the inmate's journal : the academy vi point vi

When you’re young, throwing peas on the floor and babbling in the bath, life is the only university, good and evil are happy screaming siblings, and knowledge is as much a turd as a prayer.  A child is protected, of course—if she isn’t, she can’t typically learn very well—but if her caregivers are sufficiently flexible, they push the barriers away in synch with the child’s ability and desire to expand.  Some children have minimal ability and desire, but the barriers get pushed away anyway.  A few have substantial ability and desire, but the barriers are held tight.  A very few will race past their teachers regardless of the barriers or the consequences—to death, to glory, to a job as a bike courier.  Whether there’s a match between the child’s evolutionary needs and her teachers’ ability to adapt to those needs is fairly random and the system—naturally, efficiently, and successfully—aims for the average.  The real learner—the one who stretches the limits of knowledge—doesn’t care for the average though, and risks life, pocketbook, and dependable orgasms to surf the cold ocean of her dreams.

 

Tenure, the academy’s golden cage and ticket, is one of the few ultimate adult safety barriers.  The four or five years an entry-level prof has to prove himself tend to be marked by a political frenzy blending anxiety and harassment with current intellectual fashion in a rite of passage unrivalled in its sophisticated savagery.  After all, if you get tenure at the end of your probation period, it’s almost impossible to lose your job (typically only 50 of 280,000 tenured professors get fired annually in the U.S.), the lifestyle can be leisurely if you want it to be, and you get decent money.  In my communications department, it was the tenure-track profs making $80K who worked nine days a week and the tenured profs making $150K who worked two.  Knowledge of how the system works and conforming to it might very well be the most important information a Ph.D. teaches you.

 

Fortunately, for your well being and to help you deal with the complexities of the system, I’ve written my own Ph.D. examination—included right here at no extra charge.  I told you my journal would have bonus features.

Ph.D. Final Examination

The University of Jude

 

Rules and Guidelines

 

1.     The examination has only one question, which is multiple-choice.  The examination’s brevity and seeming simplicity should not deceive the student into thinking that his or her answer should be formed quickly, however.

2.     There is no time limit; the examination is over when you die.

3.     The examination room is the world.  The examination room is bigger than the world if you’re an astronaut.

4.     The examination does not have one right answer.  Every answer is right, but you may only choose one.

5.     No coursework, thesis, or defense is required.

6.     No one will mark your examination other than you, and you only have to mark it if you want to.

7.     Not taking this examination does not mean you haven’t selected an answer.

8.     While studies have shown that those who answer #1 become academics, #2 become librarians, #3 become poets, #4 become businesspeople, and #5 become heroin addicts, exceptions have been documented and are stored in the classified archives of the Library of Congress.

 

    Ph.D. Final Examination Question

 

Would you rather gain knowledge from

1.             those who write about Shakespeare?

2.             Shakespeare?

3.             life?

4.             none of the above?

5.             all of the above?

 

Ahhh!  Help!!  Compute compute compute … decide decide decide … fate fate fate …

 

… oh fuck, I don’t know.  Where’s the I dunno option?  Where’s my answer?  Why isn’t Doubt ever one of the answers?

 

Hell … can you tell me what knowledge is and what increases it?  Does safety, risk, poverty, abuse, freedom, wealth, power, obscurity?  Maybe it’s your diet?  Is there a direct correlation between baked yams and knowledge, Portuguese olives and ignorance?  Jesus, Judas, Athena, and the whole panoply of warring gods … all I know is that the academy claims a certain kind of knowledge and sometimes partially achieves it.

 

But I don’t know how much that’s saying.  All I know is that knowledge, like love, exists, but, also like love, it’s slippery, opaque, and a little larger than the entire universe.

 

Anyway, forget these exam anxieties and metascatological musings.  Let’s get back to dreams.  Shit, back to reality.  To my challenge of getting tenure while working as little as possible.  So far no one had noticed my indolence, my deception, my quest for madness and God … or had they?  They were all too busy sealing themselves in their own worlds … or were they?