::::::::
When I left Cornell many decades ago, Ph.D. in hand, I asked my profs, as was the custom, to write confidential letters of recommendation that would be placed in my personnel file and accessible only to prospective employers, not to me. I asked one of them, whose name I will graciously omit, if he had found anything good to say about me, and he replied in a similarly lighthearted way, "Sure, best foot forward." A few months later, when I called the personnel office to have my file sent somewhere, a sympathetic clerk told me, "By the way, did you know that Prof. X wrote a terrible letter about you? I don't think anybody who reads that letter would hire you." He offered to remove it, and of course I said please do.
I was shocked. I honestly did not know what I had done to offend the man, and if he thought so poorly of me, why had he passed me on my orals and approved my dissertation? I wrote to him and asked him this question, whereupon he apologized, sort of, and said he would change the letter. (I never saw either version.) Another prof told me that I was the most stubborn student he'd ever had, and that I didn't seem to be willing to do what is necessary to become a "real scholar." He was right about the latter, I'm proud to say.
I guess it was a personal thing. I'm not so hard to get along with, or so my friends tell me, but I do ask a lot of questions. By the time I got to grad school I couldn't sit through a lecture without asking at least one or two, and it wasn't until I became a teacher myself that I realized how dangerous this is. The successful student either asks no questions at all, or tailors his questions to ensure their answerability. He does not persist in a line of inquiry once the signal has been given that the Dispenser of Knowledge is running on empty. If he does, he will be seen as stubborn or, worse, as has also happened to me, be accused of "injecting an emotional tone into the discussion."
As a teacher, I dealt with these personality flaws by trying to pass them on to my students. The whole point of discussion, I would say, was to come up with questions. The answers, after all, such as they were, were already there, usually at our fingertips in the Google age. It was more fun, and more edifying, to find the questions that they answered and, if things went well, the ones they didn't answer. My happiest moments were when the discussion would uncover questions that seemed not to have been asked before, which happened more often than one might think.
Needless to say, the more orthodox-minded students, predominately male, did not cotton to this freewheeling approach (which I prefer to call "discovery learning"), especially when it meant starting off with a song or two to loosen things up -- and raise the emotional tone of the discussion. But I like girls better anyway. There was very little weeping, fisticuffs, hair-pulling, or personal insults, and things never got out of hand. -- except once. That was the fault of Judge Scalia and Friends.
The day after the Supreme Court decided not to allow the recount that would have put Al Gore in the White House I published an article ("The Assassination of President Gore") on the internet (later included as a postscript to my book Looking for the Enemy), and although I did not exactly dump this on my class on Monday morning I did mention it. Since it was an English conversation class it would have been appropriate to talk about it, if anyone had showed any interest, but unfortunately no one did. The tendency of young German university students, you should know, at least in English class, is to say too little rather than too much -- blowback from already having sat through 9 years of English class in secondary school -- but this particular class included an older woman, a secondary school English teacher herself doing post-grad work, who had none of the inhibitions of her younger fellow students.
My usual practice was to let her talk until she ran out of gas or until someone else finally decided to speak in order to shut her up, but on this morning my patience was thin. I interrupted her! Loquacitas interrupta -- a cardinal sin, obviously, for this woman, who immediately reported the transgression to the university women's affairs officer, and I was obliged to deliver an apology the next morning at 8 am in the dean's office. I duly genuflected, and received no token of commiseration in return, not even from my department head, who said smirkily, "Just don't let it happen again." Would that Scalia et al. had received even that admonition.
I heard no more about this until a couple of years later, when my office computer broke down and stayed that way for six months, despite my complaints to the grad student in charge of these matters and, finally, to the department head. The latter, by this time a different fellow I will call Barking Berthold (imagine a Yorkshire terrier with professorial airs), finally reacted by informing me that 1) I had no computer problem, 2) he took my persistence in the matter (stubbornness again!) as a threat, and 3) he was compiling a secret dossier on me that included complaints that I was prone to "emotional outbursts" in class.
What I realized too late was that the long-legged grad student (whose skirts were conspicuously shorter on certain days of the week, namely when Berthold was on campus) was Berthold's protegée. I decided to cease and desist, knowing that the "secret dossier" was a crock collected in the innermost sanctum academicum (the men's toilet) and not anxious to get into a sh*t-flinging contest with an unmitigated a**hole. Besides, by that time my computer had in fact been fixed.
I managed to stay out of Berthold's way by not going to faculty meetings, where he could bark for hours on end, but it was harder to avoid Whistling Willy. Willy liked to announce his cheerful presence in the hallway with an irritatingly loud rendition of some classical ditty, and having fully assimilated the American mentality in some past year abroad, demonstrated this by calling me "Mike" in all circumstances, despite being 15 years my junior and while being scrupulously observant of formalities with his German colleagues. I tried explaining to him that he had not quite got it right, that yes, Americans are less formal but that reciprocity is expected, that "Mike" did not expect to be introduced as "Mike" to groups of incoming students, for example, when others, including grad students who had been Mike's students only a couple of years before, were introduced as "Herr Dr." this, "Frau Professor Dr." that, and so on. After all, in acccordance with a law from 1939 that is still on the books, I had been obliged to apply to the Reichsminister für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung (now the Kultusminister) for permission to use my title at all in Germany, so I felt I had the right to insist on equal treatment.
It didn't work. Whistling Willy continued to refer to me as "Mike" on all formal occasions, including oral exams, where my job was to evaluate the candidate's English language proficiency. Willy was always ready to lend a helping hand, though. Once I mentioned that a candidate had mistakenly pronounced the word caste to rime with paste, a minor lapse to be sure, but Billy hastened to point out -- in the student's presence -- that there were actually two pronunciations. "No," I said, "I've never heard it pronounced that way." "Well, I have!" retorted Billy, and afterwards stormed into my office with his finger on the entry in Webster's Collegiate showing the pronunciation as /'kast/. "See!" he announced triumphantly, "it's caste !" again riming it with paste. When I pointed to the pronunciation key at the bottom of the page explaining Webster's unorthodox (for Europeans used to the IPA) transcription system, he left in a huff, still muttering about "two pronunciations," having now understood /'kast/ to indicate the British pronunciation, which of course it did not. The fact that the pronunciation he was defending was neither British nor American, but simply wrong, did not penetrate.
Any longtime denizen of the Ivory Tower will have heard much worse stories than these, and it is clear that pusillanimity as the concomitant of overinflated egos is as widespread in academia as it is anywhere else, but the difference is that one does not expect it so much from a class of people who constitute, if any do, the "intellectual elite." More seriously, one does one expect to find, amidst so much brilliance and erudition, not only pusillanimity but just plain stupidity, in every sense of the word, encompassing pig ignorance with regard to facts as well as the inability to see the obvious.
Strong words, perhaps, but how else can one explain the silence of academia on the patently false (official) story of 9/11, just to take the most blatant example? To call it cowardice would be worse, wouldn't it? In general, why are universities not hotbeds of protest against the lies and injustices perpetrated by governments and the mass media, which they most decidedly are not? Why is even someone like Noam Chomsky impervious to common sense on certain issues, as I believe I have demonstrated (see Looking for the Enemy). How could I have spent eight years as a student in fine institutions of higher learning without ever talking about the most important issue of the time, the Vietnam war, in the classroom, while outside the classroom nothing else seemed important?
The answer that education, the life of the mind, concerns with aesthetics, science, literature, philosophy, etc. are beyond or above "politics," which will be readily proffered, is hogwash, a prime example of the stupidity I am talking about. When your high-minded academic offers this excuse, he means "reality," not "politics," even if he is too stupid to know it. I don't care how many Ph.D.'s you have; if you have to read Heidegger to know what reality is (he obviously didn't), you're stupid as a post.
