Academics in Fiction

The portrayal of academics in fiction is surprisingly rare. Recently, I've read two portraits. One is "Stoner" by John Williams. While the relationship of Stoner with his wife and daughter may be most central to the novel, his academic demise as a consequence of his objective evaluation of a mediocre student with exceptional linguistic bravoure is a hilarious illustration of the hypocrisy of academia. "Pnin" by Nabokov is equally funny in its depiction of a an alien academic, lost in the world, and even in the academic world that, not by any fault of its own, finishes off our hero without pity.

"But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before. "

John Williams, Stoner

“...If he failed the first time he took his driver's licence test, it was mainly because he started an argument with the examiner in an ill-timed effort to prove that nothing could be more humiliating to a rational creature than being required to encourage the development of a base conditional reflex by stopping at a red light when there was not an earthly soul around, heeled or wheeled. He was more circumspect the next time, and passed...”

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

The University in Ruins

The University in Ruins by Bill Readings is an interesting analysis of how the university might still function after it has lost its role in the nation state as the instrument that defines and spreads national culture. He argues that the present day university is rather dominated by an idea of excellence that is empty enough to allow for a purely administrative interpretation.

Though Readings makes several big mistakes, especially in attempting to heed the credo of postmodernism, in which relativism dominates, and which renders most interesting arguments impossible because one or another minority, or one or another context is not properly taken into account, he does succeed in succinctly depicting a few important historical sources for the ideal of the university that still dominates many discourses.

Readings underestimates that academics could globally unite, and teach and research in a planetary framework, and that they should be the most important players in administrative decisions. Arguments that academia becomes self-referential then, and that many academics are not suited for administration, for instance, are entirely correct, but should not be seen as decisive in this debate, just as administration should not be judged as inherently evil.

Clearly, there is an open road that stretches far beyond academic nationalism, and the application of empty administrative criteria. Academics have to take their fate into their own hands, instead of sheepishly implementing national and international administrative criteria, while simultaneously attempting to satisfy them in order to gain research grants. Academics should concentrate on what they know to be higher quality research, and they should honour those that attempt to do so persistently.