The Surreal World of Academic Doublespeak & the Illusions of Word Soup
When I was a young and voracious bookworm, I dreamed of a place called "college" where people reveled in books and civil conversations exploring the continuum of learning: creativity, science, literature, classics, philosophy, history and art.
Tower of Babel
Bedford Master Book of Hours 1423
After many years of study under the best professors that I could find, I emerged with an excellent education albeit with a much dimmed and more pragmatic view of the world of the University. I came to be a professor late in life after having successfully pursued a number of professions that absolutely did not require my Ph.D in Medieval History.
For the first time I was on a tenure track at a university. It was absolutely the worst job that I had ever had (and that includes a six-year stint as a waitress serving enchiladas in a Tex Mex Restaurant and juicy slabs of beef at the Brown Derby Steakhouse) After several years spent in college teaching, finally, in desperate frustration, I told my college age son that higher education appeared to be a vast wasteland of petty people picking on each other and constantly criticizing everything and everyone, including each other, so that very little was ever actually accomplished.
Wise beyond his years, Curtis simply said, "Mom, that is what they do."
Administrative academese has risen to new heights. Now the powers that be have taken the prized trait of "critical thinking" and transformed it with maniacal zeal into a quest for a lost holy grail full of meaningless objectives in the name of impossible accountability. Concepts such as "key performance indicators", "strategic management and metrics", "vision, mission, values" and other highly creative and useless methodology are time sucks that would astound Dr. Who.
Administrivia drains so much energy from one's intellect that it is unbelievable that anyone in the college teaching profession has the strength to teach, much less think, write or learn something new. It really, really hurts my soul that the joy of learning and teaching is being destroyed by "metrics" and other inane concepts that merely serve to create employment for an ever expanding and self perpetuating educational bureaucracy. We all need to go back and read Max Weber's writings on bureaucracy. I am so utterly relieved that I no longer have to be a college professor, constantly reprimanded for bullshit and not feeling free to be my true self, all the while suffering expansive micromanagement and nitpicking by the multi-layered authority of a vast pecking order of administrators, fellow professors, students, the media, the community, the legislators, and so forth, ad nauseum.
I am so very grateful that I was not detained within the stifling confines of Academe.
What was once the grove of Socrates has become a Kafkaesque attic in hell.
My disillusionment is now complete.
The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel - 1563
