Really. This is a rant. Feel free not to read. I'm blowing off a lot of steam because one of my professors infuriated me today by making shitty claims.
Ever wondered what an MA program looks like? What the sort of issues you run into are? What professors are like, what they talk about, what the trending ideas - yes, trending ideas exist here, too - are?
I have 7 classes every week, 2 hours each, all in the afternoon. Well, mostly. The one on Friday is from 2 to 4 PM.
They're all crazy-specialized, which wouldn't be such a problem if they were more coherent or if they were closer together in scope.
I do British Cultural Studies. This seems to imply learning about some philosophic things, some anthropology things, some Irish and Scottish things, last year some economics things and translation things...
This semester there's these: Irish studies, Critical Thinking & Argumentation, Cultural Anthropology, National Identity, History of Ideas, Subjects of Dislocation (don't ask), and something about the Shaping of the Republic of Letters.
Doesn't that sound cool?
*sigh*
What it's really like is lots of shit combined with some brilliant stuff. Anthropology is interesting and the professor is awesome with explaining stuff. The Shaping of the Republic of Letters class is awesome and I'm not saying that just because I love the professor to bits. She's good with explaining things.
But the truth of the matter is, not all professors are that good (one manages to confuse us to tears) and there's some who have Stances.
The Stance is that thing you irrationally take and support until your arms drop. It's a Thing invested with too much feeling, a Thing that's made too much of. Yudkowsky calls it an affective death spiral, a happy death spiral
here.
The National Identity professor is deadly in love with politics. And his ideas are very much about said National Identity and what nationalism is and then there's bits and pieces where he explains stuff like how everything can be reduced to a battle for survival, for getting ahead.
Dude, I don't agree. Sure, you can look at the world that way. You can take your damned violence-first, politics-first ideas and apply them everywhere. But the truth?... The truth is, professor, that there's some of us out here who don't really give that much of a damn about our nationality, not on a daily basis.
My country is like a limb. I carry it with me. It's here. I don't think about it unless it hurts or unless there's something interesting about it. My national identity affects me in that I am raised in a certain context, but I am also raised in the context of a family of intellectuals, who grew up reading Karl May and adventure novels, who lives in this age, who liked science. Unless you make me think about my being a Romanian, I won't actively be concerned with being a Romanian.
You can reduce the world to anything you want. You can make it material resources (Marx), sex (Freud), love (hippies? Christians?), reality (Buddhists) or whatever.
The world is a complex space. Some
will define themselves by their ethnic/national groups. Some really won't. Get over it. Stop throwing your pet theory on all of us. It's a class, not a religion.
Our MA leader, also the History of Ideas professor, is mostly absent. She buggers off to conferences, gets ill, leaves the country, takes over some other class and generally does anything and everything that leads up to her not holding half of our classes and not taking care of three quarters of our concerns, if not more.
She personally knows Linda Hutcheon (who is a Big Person in the cultural world right now) and a bunch of other people whose names she keeps dropping.
Woman, you're 60. Get over it. We get it. You're pals with the rock stars of culture, trailing in their wake and having them throw you bread crumbs in the shape of their friendliness and occasional approval. We can sort of see how that would be cool. But you have a class to hold and you need to stop fangirling.
Also, we are not taking this MA in order to have a diploma, as you so nicely told us that this thing we're doing will be relevant in that we will be able to get jobs as shoe salespeople, because you need to be overqualified for this nowadays.
You may think that everything today is about efficiency and productivity, but that's you. I don't think that the majority of the academic world wants to be
efficient first and foremost. If you'd been listening to the speech that Linda Hutcheon made when she was made a Doctor Honoris Causa in that ceremony you blackmailed us to attend under penalty of being failed a class, you'd have heard what it's about. Working. Saying things. Hoping that somewhere, somehow, what you said is useful and true.
It's about truth. It's about passion and love and believing in this crap that we study, even if you of all people are the one who keeps putting down our endeavours.
You said today that some hotshot rich person accused university people of not being useful to the society at large (creating jobs was it, right?). You bemoaned the fact that humankind has fallen so much and nobody reads anymore, that at first the outlook on life was metaphysic, concerned with truth and justice and good, then it was scientific, concerned with exactness and now it's about efficiency, damn all else. You said that nobody's religious anymore, that Christianity is half-dead and you seemed to bemoan that, then you went off and insulted the Arabs because they're religious and apparently that's what creates extremists, having a more barbaric society get more efficient weapons than it deserved.
There are so many things wrong with that, I cannot begin to explain. So I won't. I seethe. Because you are strong and in a position of authority, while I would step on your head to prove how mad I am over those things you said. You know that you shouldn't listen to any John Doe on the street saying bad things about universities, that there was never a time when Everybody knew about Homer and Virgil and discussed them at the dinner table, you know damned well that we don't give a damn about being efficient - if you stop to think about it, at least. We want to be efficient so we'd have nice earnings and be able to afford living how we want to live. You know that post-modern anthropology doesn't believe in inferior and superior societies. And you should know that if Christianity is dying, not all religion is dying and if you want exaltation all you have to do is walk into the wrong New Age club.
And of course, if you're people, those who write the things we learn are people, too, and there's many things I don't agree with, but the trending ideas are very strongly implemented in some minds.
I feel tired, to tell the truth. Some of the stuff mentioned in our classes is pure gold, it opens your eyes - stuff about how post-modernism works, why our culture looks the way it does, how the world was thought to be like in the past.
Other stuff seems to be meaningless, fillers of our age that will fall apart and be laughed at 50 years from now.
There's professors who are interested in dialogue and there's those who, like our beloved leader, would rather hear themselves.
Snobs and nice people, clear-minded and confusing, more interested in the current fashion, or more interested in the tried and true. There's all sorts.
And you don't really have a chance to change anything.
I don't want to study for a ph.D. in Romania. I've seen enough here and wonder, hope, dream that elsewhere things are less hypocritical, that professors don't sprout nonsense that they've been teaching against 5 minutes ago.
It's this year that I finally get the point in hating this place - I used to think that the University of Bucharest was as good a place as any to be in. Well, not as good as any, but decent enough. Now I'm starting to wonder if our students aren't wading through despite our teaching system, not because of it.
Rant over.
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