Comments on: Academic Nutjobs

By: LCohen

LCohen — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 03:53:28 +0000

I find it fascinating that a “professor of language, literature, and culture” is diagnosing past failed academic co-workers as having Asperger’s Syndrome on the basis of observed behaviors and a list of diagnostic criteria.

She draws conclusions from her interpretation of the criteria the way some people see personal relevance in horoscopes.

LCohen
http://www.aspies.blogspot.com

By: Antti Nannimus

Antti Nannimus — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 16:13:44 +0000

Hi,

Look, I’ve been dealing with both academics and civilians almost all my life. The truth is that 97% of all of you are weirdos and psychopaths, unlike the 3% of us at the peak of the bell curve who are normal like me.

Have a nice day,

Antti

By: Dick Mulliken

Dick Mulliken — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 03:32:59 +0000

Tangential, but your wife might be interested in THE HIDDEN ORDER OR ART, by Anton Ehrenzweig. This book presents a psychological analysis of the role of part perception whaich is at least intriguing. Rhetoric has something to offer too see metonymy and synechdoche. all of this veers off in turn into the whole process of symbol formation.
Otherwise, everybody is eccentric as hell – but some people hide it better.

By: Ted

Ted — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 02:56:12 +0000

to ted with a lower case initial letter and all you others …

I’m a geek. While I have spent more time in ‘real world’ IT departments, I have spent LOTS of time in academia.

Regardless of political tilt and regardless of intellectual ability, academics are at least an order of magnitude more normal than your typical IT denizen.

You really haven’t lived – or should I say had a near-death experience – until you attend an IT-peopled, non-business related ‘social’ party.

Absoultely NO social interaction what so ever. Except to discuss the latest set of code patches provided by a software vendor.

NADA. ZILCH. ZERO.

For those of you leaving the academy to join a corporate IT department just because it pays better, my advice is to stay put. Unless they pay you 5 times as much, it isn’t possibly worth it.

But if you do leave, and if you ever have to attend a party at a bosses or co-workers house, beg, borrow or steal a 6 week old baby with colic to bring along. That gives you an excuse to leave said party and go to a more enjoyable place.

A funeral home perhaps. Or a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.

By: Harry B

Harry B — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 15:43:53 +0000

I was teasing—I know its a valid usage, but one that constantly confuses me (I mean it). What do you think when they ask you to “leave the airplane momentarily” when you have arrived at your destination (presumably hopefully)? I can’t use “hopefully”, but only because my grandfather made fun of anyone who did, and I feel it would be a betrayal of his memory to do so.

By: polly

polly — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 14:02:08 +0000

I like Ted’s comments and I’d like to add my own personal ramblings. Philosophy as a discipline may start off from, erm, ‘common-sensical’ point of views but it takes such perspectives to their limit, a limit that may be far off and seemingly unconnected to its starting point. It seems to me that there’s a discrepancy between the philosopher’s attitude to her immediate surroundings and the lay-person’s one. This may not be the rule but I think it’s a real tendency. If a philosophical way of thinking (whatever that means) is something you can’t/won’t turn off, is it a surprise that people will think your behaviour weird or undesirable?

By: Ted

Ted — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 02:40:01 +0000

Speaking only for myself, if I had had any social skills, I would have gone to parties in high school and college instead of going to the library, and I might have avoided my current academic vocation. In graduate school I intentionally worked on this lack of skills, by going to parties and social events and being sure to talk to the wives/boyfriends/etc of the faculty and other grad students in the department, and then being sure not to dominate the conversation. They were usually sitting by themselves at the edges of the room, and were often visibly relieved to have someone to talk to who wasn’t yammering on about politics. Interacting with real people was very useful.

Here’s a University of Chicago story: I got an interview for a tenure-track position at a state school that is in the same state as the school I got my Ph.D. from. I told this to a colleague of mine at the college I was working at at the time, who was a University of Chicago Ph.D. in political science. He said, “Oh, you must have a back door connection. Did they advertise the position?” He seemed surprised when I told him that, no I didn’t, and yes they did.

That was our last conversation ever. It still pisses me off, seven years later.

Oh, and I got the job, and am up for tenure myself this year.

I’ve always liked this quote:

You may be a geek, you may have geek written all over you; you should aim to be one geek they’ll never forget. Don’t aim to be civilized. Don’t hope that straight people will keep you on as some kind of pet. To hell with them; they put you here. You should fully realize what society has made of you and take a terrible revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird and don’t do it halfway, put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it. —Bruce Sterling

By: save_the_rustbelt

save_the_rustbelt — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 02:01:10 +0000

I’ve spent most of my life half in academe and half in the ‘real world.”

In many schools the business and professional school profs tend to be a little less flaky, if only because at times they have contact with the real world. We in the acounting department work hard to maintain our rep as boring stiffs.

However, tenure and life in a relatively closed system creates some really odd ducks. Odd is ok, punishing students with bizarre behavior is not.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:47:54 +0000

“Presently”? or “Currently?”

Presently, in the sense of “at the moment,” which is of course a perfectly valid usage.

How do you feel about the meaning of the sentence, “It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive”?

By: Miriam

Miriam — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:14:54 +0000

It’s not for nothing that the unofficial motto of the place is “Where Fun Comes to Die.” You can get T-shirts with that on them.

I always preferred the “University of Chicago: Hell Does Freeze Over” shirts, myself.

By: lindenen

lindenen — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:07:39 +0000

Here's some actual medical research showing a link between creativity and nutjobbery. "New research on individuals with schizotypal personalities – people characterized by odd behavior and language but who are not psychotic or schizophrenic – offers the first neurological evidence that they are more creative than either normal or fully schizophrenic individuals, and rely more heavily on the right sides of their brains than the general population to access their creativity."

By: Harry B

Harry B — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 23:43:35 +0000

“Presently”? or “Currently?”

By: bryan

bryan — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 20:49:02 +0000

“You can always tell an academic by the way he flings faeces—the rest of us just fling feces . . .”

while students fling faces.

By: Scott Eric Kaufman

Scott Eric Kaufman — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 20:38:10 +0000

I think there are a couple of issues worthy of address here (and some of them already have): the first is (as Timothy Burke already said) that tenure (and the concomitant lighter teaching load) coupled with the isolation of daily academic work will, over time, magnify whatever social problems someone came into academia with. For example, over the summer I’ve noticed a steep decline in my ability to make small-talk, and I attribute this to the attention I’ve paid to my dissertation this summer (more intense and time-intensive than during the school-year) and not having to interact with students for a couple of months. (My wife and I communicate in “married shorthand,” so that doesn’t really count.) If a couple of months does this to, imagine what someone with a grant, a cave and a computer could “accomplish.”

By: Hektor Bim

Hektor Bim — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 19:11:20 +0000

Chester,

Of course not everyone at the U of C is that way, but there are far more of them there than the statistical average. I also think that while the softer subjects are crueler (I know one music professor who specialized in asking questions of the class. If a student spoke up, he proceeded to quite thoroughly humiliate that person. After a while, everyone got the hint, and no one ever spoke up in his classes again.), there was plenty of cruelty in the physics department for example.

Maybe it is because there are no engineering departments or other practical subjects there, but the cruelty you seem to want to extend only to the softer subjects, in my experience, washed over all the departments there.

As for the “where fun comes to die”, I think that is mostly in reference to the undergrads, who really suffer, since they are at the bottom of the totem pole. This is probably an urban legend, but at UofC there is a one-day holiday on a Monday in winter. The story goes that they did a statistical analysis and determined that undergrads were most likely to kill themselves on that day, so they made it a day off to cut down on the embarassingly high suicide rate.