18 July 2008
for a 70s academia
Recently I read Kate Millett's 1977 lesbian memoir-of-sorts Sita, which I purchased for 50p at the National Trust second-hand bookshop at Felbrigg Hall. Mainly I bought it because it was 50p at the National Trust second-hand bookshop at Felbrigg Hall. Because I am a fan of incongruity I found this amusing, although I do not generally find National Trust properties in the least bit amusing. In fact, I hate them, with their pointless over-staffing, their passive-aggressive instructions 'this way, please! [don't touch anything, you filthy pleb]', their lavender-scented chachki shops and the hordes of identikit middle-class, miserable bastards that hold their car-parking membership rights closer to their heart than their own children (er, probably).
Anyway, what is most striking about this largely-forgotten memoir, as intense as all the highly-emotional sex is, is Ms Millett's relation to an academia that could not be more over. When Millett moves from New York to California to be with Sita, post one nervous breakdown or another, she decides she'd quite like to teach a course at the university. She does, and then she doesn't. She gets it cancelled a week before term starts and then decides she'd actually like to do it after all, so it goes back up and she starts teaching. Reading this, you think, on the one hand, 'how nice! How wonderful it would be to teach a course on anything you like, just one, how much work you could put into it' and, on the other, 'what the hell?! What about all the course outcomes she was supposed to write months in advance? The year it takes to get a new course approved? The authorisation required to approve the assessment for the course?'
It's amazing - most, if not all, of the reason Millett can have such a rich emotional life, to be such an individual is because she (or anyone else at the time, one assumes) didn't have to do all this bureaucratic stuff, to know all these pointless little rules about how someone does x or y. I realise, in a sense, that I have come too late to academia, that this creeping audit-culture and over-administration has been worming its way into Higher Education for years. It was probably happening when Millett wrote Sita too, though she was too busy being interesting to notice it.
Still - academics - good God, couldn't you have tried a bit harder to stop this? It is a horrible truth that the ability to be a 'good academic' is basically now synonymous with being 'a good administrator', and perhaps there is a symbiosis between the kinds of techniques suited to certain kinds of research and the flashy, polyvalent grant-getting-media-friendly model of the desirable academic. The conformism of the diligent reader meets the conformism of the business-minded university worker. Where once reading and thinking might have been oppositional in their very practice, now they are merely colonised by the following kinds of imperative: 'what kind of grant can I get for this project?' 'what names can we get to attend the tie-in conference?' 'will the Times run a by-line on this if we make it sexy enough?'
Ha! I am so going to get myself fired.
