Grad students spend most of their time in the library, and because of the peculiar ecology of college towns, even their non-library hours are spent almost exclusively with other academics. You have to work very, very hard to have any kind of “normal” life in a college town, in other words, so even if you’re not a goofball when you arrive, pretty soon Stockholm Syndrome kicks in and you find yourself, if not liking, then at least tolerating, experimental theater and milk made from plants.
After a few years of this, you forget what normal life is even like. You come to understand the deep and longstanding grievances the Poststructuralist Feminist Marxists have with the Marxist Feminist Poststructuralists. Oh, there’s scads of “diversity” on campus — all those recruiting brochures they mail to dumb parents in the ‘burbs aren’t lying — but there’s one thing you’ll never, ever find: The thought that maybe politics doesn’t matter all that much.
That’s the answer, right there. Academic “humanities” work is mostly bullshit because most people just don’t care about politics. To normals, if they think about “politics” at all, it’s in Schoolhouse Rock terms — some guys in Washington vote on some stuff, and that’s how a bill becomes a law. They certainly don’t mean ideology, which is pretty much the only thing academics mean. That a normal person could walk into the voting booth without really knowing if he’s going to pull the lever for Trump or Hillary fries an egghead’s circuits…
… and yet, as we all know, the majority of American voters do this, every single time. There’s something profound about normal person behavior that academics just can’t — or won’t — grasp.
Severian, “Ignoring the Human Factor”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-08-14.
October 6, 2022
QotD: Life in grad school
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