Professors and Hell: II

Just re-read the entry from a while back about hell and professors. Should I have followed my own advice in dealing with the committee of that program from which I was forced to leave? Which, I suppose, is another way of asking to what degree did their personal animosity and not their professional concern direct their actions?

At first, I wasn't certain that it had at all. I thought that it had been entirely my fault. (And I am, admittedly, a difficult person at times.)

But then I remembered an interesting incident. The head of the program was a large and billowing man who was a noted authority in a particular field. I'll not identify him, just as I will not name the other two members of my committee, but suffice to say that he was well known and something of a star in the academic world.

I had admired him, at first. I thought he was quite remarkable…though I found his comments on my papers less than useful. He had a great dislike of anything smacking of informality, or indeed of popular culture. Once, when I compared a certain nineteenth century figure to a video game developer he just about took my head off.

But I thought we were on good terms…or at least, functioning professional terms, until my two other committee members sent me a letter telling me that they refused from hence forward to work with me on my Ph.D. Dissertation. On the advice of my mentor at another university, I then sent this man an email saying that I seemed to have inadvertently alienated these two committee members and asking him what was now possible.

He wrote back an angry note in which he said he could not believe that anyone on my committee was refusing to work with me for any personal reason. Rather, he said, I had failed to understand the nature of "genuine scholarship."

Much later, when I had left the program, I began to be a bit suspect of his disinterest. I remembered that in my email to him I had said that I had alienated my other committee members, but I hadn't accused them of any personal animosity. You can be alienated from someone, particularly in a professional setting, yet not hate them as an individual.

Why, then, had he been so quick to assume that was what I meant? Why had he been so eager to defend himself, and the other committee members, from an accusation which I had not actually made?

Maybe… maybe because…because it was true? Because personal animosity WAS part of the equation? Because their treatment of me WAS unfair and unjust, and very personal? And he knew it? And he attacked me before I could raise the possibility? Did he, in other words, protest too much?

The more I've thought about it over these past few years, the more I've wondered if that wasn't exactly the case. Of course I cannot say for certain, much less prove it, but I've begun to suspect my exit from that particular university was as much a product of their personal dislike as it ever was of my failure to practice "true scholarship."

And the source of that dislike? Why they hated me? Well, who can say? But, I'm guessing it was precisely the thing that I found offensive in my own students: that I was not sufficiently deferential. As I admitted before, I can be a difficult person, and I have the habit of saying openly (and with force) what it would be wiser not to say at all—that such-and-such a book is badly written, that so-and-so is a pompous and vapid idiot, that this-or-that idea is politically correct but utterly foolish.

In other words, I suspect I did not properly pucker before the proffered asses. And this, alas, spelled my demise.

Which means I'm confronted with a disturbing question. How do I tell my own students not to do what I do, but rather tell their professors what they want to hear?

Or, to put it another way, how do I explain that Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, with all its pettiness and cruelty, is actually terrifyingly understated?