Misprision
An email I got today asked innocently “if I was still in academia.” Referring to my current job, mind you, not my grad-school stint.
*choke*
Just for the record, in case offhanded comments haven’t been enough—I am only “in academia” insofar as my lackluster programming skills and wizard typing speed are furthering an academic project. The principal investigators, all of them of the Professorial Class (a term I am coining because I haven’t a better one), look at me and my three coworkers (not my boss, but they know my boss personally) like—hm, well of metaphor running dry. Suffice to say that they give us the look that people give other people whom they consider inferior.
(I’m not dissing them, believe it or not. I used to use that look myself. I’m thoroughly ashamed of that, and I have banished that look from my repertoire of expressions.)
My status will, as most readers know, change this fall, when I start in on a library-science degree. Should I be successful in attaining that degree, chances are probably roughly even that I will end up as “academic staff” or whatever the term is for non-Professorial-Class university employees where you are.
It’s kind of a weird thing, how the gigantic structure that is a university has a public face composed entirely of the Professorial Class. I mean, my correspondent knows perfectly well I am not Professorial Class (at least, I think he knows it! not something I exactly keep secret!), but his email implied that I was engaged in some kind of thrilling research-think-tank type thingie with a thrilling title and thrilling work, when all I am is ten busy fingers and occasional code generator. Chief cook and bottle washer, that’s me.
Maybe part of what’s going on in the academia fracas (which itself is still going on, at Naomi’s and Li’s), and if I’m right about this I’m as guilty as anyone, is myopia. Grad students aren’t all there is to a university. Nor are professors. Nor is a university a law unto itself. I don’t know if anyone can compass the whole picture—I certainly can’t—but it’d be interesting to try.
I am dancing on needles at the moment, with more to say but knowing I really ought to shut up. Well, duty calls, so up I shut—with apologies to Joseph Duemer, whom I unaccountably left out of my earlier list. He’s such a gentleman I honestly didn’t realize how badly I’d hit him until I took another look at the comments to Naomi’s first response to me today. I am sorry, Joseph.