the inmate's journal : the academy xii

It wasn’t quite what I had in mind, said Ouzo.

 

Your instructions were rather vague.

 

What in the world’s clearer than humiliating someone else?  You only humiliated yourself and showed yourself to be a bungling idiot.  That’s not knowledge, that’s insanity.

 

I feel badly about IdI’s office.

 

Feel badly about IdI’s office.  Christ Jude, IdI’s office has always smelled.  Her files needed to be cleaned out anyway.  Her office needs a paint job, her chair was falling apart.  You did her a favor.

 

Does this mean I don’t get tenure?

 

The academy has historically been held together by one thing and that historic adhesive has shown no sign whatsoever of changing its nature or effects.  That glue has been and remains—collegiality.  How is collegiality shown?  Not through callow flights of fancy.  Not through naïve and suburban notions of niceness, kindness, superficial showings of respect … these are what fools associate with collegiality.  Let fools think what they like.  The continued and growing success of the academy—its weight, its influence, its pervasiveness and tenacity—is its ability to ignore fools and offer future thinkers the only definitions that have ever worked in the real world.  Foolishness is the denial of life’s raw principles.  And collegiality is nothing other than being bound together by strife.  Academics must continually fight - among themselves, in themselves, in the world - in words, in actions, in thought, in force.  That is how knowledge is born.  We can intersectionalize and dei-ize until hell freezes over, this doesn't alter the academy's essential character one bit. All it does is diversify the clothing on the eternally bellicose heart. Doesn't matter what a person looks like or how they play on whatever the orientations of the day are, everyone gets sucked into the academy's homogenized abattoir and shat out as a knowledge borg.  Content changes, that's what we fight about. Form never does, that's what unites us.

You’re a fool Jude.  You’ve consistently demonstrated amateurish incompetence, juvenile indolence, crushing naïveté, and a lack of understanding of university politics so thorough it makes me think you’ve just dropped from a monastery in Oz.  I find it almost impossible to believe you ever were the least bit successful in business but even if you were all that proves is that the real battles on earth take place here, that business is simply a training ground for the pinnacle of reality—the academy—and that you’re a most unsophisticated warrior on the world’s most severe battleground.  Having said all that, there is one way, however, I might still be able to overlook your substantial defects.

 

I don’t understand.

 

You can perform certain favors for me.

 

I’m afraid I still don’t understand.

 

Jude.  Before you, Dr. Hite was the only male in the department.  Now you are.  I might be able to convince the Dean you’re a worthy candidate for tenure if you service me.  Regularly. 

 

You mean …?

 

That’s exactly what I mean.

 

Isn’t that sexual harassment?

 

Oh Jude.  Only men sexually harass.  Women connive.  Anyway, this is the University.  I’ve explained all this.  Knowledge is born from persecution and coitus.  You’ll thank me later.

 

How would the Dean be convinced?

 

The Dean is not immune.

 

Immune?

 

Immune from temptation.  The Dean is the Dean.  Everything can be managed.  You maintain a propriety, Jude, that I can only surmise is a hangover from your religious days.  It would be comic if it weren’t so pathetically ineffectual.  Among the thousand and one management tools, the genitals are the most potent.  Never forget that if you aspire to greatness.