My scariest moment in Academia

occurred during a meeting with outside reviewers of our department at my previous institution of employment. As the well-mannered, contained evaluators asked for our comments about our own department, one of my colleagues launched into a garbled and not very convincing spiel about how our graduate program is really unique because we allow our students to be themselves, and they don't imitate our models, not like at other programs where there is a lot of imitation and self-reproduction.

I cringed while I listened, think "What is so weird about this and its pseudo-therapeutic language against imitation and mimesis?" Then it occurred to me: six years earlier, when I had just joined the department and we were trying to build the program and hire new colleagues, I had made an impassioned and impossibly naive speech during one of our planning meetings about what we could become as a graduate program -- we should not be a place that churns out clones of ourselves, reproducing ourselves in attitudes and postures. But rather, we could become a department that taught methodologies, debates, forms of dissent and historiographical problems in cultural and critical theory. We would never be able to compete with the private universities' budgets and star rosters, but we could create a rigorous, progressive program that respected progressive values in pedagogy as well as ideology. Rather than encouraging master/disciple relations -- we would really work to help our graduate students discover what counted for them. I had no understanding of institutionality, and I didn't realize how underprepared some graduate students would be to do research on their own and how one would want to reproduce oneself in them for lack of any better ideas of how to teach them!

The institutionalization of competiton rather than disagreement and dissent is reproduced on and in the bodies of graduate students. I thought of some sort of Socratic teaching -- with a bit of John Dewey thrown in, -- boy was I out of it -- believing in the very forms of humanist education long debunked -- and devalued by bureaucratic rationalism and corporate monopolization of the powers of representation.

So when my former colleague painted this rosy picture of our so-called uniqueness, it had absolutely nothing to do with what the department had actually become. Competing forms of thought and methodology had created an acrimonious, Hobbesian atmosphere of resentment and suspicion.

And in appropriating my language of idealism, he reproduced the conversational terms of an internal discussion of possibility into the reified language of false advertising.

So here is what I have got to say to him now: imitate this!