Plane rides always let me listen to fascinating conversations: when you have no choice it isn’t evesdropping.
Sitting behind an English graduate student and listening to her explain university life to a business guy my age was enjoyable. Each discipline has thinking, jargon, and assumptions that make it hard for outsiders to understand. I do it all the time with mixed success, so I listened for pointers.
She did a fine job explaining the importance of English to civilization. The inevitable questions about the job market did not phase her either. Given her choice of schools, I would guess her chances of getting a job are worse than the odds of Joe Biden becoming president. It is possible, but neither Vice President Biden nor this new Dr English should bet his future on it, though, you can make money running for President and nobody ever made money looking for a humanities professorship.
Not even the lucky ones who get them!
She went awry under heavier questioning than most English majors experience after she said: “The heart of the problem is that universities are like hospitals. They shouldn’t be run to make money. Education is a cultural investment. Too much of education is being run like a business.”
The conversation never recovered. The businessman had questions, like Socrates in pin stripe, he kept trying to understand. Some people speak as if they were always on Twitter and limited to tropes. She was articulate in sentences but inarticulate in pages and the flight length required chapters. Don’t think the suit was rude, she wanted to talk and pressed the issue. She just kept running out of stock phrases.
I am not sure her seat-mate ever got clear on what she was saying. Hard as it might be to believe, I said nothing, but now is my attempt to unravel the heart of the misunderstanding.
Dr English believed “business” was about making money and this was different than building a civilization. She knew making money is a necessary evil, but speaking of it should come with a trigger warning before being introducedto a humanities person.
The business guy was more like most business guys I have known than the Scrooge in her mind. He liked money, but he was building a business for the love of the business. He wanted to leave something to his kids. Suit was in it for the act of creation and the money was a way of measuring health. I don’t think she ever understood that his paycheck, like hers, was only a way to sustain his passion.
He provided, a good thing, and created. His business was his dissertation.
Dr English thought her discipline was English when in reality she was spending most of her time studying a sub-discipline of a sub-discipline. Her actual discipline will remain nameless, but it was the equivalent of careful work on the obscure work of the unknown poet who wrote on the lesser known issues of the day. It advanced scholarship in the sense that it was the first thing anyone had ever bothered to seriously say about this person.
And I was interested in it. She has a fascinating interest, but would civilization falter if her dissertation question had gone without being given her particular answer? Should this man be taxed to pay for finding the answer?
This had never occurred to Dr English: she privileged her interests. I am guessing the business of Suit was at least as important to the culture as her dissertation. I am all for both careers, but not for the demand of Dr English that we pay her without better reasons than she seemed capable of giving.
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