By Dylan Lightfoot
Last week I had a moment of clarity. I was chopping wood when a chunk of rock maple flew up and busted my face open. My wife-to-be dashed off to Walgreens for first aid supplies — perhaps wondering if marrying me is such a good idea — and as I stood there helpless, blood streaming down my face onto the patio, it hit me out of the blue: I really hate school.
Epiphanies come at strange moments.
I don’t mean to say I scorn higher learning, self-betterment and education for its own sake. These are virtuous pursuits that may yet deliver me from a life of blue-collar drudgery. No, the truth is that, with few exceptions, I can’t deal with the people. France, they say, is fine but for the French. Likewise, academia would be peachy were it not full of irritating academic types.
Academics of the irritating variety make up only a fraction of the academic wild kingdom, but they are plentiful enough to make post-graduate work an unsavory proposition. But, irritating as they are, they’re also fascinating. Having lived among them these last three years, studying their social habits and cultural schemas, I feel confident enough in my expertise to offer this catalog of irritating academic types for peer review. Please direct all correspondence to the Council on Higher Education.
The Pompous Pedagogue: What’s worse than a self-satisfied intellectual? A self-satisfied intellectual with letters and a tenure slot, of course.
Identifying features vary, but a tweed sport coat with leather elbow patches is a dead giveaway. Females adorn themselves with L.L. Bean or Liz Clairborne.
P.P.s are the queen bees of the academic hive; they must procreate, if only to ensure a viable pool of graduate drones for their research. It is the nature of their research that distinguishes P.P.s from legitimate scientists.
While some Ph.D.s diligently push the boundaries of human knowledge in the pursuit of “hard science,” P.P.s ride the academic gravy train and publish papers on gender roles, race consciousness and literary criticism that further only their careers. Teaching assistants furnish them with coffee, a staple of their diet.
P.P.s love to hear themselves talk, and would much rather lecture passels of half-asleep undergrads than work in the business sector where nobody cares about their theories.
The Loquacious Liberal: Loquacious Liberals constitute that genus of academics known as the “herd of free-thinkers.” They buy the academic shtick hook, line and sinker. There are several subspecies, including the Solipsistic Savant, the Intellectual Idiot and the Know-it-all Hippie (reference the “Die, Hippie, Die” episode of South Park).
L.L.s love to debate endlessly about lofty abstractions, couching everything in the sterile language of academic prose. Talking to L.L.s is tricky; they resort to rhetorical gymnastics, standing everything on its head. For example, they love condemning this or that institution as being “just a social construct,” which is supposed to give a leg up to whatever utopian hoodoo they’re selling.
L.L.s like to think critically about everything except academia itself because, if they did, they would have to admit to being fraudulent hacks; mass suicides would follow.
The Sentimental Socialist: Many of these can be found loitering in front of the humanities building or lounging on the grass. They can be identified by their cultivated slovenliness and affected disaffection. Ché Guevera t-shirts and army surplus clothing also mark the strain.
S.S.s are mostly middle-American white kids. They haven’t had to work for anything in their lives, yet advocate for the working class. They’ve never experienced discrimination or racism, yet their hearts bleed for downtrodden minorities. They cop a stick-it-to-The-Man attitude even though The Man, fascist bastard that he is, subsidizes their “education.” In short, they don’t have clue.
S.S.s pursue activism, but only as a fashion statement. They don’t stage sit-ins or riots like committed activists because that can land them in jail, where mopey college kids fare poorly. Instead, they quote famous activists and hang up posters of them. Their revolution will not be televised, but it will be posted in the blogosphere.
The Collegiate Conservative: Also called the Rancorous Republican — males and females sport ball caps, Abercrombie gear and highlights, but females often wear sweatpants with butt lettering to attract a mate.
Technically not academics, C.C.s are only in school for a better crack at the job market. In this sense, they have a leg up on the others: they know college isn’t the real world. For them academia is just a liberal indoctrination racket, and they ignore its platitudes.
C.C.s become irritating academics by proxy when they sue for victim status due to the unpopularity of their anti-liberal views — somehow, the glaring irony of this is lost on them.
C.C.s are biding their time until creationism, intelligent design, QM theory and professional sports are the prevailing topics of learned discourse, at which time they’ll be the only ones spending precious time and money on a college education.
No irritating academics were harmed in the writing of this column.
