Saturday, July 04, 2015

Eric Jarosinski Says Nein to Academia


These remarks by Eric Jarosinki, ostensibly about the virtues of Twitter, but ultimately about the vices of academia, resonate with me. I, too, at some point realised that I would not be able to carry off a convincingly academic performance. I didn't want to write that way or talk that way or spend my days working that way. I, too, did not want to pretend to understand what my peers were so earnestly saying they knew. At one point, I even decided I lacked the "moral compass" required to navigate the ambiguities of an ethical, academic life. So I also chose this "alt-acish" career as a coach and, indeed, a social media presence. I'm not as successful as Jarosinski, but I make a decent living, and on most days I enjoy the work.

There's a nagging doubt, however. I'm sure many of us feel a little sadness for the university that Jarosinski left. The university, we think to ourselves, needs him more than he, it seems, needs it. For a long time now I have felt like I abandoned my post. To be sure, I didn't yet have tenure (I don't think he did either), and I must say that I didn't feel like it was being handed to me on a silver platter. Getting the "privilege" to make the contribution to your culture that pretty much everyone around you knows you should be making can be a very humiliating experience. Nonetheless, I feel a bit of shame about not "doing the work". Moreover, I'm vain enough (and have friends and colleagues who nurture this vanity) to think that I would make an excellent professor. From everything I know about Jarosinski, so would he. Students everywhere, let's agree, are poorer for the decisions we have made.

And this raises an interesting question that I will spend some of my summer thinking about. What would a university that people like Jarosinksi and I are qualified to teach at look like? What sort of place would take us "as we are". What, we might say, is the utopia that Jarosinski's negation implies? Specifically, what if our social media presence were all the "publishing" we needed to do? I've considered this question before: imagine a university that hires based on a scholar's contribution and demeanour on Twitter, in the blogosphere, and, say, at Wikipedia. And what if the "culture" we imparted to our students was precisely a matter of shaping their persona in these media, their ability to "be present" there? Sure, an occasional long-form essay and even a book, written at one's leisure, would not be out of place either. But let's stop making academia so unpleasant that people precisely like Eric Jarosinski end up saying NEIN! to it.

6 comments:

Presskorn said...
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Presskorn said...

This seems like a good exercise in what Kant would call teleological judgement. Or an exercise in what screen writers (and crime novelists) call "Writing Backwards" (http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~ina22/cliplib/clip-Writing_Backwards.htm): First, to ask what is the intrinsic purpose of the university? Second, to work backwards from that purpose by asking what institutional setup which is likely to cause the purpose as its effect?

At present that intrinsic purpose seems to be publishing in peer-reviewed journals. Belonging to the group of friends nurturing your vanity, I want to assure that you are already more than qualified to teach under such conditions. But I, too , fear that the univerisity's purpose is, at present, unwisely chosen. Obvious candidates for alternative purposes include: Aufklarung or good students. Hence, I'll check in from time to time over the summer.

Thomas said...

I appreciate your assurances, but I did mean formally qualified. That is, the question is whether Jarosinski and I could actually get (and keep) a job in academia, ultimately, whether we could make associate professor. I agree with you that we'd probably be good teachers and even, I guess, that we have the ability to do the work to meet current criteria. But that's not the issue. The issue is whether the work we've already done and are already doing would be sufficient for the relevant hiring and promotion processes. I don't think they would be.

You remark about alternative purposes is well taken. I've written about the sense in which universities don't produce ideas but students before. This actually marks another bound of the discussion, since I don't think our "performance" in social media can be the only mark of success. As I wrote about after last year's AOM conference.

Presskorn said...

Yes, I remember that blog post & I often make the "not ideas, but students"-point in conversation referencing you.

Presskorn said...

Ramdomly (today via Leiter), I ran into the story of Mark Anderson - a scholar and a philosopher who disappointed with the publishing business and the usual academic tactics - decided to blog a book instead, chapter by chapter. The project has just been completed... http://mobydickasphilosophy.typepad.com/my-blog/

Thomas said...

Small world! I know Mark. He was a graduate student at the University of Calgary when I was doing my BA in philosophy. A very smart guy.