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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
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)

Sunday, February 26, 2006

How Do You Wear Your Smart?

One underreported detail of the Summers thing that UD wants to consider here is his intellectual style -- his way of wearing in public, if you will, his knowledge that he’s smart.

UD’s ancient glittering eyes have taken in a lot of professors over the years, and, just as she has, in these pages, systematized varieties of beardedness among them, she’s now ready to begin systematizing modes of “I’m smart” wearing among them.



Recall that one reiterated complaint about Summers is that he’s aggressive about being brilliant -- “always has to be the smartest guy in the room” is the meme.

This is certainly one way of wearing one’s smartness, and we’ve all seen it, starting in grade school.

This is the kid whose socially anxious, intellectually snobby parents have been wetting their pants since he was born about what a genius he is. They gotta crow. Elaborately, they share with strangers accounts of the bairn’s mystic brain.

All in earshot of the kid, who concludes he is God.

As he grows, the kid graduates from correcting the factual errors of his playmates and doing brain tricks to impress adults (“He’s only five, and he can recite the state capitols in twenty seconds in alphabetical order!?”), to ushering fellow professors into his office and telling them what it is about their discipline they don’t understand.

This kid, like Larry Summers, is not popular. Society is going to put him away in a cork-lined office in an ivory tower. Despite his gifts, his life is sad, for every human encounter is a punishing challenge to establish cerebral dominance. His affective existence, he will grasp on his deathbed, has been a Scrabble game.




The opposite extreme of self-conscious and warlike smart-wearing is embodied in the demeanor and career of beloved intellectuals like Saul Kripke and John Rawls -- global geniuses whom intimidated students expect to stride into classrooms with ego aglitter, but who walk in just like normal - albeit somewhat shy and modest - people. Think Albert Einstein. Iris Murdoch.

Who knows what vicious parenting spawned these paragons of gentleness and gentility, these people who’ve concluded that their brains are not about preening and belittling, but about serious thought about the world? Better not even try to imagine the prussian repressions visited upon these little people as they grew into big people able to intuit the feelings of those less brilliant than they…




Then there’s the My Brain Hurts! style of wearing your smart. Professors like this are about the heavy burden of intellect. Pale and thin with a pained expression on their faces, they are like early medieval monks in tortured consideration of Being. Their psychic sensitivity is notorious: Careful what you say to Professor X! She cries when she lectures on Sickness Unto Death!

The word “neurasthenic” used to be reserved for this sort of smart-wearer, with her turtlenecks (UD’s favorite thing to wear, by the way), frown-lines, and furtive smoking. (Think Joyce Carol Oates, Renata Adler, Joan Didion, Francoise Sagan.) Since to think is to suffer, cheery plump intellectuals like Murdoch and Roland Barthes excite the contempt of this smart-type.



And there’s more, there’s more. But you’re supposed to keep your posts short on these blog things. And UD has to get ready to go to Baltimore for a concert. Later.