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Wednesday, March 10, 2004
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WHO IS DAVID LESTER AND WHY ARE PEOPLE SAYING SUCH TERRIBLE THINGS ABOUT HIM?
Professor David Lester, my hero, is this morning’s villain among university internauts. From Invisible Adjunct to Crooked Timber, they’re unloading the full academic arsenal against him: sneering contempt, laughing scorn, haughty dismissal, rank incredulity (“Must be a parody!”), etc. Why is this happening? What has he done? Why do they hate him? Why do I love him? Where shall I begin? First, I think there’s a cultural problem here. Professor Lester is British and he writes in that nonchalant goofy way some British people write -- like, here I go, I am who I am, I don’t care what you think of me. John Stuart Mill singled out tolerance of eccentricity as a crucial mark of a free society. The British specialize in eccentricity, turning out generations of people like Rebecca West, Iris Murdoch, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Quentin Crisp and many others who are absolutely bizarre and do not give a shit that you find them so. Lester, while not as impressive as anyone in this group, is this sort of person. Second, Lester is breaking a cardinal rule of academia: In an essay in the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (available online) titled “Complaints, Complaints,” he complains that academics complain unconscionably, given that their jobs are among the most glorious the world has to offer. He is absolutely right. I’d extend the point to many other jobs Americans do (Robert Hughes wrote a whole book about this problem in America, titled The Culture of Complaint), with being a professor right at the very top of the non-complainables. Professors, as I’ve suggested before in University Diaries, complain for a lot of reasons, but mainly they complain because the profession selects not only for liberals (see the Duke dustup) but for neurotics. A neurotic will complain under any conditions (think of Princess Diana). Because they are neurotics as well as university professors, many professors conclude that to be intelligent (i.e., hireable as a university professor) you must be a neurotic. By definition a neurotic is unhappy. Hiring committees are expecting to see people who are unhappy. If you go to your interview at the MLA with a button on your lapel that says Recovering Catholic, you will be probably okay; if you have a Happy Face button, you are in trouble. (I've talked in a number of places in UD about how unhappiness is the default position in American academia. David Brooks gets at the underlying class aspect of this nicely in one of his New York Times columns: “As you know, there are two kinds of women’s magazines in the world, nonsmiling and smiling. In the nonsmiling magazines, which tend to be upscale, the models in the photo spreads wear these blank or haughty expressions because, you know, happiness is so middle class.”) But Professor Lester is abhorred not merely because he points in the direction of neurosis rather than working conditions to account for the endless bitching of tenured university professors; he is abhorred because he is not a team player. Collegial, that is. Lester’s unflappable British logic and insouciance have led him to detach as much as possible from the administrative structure of his university. He is in no way an irresponsible academic: it’s clear he does his bit, in terms of teaching, publishing, and administrative activity. But he doesn’t attend departmental meetings, and he doesn’t answer his office phone, and he’s had his name taken off the department email list. Finally, what makes Professor Lester particularly delicious to me is his field of specialization: he is a suicidologist. He has spent his life examining the reasons why people get so miserable as to do themselves in. He is sharing with you the fruits of his labor. Rather than condemn him, read carefully. |