Metis

In The Gilded Guild, Lilith raised a number of interesting questions about the place of academics or intellectuals in wider society. She makes a solid case for rethinking scholarly and intellectual activity so that it is seen as taking place within society rather than in a limited, specialized sphere: the academy.

In her closing sentence, Lil writes, relative to academics' scorn of those who write for popular audiences,

"In much the same way... those of us who decide to be thinking people outside the rarified realm of academia are no longer considered thinking people by too many academics."

I've been thinking about -- and living -- the implications of being a thinking person who does her thoughtful work outside the academy. It's become obvious to me, once my conditioning blinkers were forcibly removed, that there are a lot of intelligent, thoughtful people out there who are not writing from within the academy. Indeed, I've been pleased with all of the lively conversations I've had in the blogosphere with members of this population.

Yet one thing I've noticed in this discussion: almost always the emphasis is on the effects on academia, academics, and post-academics of this situating of intellectual activity solely within the ivory tower. What I am not seeing nearly as much is the effects of this rhetoric on the larger society in which academia resides.

What does it mean for a society to say that thoughtful, intelligent conversation and the pursuit of knowledge are restricted to a cadre of specialized individuals? What does it mean, moreover, when that cadre is deemed to be out of touch, alien, elitist, naive, etc.?

What I am getting at is that, as with the case in other arenas of modern society (notably American society, and notably American politics), we see an increasing polarization and development of armed camps. Unfortunately, I don't think it's a conflict which academics can win. They are out-numbered, out-rhetoricized, out-voiced. Intelligent people can only have intelligent discourse with other intelligent people, and it is only in the realm of intelligent discourse that academia holds any authority. If all such individuals are on one side in a contest, the other side has no incentive to play by the rules of reasoned discourse, if it even bothers to play with a group it considers irrelevant. So long as the conflict is framed in terms of intelligent thought being the province solely of a trained elite that lives outside of society, academics will lose.

And society will lose with them.

Do we want a society in which thoughtful, reasoned discourse is deemed elitist and naive? I'm not saying that in actuality academia has a lock on this discourse -- indeed, in many cases it is noticeably absent -- but that if the rhetoric of intellectual = academic is allowed to go unchallenged, it is hard to escape the popular acceptance of such a formulation.

We need a middle ground.

Obviously, academics have much to gain if their intellectual work becomes again part of the daily discourse of their society -- but so does society. Recognizing the existence of thoughtful intellectuals who operate in their quiet ways outside the academy would be an important step. Like the Metis, these/we intellectuals who are currently neither of one world or the other, can do much to bridge the gap.

But we can't do it alone.

Comments

[wolfangel]

I need to think about this more to reply well -- but your remark about the Metis was rather surprising. I'm sure there's history about it in the US, but I'm only familiar with their history in Canada (Louis Riel was quite big in Quebec).

You must be using it differently, anyways, cause you didn't capitalise it. Curiousity.

[Rana]

Whoop, you're right -- it should have been capitalized. (scurries off to fix)

I was indeed thinking of the Metis in the French/Indian frontier areas -- a northern version of the "middle ground" described by Richard White.

As best I recall -- and I'm willing to defer to experts, since my background is in American frontier history, not Canadian -- the Metis, by dint of their family ties to French/Canadian fathers and Native mothers, served an important social function as mediators between the two cultures. That's what I was alluding to.

[wolfangel]

If you say that happened, I have no doubts. I was thinking about their history around the time of Riel and since (pretty much post-Confederation history) -- which has not been an easy one. My background is just the high school history course (which spent a fair amount of time on this, but was also 10 years ago, so my memory might be a little faulty -- though not totally faulty, since that teacher was possibly the best teacher I ever had, so I remember much of what we were taught).

In any case, I will get back to thinking about your post proper.

[LiL]

This post is great. It's a call to arms.

And, I don't think this will disappear. Maybe we won't all meet in person in the next year or so... But somehow we already have met. There's a reason that talking through blogs is so important to so many of us who would otherwise not talk at all - and it isn't just that the technology makes it easy. There is a need for this thing (let's call it technology) that gets people talking to each other across the traditional divides of academia and the "outside" world.

I like the Metis likeness. I like that it means engendering new life, new culture, a hybrid that can lead the old peoples and cultures it was born of to something new that belongs to both yet never existed before. That's what we need.

And I do think it's up to us to make it less "removed" from our real lives than it is now. We just don't know how yet - but it'll come, it hasn't been that long yet that this way of communicating we're practicing now has existed... Just think: IA's blog was active for just over a year - and how much change it brought about in such a short time?

[Another Damned Medievalist]

Is the problem with academia entirely, or perhaps with the fact that, from our populist leaders down, there's an anti-academic bent to our society. Let's leave no child behind by holding teachers accountable -- it has nothing to do with funding, school districts and government bodies that kowtow to the education (as in the people with Ed. degrees, rather than discipline degrees) lobbies, and a society where it's harder and harder for parents to be involved in the academic life of their children ...
Sorry -- ranting a bit, but you know what I mean.

[LiL]

Ah, the ed degrees instead of discipline degrees - that's a pet peeve of mine too... It's worth some ranting. That many newly minted teachers (working at pre-college-level) are more and more unqualified to teach - they don't know any subject well enough. Math is probably the worst off - although I think history is really badly taught in many schools too, students come out with no idea whatsoever of how our world came to be the way it is. Ed degrees should be combined with discipline degrees - I mean, it's insane to think that the same pedagogical methods will work for teaching history as for, (just so as not to stray from the previous example) teaching math.

[Rana]

ADM -- I'm annoyed with the society at large, too. I don't want to imply that this is yet another thing to be laid at the feet of those head-in-the-cloud elitist academics.

Yet... because academia itself promulgates the notion that (heavy sarcasm here) academics are special creatures, called to the life of the mind in the way mere mortals are not, it reinforces that impulse on the part of its anti-intellectual attackers. Intellectuals -- most especially those located in the academy -- need to stop playing that game.

What I want to do is take the wind out of their sails, by pre-emptively saying to the anti-intellectuals, "Yes, we think, and value intellectual activity and so does the general public. It's people like you who are parochial and out of touch, not us."

And then we have to walk the walk as well as we talk the talk.

[Michelle]

That's a high goal, Rana. I'm not sure what it would take for the general public to value intellectual activity, or to convince academics that they're out of touch instead of the "common man".

I'll echo the rant on ed. degrees vs. discipline. I find that most teachers in the elementary school my children attend seem to think I'll tell them what to think about vocabulary or spelling or all these very specialized issues of second-grade development because I'm working in English. I wanna say, hey, man, I'm studying Spenser. I don't know cats' beans about how to teach a second-grader punctuation.

Re: "pursuit of knowledge are restricted to a cadre of specialized individuals? What does it mean, moreover, when that cadre is deemed to be out of touch, alien, elitist, naive, etc.?"

Rather than rant here, I'm going back to my place.

[Chris]

The difficulty we face is that a knowledge of Spenser, or the cultural and political history of the Metis has virtualy no place, no relevance within the economic spheres that structure and govern most non-academic forms of employment. There are exceptions, of course, but those jobs are highly sought after, and not easy to come by. At the same time, working as a project coordinator for an IT firm, or as an assistant designer at an ad company, or as an insurance agent do entail a kind of intellectual know-how and ability -- just not one that entails anything to do with Spenser or the Metis.

I don't know how to bridge this gap. I don't think it can be bridged. And for those of us ath the edge of leaving the academy, I suspect we wage a daily struggle with this fact of our new reality each day.

[Simon M]

"Like the Metis, these/we intellectuals who are currently neither of one world or the other, can do much to bridge the gap."

The Metis metaphor is interesting in that it leads to the conclusion that bridging the gap is not possible/viable, considering what happened to them, both as a people and as an "interface". (Sorry for the english I am myself from french minority Quebec). In short, the canadian people did contribute to destroy them as a people and did sign treaties it did not respect, pushing them away to the west. That also marked the end of the contacts they had with both french and english cultures. However, the french minority did identify with their struggle for survival, even more after Riel--a french canadian-- joined them and got killed, and probably internalized their clear defeat.

I guess one could then say that 1-bridging gaps only works if both parties are interested 2-there is the danger that a failure to find the "middle ground" reinforces the beliefs of the minority and therefore their seclusion/unwillingness to reach out.

I don't think I expect much from those outside the academe to gap the bridge. Recogninzing that there is life (I mean intelligent life) outside the academe is the very first step that only those inside the academic world can make. I don't think it matters much how loud the outside world calls to them if they don't listen.

[LiL]

I don't believe the gap can't be bridged. I do, however, prefer to think of it as engendering something new, with "genetic" material from all the things it came from but having an entirely new genetic makeup all its own, with a sturdier immune system perhaps that will be resistant to the failures of the parent systems. At that point I may have carried the genetic offspring of multiple parents metaphor far enough... However, part of the point is that it is entirely impossible to foresee how that offspring will be. There is the risk it won't be the way its parents want it to be. It will be the way it needs to be instead, whatever that is. We cannot know. We SHOULD NOT know - because what we know (our culture of academics, our culture outside academia, etc.) has thus far largely failed us.

[LiL]

And one more thing: just because we can't foresee what a new thing will be doesn't mean it won't be at all.

(I keep harping on the example of Eastern Europe - but really, as far as the unforeseeable goes, it's a good one. I don't know the history of the Metis... I think it works very well as a metaphor for engendering new culture. But then, being a metaphor, it begins to lose coherence when you carry it too far back into reality.)

[Chris]

I'm really trying to understand the intersection between the genetic metaphor, gene splicing forms of life etc. to the jobs of data-entry, insurance sales, grocery store manager, or actuarial.

Can anyone help me out?

[Rana]

One possibility, Chris, is that we need to think of this in terms other than what people are paid to do. I mean, heck, my current job is using perhaps 15% of my training and education, if that, but here I am, chatting away about the state of the academy, etc. In other words -- just because many _jobs_ are not focused on "intellectual" activity that doesn't mean that the individuals who perform them are incapable of it, either on the job or in their free time.

I agree that the metaphor of the Metis should not be tied too closely to reality. Ditto the genetics one. But both do suggest the essence of what I was thinking of: people with connections to both academia and "the general public" who don't want to abandon the better aspects of either.

[LiL]

That's just it: that most jobs are not necessarily where a person's, well, "calling" lies. I can't really come up with a better term right now...

Take, for instance, a musician: how many are there that have a day job to pay rent, buy food - live on, but would never consider giving up their art just because they need a day job for cash? Or - writers, artists... And by the way, even academic tenured jobs come with a lot of pretty unlikeable administrative parts - yet no one would think to define academic work in terms of them and only them.

P.S. Like any example, these don't apply in the same way to every single aspect of this debate, or every single person and their every single problem... And, I think, part of the larger problem is that we forget this too easily.

[Another Damned Medievalist]

Rana, you've led me into another "thing about which I must now blog." I wonder if part of my take on the academic/non-academic dichotomy has to do with the fact that I come from a working-class background, as do many of my CC colleagues. My Doktorvater was also working-class. I think that might mean that I've found it easier to dismiss academic snobbery as BS, because I know the bills have to get paid before I can let my mind wander.

Of course, that may also be why finishing took me a long time -- it's hard to believe that we get paid to read and write ...

Finally -- I'm wondering if the greater availability of higher and post-grad education might have something to do with the adjunct situation. If many of us are from blue-coller backgrounds, we may be too used to taking what we can get and lumping it. Hmmm. I must ponder, but I think I might have to write something in the next day or so.

[Dorothea Salo]

Fuel to the fire:

In my experience, the notion that "well, I'll never be able to use this in my job" is self-fulfilling. I've done data entry for the last two years, Chris. I did it in Spanish (in which I have two degrees), as it happens. Did my humanistic background help? Sure it did. Did it advance me? To some extent (though advancement was not the point of taking this particular job).

How'd I get started on the whole text-geekery thing? Because I had academic experience with text transcription and lexicography. Truth.

Point being, if you're dead sure you won't use it, for whatever value of "it" -- well, gee, you won't look especially hard for opportunities to.

As for "the general public does/thinks/is X" -- hey, that's ME you're talking about, and I resent some of these characterizations. If your beliefs about the general public can't handle me, then you might want to revisit your beliefs. (Or not. If you think I fit, well, okay then, doubt I can convince you otherwise.)

[LiL]

ADM - in my experience, coming from a completely "intellectual" background does not speed up the process of finishing a ph.d. - or maybe I'm just really really weird...

And for my part, I've never, not at any point in grad school or before, ever been able to disabuse myself of the notion that I belong to the general public too... In addition to belonging to various other social configurations.

[Rana]

Lil, I wouldn't say taking one's time is weird. It took me seven years -- I turned in my degree request the very day my normative time was about to expire. And I knew some people who left and returned several times and thereby extended the time required even further.

The class angle is interesting. I wonder if the push for more "practical" education (by both grads and undergrads) might be related to the wider expectations of college education among the general public.

Of course, that raises the question of why academia persists in seeing itself as an elite institution in an era when the spread of college education among the general population is growing.

I wonder if some of the self-doubt surfacing in the institution is related to this influx being combined with the belief in a dumber "outside" population. Something along the lines of "if the non-intellectual public "takes over" higher education, intellectual activity must proportionally decline in higher education." It'd be nice to reverse that calculation so that it becomes viewed instead as an indication of the growing interest in education among the general public. (Which I think it is, popular rhetoric notwithstanding.)

[Bill Tozier]

Now this is what you call a Big-S Synchronicity.

This morning I was interviewed by a reporter from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and I was trying to explain to him the widespread and emotional response I heard from bidders and commentators on my Erdös Number Auction. Those were folks in your Metis intellectual demographic, most assuredly. I've heard from dozens. All outside the Tower, but nonetheless highly trained clear thinkers who want to contribute their effort and pose and answer questions and move the body of knowledge forward. Not content to just receive wisdom from on high in press releases and peer-reviewed doses.

And then I started to describe to him the online community I've been sketching, intended to bring non-academic and other disenfranchised collaborators together. I tried to come up with an analogy he could get... a word or phrase that describes a culture that is unique but spanning several groups.

And you nailed it. Today. Thanks!

Count me and my bidders and mathe-Metis folks in, if that isn't obvious. I haven't quite enough vanity to speak for other mathematicians and scientists and engineers, but I should say again that they're out there in the greater intellectual community at least as thick on the ground as humanities folk and social scientists.

And maybe, through the back door, we can break Snow's cultures down as well....

[Rana]

Math and science folks! Huzzah!

Seriously -- I'm very glad you've posted here. As someone who worked in the fields of environmental studies and environmental history, I've long thought that more work to connect across the divisions between the humanities, the social sciences, the theoretical sciences and the applied sciences is needed. This is especially true given the ways that the questions and topics our society faces rarely (if ever) fall into those tidy little boxes, being instead hybrids of the physical and the cultural. (And there's a Latour reference for all you theory folks.)

I'll definitely keep an eye out for that article.

[Rana]

And for those, like me, who wondered exactly what an Erdos number is: click here.

(What was I saying about field divisions? Ump.)

[wolfangel]

The Metis works well as a metaphor for creating a new culture from two very different ones, but not so well as a bridge between two. But creating one is sort of the goal.

I wish more non-academics were in this discussion, too. (That is, people who have never been to graduate school.)

Bill, why do you think it is that humanities etc people are more verbose in these discussions than science people?

[Bill Tozier]

Bill, why do you think it is that humanities etc people are more verbose in these discussions than science people?

A general paucity of writing skills and training. The fact that there's still an illusion of widespread job availability in their fields (especially biology and some other sciences). The amount of wall-clock time their jobs are perceived to require -- as molecular biology students, we really did put in 60+ hour weeks, and often more. The perception that in technical fields one can always "be a technician" as a fallback position to a faculty job (not true).

Oh, and the simpler fact that science and engineering people haven't got into the discussion yet. (Aside form me; I don't count very far towards that, frankly...)

[Michelle]

Too much for catch-up here. Wanted to say to Chris, I agree w/you re: Spenser. Love it I may, but as I told an old friend today, I suspect it'll wind up a big esoteric excess dump in my brain with nowhere to go.