools, live, as Phillip Rieff long ago explained to one of his graduate students:

"[Y]ou had better understand that the profession that you are going into [should be] all about teaching [the student recalls Rieff telling him]. I know many professors who went into this business because they loved writing books and articles and developing a little coterie of admirers. ...Most academics are too narcissistic to be the parental figures that they need to be. They will slam their door on a student just so they can write their next forgettable article or book... These self-involved characters will also turn their wives into secretaries and sacrifice their children to feckless books."


Now it's true that in this cohort, as Rieff goes on to say, there will be a few -- a few male humanities professors -- who will get "into their 50s and ... feel the limits of their talents." This sad lot will fall "into very serious despair, because it [is] clear that they [are] never going to become the Kierkegaard that they imagined they were, and they [dread] teaching."

But let me be a bit more generous than Deresiewicz or Rieff here and suggest that another reason for lecherous alcoholic despair among certain male humanities professors can be found right inside that Kierkegaard. If, every single semester of your life, you had to descend into fear and loathing and sickness unto death, or had to reread every stanza of Tennyson's In Memoriam, or had to recite "Margaret, are you grieving/ Over Goldengrove unleaving," wouldn't you get a bit down? Serious thought undermines. As one of Saul Bellow's characters says, "Maybe an unexamined life is not worth living. But a man's examined life can make him wish he was dead."

A final reason for the glum horny thing we've got going here is what UD'd call a lack of scope for rascality. It's hard to feel you're a real man unless you can occasionally misbehave in gratifying ways, but the only departments where this can be done (aside, obviously, from athletics) are business, economics, engineering, and those hard sciences that attract a lot of funding. This is where Deresiewicz's thing about a talent for bureaucratic maneuvering comes in. You want to feel you're a player in capitalist sport, but there's just no way to play in English departments. No one cares how badly you abuse the little gifts -- the Guggenheim, the weeny grant for two weeks in a room near an Italian lake -- that the humanities offer. If, as Rieff suggests, the humanities professor is not supplementing his goodie bag with a love of teaching, he's on his way down.