February 12, 2008
Mel Gregg's description of her response to a night out with friends is a good example of the academic experience of the otherwise mundane. Surely a move and a Chinese meal don't trigger this kind of contemplation and confusion in "normal" people? Or maybe non-scholars do have similar experiences but are just too polite to talk about them?
Gregg says:
"I’m still feeling unhinged by the whole thing.
But it did help me appreciate the complicated, chaotic, compromised world we live in, and how regularly it seems to involve being constantly buffetted by the most incongruent trivia just to make sure we don’t ever remain completely comfortable in our response to something. This lack of certainty and my resignation to it feels closely tied to what I understand by ‘having a scholarly temperament’, even though I also lament the way it prevents me from accessing many familiar kinds of mundane reassurance."
This resonates. Contrary to the popular notion of ivory tower academics enjoying a privileged position in some cocooned Neverland, the ordinary can be painfully confusing. You can't escape into the latest issue of Womans Day or enjoy the spectacle of Britney Spears' meltdown without complicating the whole thing, or reflecting on your own role in perpetuating damage.
The scholarly temperament is not the sole preserve of the credentialed of course, and I'm grateful for the analytical toolkit that makes "incongruent trivia" a solvable puzzle rather than the source of frustration it used to be. The mundane was never reassuring, but at least now I don't feel the need to acquire brain damage to fit in.
Loss of access to academia is the worst thing about the possibility that I'll end up working at Target. I'd rather give up a limb than my library card. So this from dana boyd is welcome. As Catharine Lumby said, the barbarians are no longer at the gate - they're inside the castle redecorating.
boyd has decided to boycott the academic lock down and publish only in open access journals. She calls on others to do the same, which is fine by me.
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Lyn,
re your comment "I'd rather give up a limb than my library card."
I gave up my uni library card years age when I finished uni. I haven't ended up in Target. Nor have I become one of the barbarians. I get by without the library books. I don't miss them as much as I thought.
What I do detest is academic publishers locking down their journals, authors and their content behind heavy iron walls. Public access is effectively denied. So I am glad that the economy around academic journals is crumbling--- no one else is buying the journals because they are god-awful expensive and no one outside of a niche market knows what's in them. Nor wants to know.
Consequently, academics are publishing to increasingly narrow audiences who will never read their material purely so that they can get the right credentials to keep their job.