My editorial that the Chronicle of Higher Education rejected

[Please excuse the rough-draft-ed-ness of this piece]

On Polite-ness


This past year, I sent out roughly 30 packets of application materials for positions in the halls of academe – these consisted of letters, each one written specifically for the department, statements of teaching, research agendas, transcripts, sample syllabi, recommendations, samples of my work, and anything else the department could dream up. Of these 30 schools, five never acknowledged receipt of materials at all. Five others acknowledged receipt of materials and never contacted me again. That leaves 20. Of these 20, five sent me nice letters telling me I wasn’t what they needed. I had 15 phone interviews and six on campus interviews. Of these, I never heard from seven schools again.

Think this is strange? I also submitted four pieces for publication. Three of which remain unacknowledged by the publisher, even upon multiple contacts. One piece I’ve had to email editors about 4 times just to make sure they received it.

The final straw is this: in March I was solicited to write a short piece for a yearly collection. Today I found that collection had been published and my topic had been assigned to someone else. The two weeks of work I did on the piece are, in effect, wasted. I never received word one about this piece after I was asked to write it.

Is this all complaining? Of course. It’s pretty typical of the stuff you’ll see on the job boards and in the hallways of departments.

But the fact that it’s constant and happens to others doesn’t necessarily make it wrong.
What it really is about is politeness, a rather quaint concept, I realize, but one that I think has pretty much left the building these days. We live in a world where people get off on being mean – from road rage to partisan bickering in congress to the extraordinary rise in lawsuits, we are living in a clearly adversarial moment in time. The importance of being right (or feeling that you are right) seems so much more important than doing the right thing, even if it costs you a moment of time, has created an angry, selfish world that has started to permeate the ivory tower.

And I think it’s wrong.

Look, I understand that academics has always had its adversaries – I got attacked during a question and answer session at my first MLA in 1994 and told that my degree was stupid and that as a grad student I didn’t really know anything, so I get it. There are intellectual bullies all around us.

But there don’t need to be.

Before I get called Pollyanna, I want to try and explain why I think that people who are responsible for teaching ought to conduct themselves in a way that mirrors the society we want, not the one we’ve got. Too often faculty of my acquaintance treat each other, their friends and family and their students like imbeciles. I think I know, at least in part, why.

For much of our lives we, as young, intrepid, future academics, were picked on. We were bookish, lumpy, had few friends and less style. We had a hard time hooking up, if we hooked up at all. We existed in a world where being smart or studious was looked down upon at best and actively discouraged at most. Many of us, myself included, have needed intense therapy to get over the damage, both physical and emotional, done to us in high school, by fraternities and sororities, by the mean girls and football players, and by a culture that thinks Paris Hilton both going to and coming from jail is, literally, worthy of a “Breaking News” designation on CNN.
Then we entered, however briefly, the one place that being smart is still considered “cool.” The University. So we connived to stay. As long as we can.

But a funny thing happened along the way to our enlightenment. We learned that being cool is kind of fun. It’s a rush. It’s powerful. Boys want to be like you and girls want to be with you (as long as you can sign their overload forms and be on their thesis committees – more about that later). That we now exist in a world where we are cool; where we set the tone and the fashion. Suddenly we get to be the mean boys and mean girls and make all the little people suffer. It’s revenge time, baby. It’s hazing, only this time we’re the good looking seniors and the students and new assistant professors are the pledges.

So we put them down and keep them out. We do it ever-so-nicely – their research isn’t “up to snuff”; their writing is “in need of work”; their proposal is “hackyned”; their students are “trying real hard.”

And when it comes to being polite – to doing the right thing and making the effort, we’re “really busy,” “overwhelmed,” “buried.” Of course, we aren’t. Not really. Not compared to someone who only gets two weeks of vacation a year. Not to someone who has to find their own sub if they want to take the day off. Not to someone who works at a wage set by the government as the lowest possible amount a company can pay them.

We’re not polite, in other words, because we really don’t have to be. We treat job applicants like shit because they are a dime a dozen (never mind that the search committee spends hours talking about how terrible the applicant pool is); we treat scholars who have submitted pieces to our journals like crap because there are twenty more articles in our in basket and besides we can always get something from that “really famous scholar” and/or our grad school buddy.
So a few words of advice – stop doing shit just because it looks good on your c.v.; don’t be chair if you don’t want to be chair; don’t apply for the editorship if you aren’t interested in the scut work that comes with the position; don’t volunteer to serve on a search committee if you hold all hires in contempt. Get over yourself. Realize that you are one of the lucky ones – you have a job doing what you like and what you want to do. How lucky is that?[1]


[1] Caveat: if Paul Stanly ever calls and asks if I’ll fill in for Ace Frehley on the KISS Alive 5 European tour, I’m gone. We all have our dreams.