Quests, being quests, don’t particularly care about reason, other than any reason required to pursue the quest. So the cowboy’s reasons look like madness to the eco-vegan, the poet’s to the lawyer, the academic’s to the evangelical, the politician’s to the bum. Each has a different reason and a useful definition of God might be that he’s the sum of all reasons. A little spiritual mathematics for those with some spare time.
There are trivial quests of course. Quests to find that special dental floss. To never miss a Seinfeld episode. To always keep the SUV clean and dentless. They’re fine. Let the dental floss seekers be satisfied. Let the Seinfeld addicts be fulfilled. But trivial quests are possible. True, someone might scrape your Infiniti QX56, but it’s more likely someone won’t. If you make that special call to that special floss manufacturer and pay that special price, you’re probably going to get that special floss. All good. Something to talk to your friends about. But the quests I like are the impossible ones, the ones the night talks to you about—spreading chivalry in an unchivalrous world, building a garden to the moon, painting God. And the seekers I like are those who see dreams as if they were trees and trees as if they were dreams.
I don’t know if the Devil’s advice was any good. Dalwhinnie and the boys rejected me for the Ph.D., but Knickerloo accepted me, on condition that I get a Ph.D. The Devil laughed I guess, and I moved into the academy to continue my increasingly blurry quest, into a 6x10’ teeny-windowed fustydusty office in which I was expected to expand the boundaries of human knowledge.
Knickerloo wasn’t a tier one university … not one of those envy-league extravaganzas obsessed with its own endowment of vanity. It wasn’t even tier two, with dreams of becoming tier one. It was tier seven, with dreams of becoming tier six. It dreamt of dreaming of vanity; it tried it on in the closet and was desperately impressed. My colleagues had Ph.D.s, it’s true, but they were from the University of Cowdip, Ostralasia U. Online (OUO), Krung Thep Brothel and College, and the Newest School of Deconstructionism at Southwest Yonkers. Knickerloo had recently implemented graduate degrees, it’s true, but they were in things like Curtain Management, Leonard H. McCoy Studies, and The New Idahoan Politic. Tens of thousands of students attended its classes, it’s true, but only three of them could spell knowledgeable and only two could write a twenty-word sentence with fewer than four grammatical mistakes.
But there was something in Knickerloo’s dispossessed nature—its perfect injection of democracy into education so that even video-addict crackheads could get a degree—that appealed to my cultural voyeurism and infatuation with madness. Plus, I tried to reason enthusiastically—there’s something about tier seven universities that’s structurally more honest than tier ones. That reflects our cultural mediocrity, interests, ambitions, and hypocrisy more fully than those that are primarily dens of the wealthy. That says, We are the weird secularization of Christianity, where all are welcome into the Kingdom … even the weak, lobotomized and leprous … especially the weak, lobotomized and leprous. Yes, at Knickerloo I was returning to my religious roots, but Christ was called curriculum and salvation tenure and the underprivileged were exalted and the exalted were envied.
The first few years of my professoriate were spent doing four things:
1. Doing what I was getting paid to do—teaching and committee work.
2. Doing what I wasn’t getting paid to do— covert research on whether I could find God or dreams or madness or satisfaction or whatever-I-was-looking-for in the university.
3. Not doing what I was getting paid to do—getting a Ph.D., doing statistical analysis on things like middle management Friday afternoon email misuse in Fortune 100 companies cross-tabbed to household charitable donations during global famine relief media campaigns.
4. Managing perceptions so that everyone focused on the first thing and ignored the other things.
I enjoyed doing what I wasn’t getting paid to do the most, followed by not doing what I was getting paid to do. After that it was a tossup. But, hey, institutional Robin Hoods, sucking salaries from bureaucracies to feed their dream-cravings, are a rare commodity these days. We need more of them. Support groups, workshops, tax credits.
The political scene at Knickerloo, though, was considerably different than the religious and business scenes I had survived. In the church, the hierarchy’s something like this—
In business, the hierarchy looks like—
But in the academy, the hierarchy’s squashed into shapes hierarchies were never meant to be in—
Throw into the oval mix illusions of knowledge and hipness, denial of madness, government policy, boards and books and the memory of books, the ascendancy of accounting, student rights, the cabal of tenure, political correctness, and the utter destitution of anyone anywhere with management experience—and that explains what I’m getting at: it was easy for everyone to ignore what I was and wasn’t doing; they were all too busy trying not to suffocate under the knowledge factory’s ghoulish demands.
I felt wonder for my colleagues. How did they do it? What made them believe so fervently? These hyper-educated phenomena who worked nine days a week teaching classes, supervising graduate students, seducing graduate students, staying current on every word of every scholar who had ever said anything remotely related to anything they were supposed to know anything about, writing grant applications, monitoring each affair that might affect their grant applications, transferring all their courses to the online world, responding to the thousand student emails they received each minute, dressing as if fashion had never been invented, attending conferences in Barcelona, Sao Paulo, Cairo, Beijing, publishing one book and ten articles annually, chairing committees, sitting on committees, negotiating to avoid committees … when did they have time to think?
