Ranting, anecdotally

(We temporarily abandon our normally demure tone in order to froth at the mouth.  Yes, this was inspired by an article I read today, and no, it's not on the 'net.) 

Try to take this in the kindest possible way.  Please.  All of us have had our petty sense of self-worth pricked, at some time or another, by someone who failed to appreciate our true brilliance.  All of us have found our rosy fantasies of academic life undermined, at some time or another, by the realities of hiring, students, committees, and tenure review.  All of us have suffered Grave Professional Injustices, at some time or another, at the hands of someone of a different scholarly, political, religious, ethnic, racial, gender, or sexual persuasion.  And so, all of us have trotted out, at some time or another, our little store of anecdotes, the better to impugn "the discipline," or "the academy," or "academic publishing," or what-have-you. 

Again, I mean this in the kindest possible way.  But that little store of anecdotes takes on meaning only in relationship to your career.  The injustice may be real--may even be legally actionable--and still mean nothing.  For example, I sometimes trot out my story about the least professional, least ethical job search it was ever my misfortune to experience.  As it happens, the institution running this job search was a Catholic university.  I have never even remotely thought that I could make any generalizations about the professionalism or ethics of Catholic universities from this particular case.  Was the experience annoying? Sure.  Does it tell us anything, except that this university botched that search? Well, no, it doesn't.  If I had had four such experiences, would I be justified in making grand pronouncements? Well, I could try, but I might run head-on into someone who had had four just fine-and-dandy experiences at similar institutions--heck, perhaps at the same institutions.  Then what? Play games of "my anecdote is bigger than yours"?

Even worse are sweeping anecdotes about What Professors Do or What Students Are Like or How Mean People Failed to Fall Adoring at My Feet or How Somebody Important Told Me that Nobody Really Believes in this Stuff.  These anecdotes are almost always safely anonymous--names, universities, and sometimes sexes carefully concealed--and always in favor of the poor, victimized teller.  Never mind that none of this mock-confessional self-indulgence can ever be verified (seeing as how, you know, it's been anonymized); never mind that we only get one side of the story; never mind that, on closer examination, the teller may have founded his or her sweeping generalizations on a single institution, a single poetry reading, or a single hour with a single person; never mind that the teller may have misread the situation, may be allowing his or her ego to get in the way, or (gulp) may even be lying.  Because, apparently, it's in bad form to offer evidence to support one's case--or even be expected to offer such evidence.  So much for academic standards.  How dare someone insinuate that my grievances might not really indicate anything about the academic world at large? How dare someone question my self-evident righteousness, my purity of motive? How dare someone, in other words, suggest that the academic world might be larger than me?

(We now return to our normal demure tone.) 

Comments

[Richard]

Related Question: Assuming the author of the article was involved in some way in literature (perhaps a large assumption), how is it possible to work closely with the most intimate creations of the minds of others, and emerge from the library a Monolithic Solipsist?

[Miriam]

It was indeed a person of the literary persuasion. Sigh.

[Mano]

I am guilty of recounting "anonymous" situations. I would never dream of naming the professor who inflicted the worst "grad school trauma" on me, I think for good reasons. It's more about fleshing out my own feelings about the experience than putting blame on someone. Of course, I don't know if you were thinking of me here to begin with.

[Mano]

Yes, actually, I do know you were NOT thinking of me because of what you said at the beginning of your post. My ability to remember what I read five minutes ago is apalling sometimes. (I should add that I'm not so sure my experiences are ever representative of larger trends such that I could make any semi-accurate generalizations about academic culture from them.)

What do you think about people who have made their own marginalization a sort of jumping-off point for framing their scholarship? (For example, Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty's book?) This expecially seems to come out in Women's Studies as a kind of self-reflexivity to make one's stakes clear from the get go, as they always color how one thinks about one's work.

[Miriam]

Not at all, Mano! (Like I said, this was a print essay, not something off a blog.) I'm not ranting about complaining per se, which I do all the time; I'm ranting about people who think that their complaints exhaust an entire universe's worth of experiences.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Amen. It's like if I had one crappy experience with a psychiatrist and then walked around saying psychiatry is bunk and the entire profession needs to be reformed. Because the universe is all about ME, I tell you, ME.

[Ancarett]

You're wrong, NK. It's all about me! ME!

Erm, ahem. Yes. I've had trouble convincing some people that institution X or department Y is not the font of all evil because of one bad experience they or someone else has recounted. Especially when they're savaging people with whom I've worked over several years and they've only met for a matter of minutes. . . .

[A. Cephalous]

One day I'll write an excruciatingly long entry about the phenomenon known as "the small sample size" and how it's the bane of both literary scholars and their critics (not to mention baseball fans and meterologists who study tornadoes). Here's the short version:

There are two types of conclusions in the world: 1) the statistically valid and 2) the anecdote.

Critics of literary theorists, as well as any literary theorists who rely on Freud/Freudian/etc. and deconstructive models, always draw from anecdotes statistically invalid conclusions. Just because Ward Churchill is a louse does not mean that tenure ought to be abolished; similarly, just because one kid played the fort-da game does not mean that all children play a variation of it. (I could add: just because this word contains a pregnant ambiguity doesn't mean all words contain pregnant ambiguities...but Derrida hardly ever writes about ordinary language, so how would the deconstructivist know?)

In short, Miriam, "Amen, Sister, Amen."

[profsynecdoche]

There was once a minor scandal in my dept. b/c a colleague took a comment made by a visiting scholar (whom we were recruiting) and used it as a negative example to set up an argument about the academy at large in a very, very prominent place. Of course the visitng scholar was made anonymous (probably referred to as "a visiting scholar") but people in my dept. were furious, and the visiting scholar did not end up coming to our dept., though probably for different reasons. All of which is to say that these things have repercussions, which is one thing I think you meant to say as well.

[Another Damned Medievalist]

Glad I noticed that it was a print article -- you had me feeling all guilty about recounting the Interview From Hell!

[Jonathan]

You know, I bet that visiting scholar was Noam Chomsky and that he was upset by a recent review in Reason of the Frothing, Anti-Chomsky Reader.