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| Hearsay: |
Jessa points to an interesting and funny piece on the disadvantages of an elite, Ivy League education. I’ve often referred to my frustration with academics as the “prof in the bubble” syndrome, wherein highly edumacated folk seem to walk around with their eyes focussed solely at the distance needed for reading a book—about the distance between the centre and skin of a beach ball. Anything outside that distance they bounce away from, just like said beach ball, rolling around in the wind.
When we were in NYC and Lady Ninja was at an elite-ish school there, we also called it the “stop/rewind moment”. That’s when you say something to an academic that does not compute and you get a sort of somatic error message, which is a blank stare and a couple blinks before they seem to stop the mental tape, press rewind, and then restart the recording over what you just said.
It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League dees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.
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June 17th, 2008 at 9:45 am
George, I thought this was another one from The Onion you snuck in.
June 17th, 2008 at 10:17 am
frankly, the problem is with william deresiewicz, not with ivy league — or any other — schools. since when is a college education supposed to teach you to talk to a plumber, or to anyone else? if that’s what he thinks the goal of a college/university education should be, then he should have gone to vocational school or read a self-help book about conversation. look at it the other way around: what does the plumber have to say to him? why, for example, should i be obliged to carry on a conversation with anyone, period, who can’t carry on a conversation with me? i don’t go to the supermarket, or call the plumber, or eat in a restaurant so i can be best friends with the cashier, the plumber, or the waiter. this pseudo-populism is tiresome and smacks of dinesh d’souza and his crowd. intellectually bankrupt.
June 17th, 2008 at 10:23 am
I have this thing on my bulletin board which reads as follows: Andrew Mercer has recently opened the Sequoia College of Diseducation (SCD) in San Francisco. It’s chief purpose is to untrain over-qualified people. Thisi s a boon to PhD.’s and other highly educated people who are experiencing difficulties getting jobs. A PhD., after four years at SCD, will find that he thinks like a BA, and will no longer be turned away from employment because he’s overqualified.
I don’t know where i got this. But i think its funny.
June 17th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Ooh. Mitchell. I hope i never meet you. That’s a little elitist of you, isnt it?
June 17th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Poor Mitchell. His expensive education didn’t train him to read all the way to the end….
June 17th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
I think he suffers from the disease called “just being a straight-up asshole.”
June 17th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
oh..yes, i think you’re right, Michael. It’s a pandemic.
June 17th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
I think you’re all being a tad harsh with Squire Mitchell.
I, too, find it tedious attempting to have what I most generously term “a conversation” with the various fishmongers and smithies and chimney sweeps and cobblers’ sons I meet while out for a brief promenade.
Sometimes, I must confess, I pretend to be too distracted by my snuff box or my powdered wig to return their barely comprehensible greetings.
June 17th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Yeah, I saw Nathan at BookExpo, he did seem distracted when I tried to talk to him…
June 17th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Naw, John, he’d just popped his monocle and, having long ago lost the ability to focus with two eyes, was surreptitiously trying to find it in his cravat.
June 17th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Not being able to relate to an adult who still wears a baseball cap is a sign of genuine human progress.
Writing a faux-self-flagellating article about it, however, may be a symptom of academic damage.
June 17th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Fie, I say to you all, fie.
And John, were you only able to converse at a level even an angel’s hair more lofty than that of mere Cockney rhyming slang and the usual gutter utterances, than I surely would have lowered myself to offer a word or two in greeting.
I would even have displayed such democratic spirit as to overlook your garish attire – your shirt, I believe expressed boldly coloured support for some athletic club or another.
But again: fie.
June 18th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
TFC! TFC! TFC!
WHO ARE YA?!?!
THIS IS OUR HOUSE!!!!
Where’s Degen when I need him. Actually there’s a very lively debate going on over at his blog the anti-copyright guys are trying very hard to explain why they hate the idea of copyright protection without using the phrase, “Police state.”
They’re having some trouble.