Thursday, December 4, 2014

Look! It's an Article About Us! Where We Feature Again, and Laud, the Work of Rebecca Schuman, Who We Continue to Love Despite How Much She Hates Us. This Was in Slate, Which We Really Enjoy Reading, Even When We're Drunk.

There is a long-established drinking culture in academia (#notallacademics, of course, but plenty). It’s destructive, it’s pathetic—and it’s widely accepted.

Every academic on Earth has witnessed, as I have, the untoward behavior—at best mildly embarrassing, at worst criminal or life-threatening—of a scholar in his or her cups: the uninhibited blabbing (revealing everything from latent racism to deep departmental secrets); the slurring diatribes mistaken for erudition; the sudden and unwelcome onset of handsiness. I have been the ungrateful recipient of more than a few instances of three-sheets eminent scholars curiously fascinated by my “scholarship” (having, of course, read or heard nothing about it).

The rest!

12 comments:

  1. I don't drink, and it has not posed a difficulty to my career, as Shuman argues it inevitably does. I may have been fortunate in finding a department whose socializing doesn't involve a lot of alcohol - people will have a beer or two, and it doesn't worry them that I have a gingerale instead. The important thing, at parties, is to have a drink in your hand; it doesn't matter what's in it. This works in bars too.

    That said, it probably wouldn't work if powerful members of the department were drunks and needed their colleagues to enable them.

    I have had the impression that people in my field used to drink a lot more than they do now. But then I used to drink a lot more than I do now, and back then, I hung out with people who drank. Now, I hang out with people who don't drink, or don't drink as much. There seem to be lots of both kinds.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I don't *not* drink, so I probably have it easier than you, but I don't really drink either -- in other words, I'll often start a party or dinner with a glass of wine, and end it with half of the same glass of wine. Or, sometimes, I'll finish the glass and have another -- which is about my limit --; it depends whether I really like the wine, how I'm generally feeling at the moment, etc., etc. I guess I'm sort of an intuitive/in the moment drinker. I'm always surprised when others (usually family members or acquaintances; I haven't encountered this in a professional context) remark on my (sometimes) sparing consumption, since I pay little to no attention to what or how much others are drinking (to the point where I sometimes don't realize that the reason for someone else's out-of-character -- or all too in-character -- behavior is that (s)he was drunk; I can be pretty oblivious sometimes). I suspect that those who closely monitor others' drinking are, in fact, comparing it to their own, and are probably, yes, dealing with their suspicion that they might have a problem by looking for confirmation that their drinking is still within the "normal" range.

      But I can't say that any of that has affected my career prospects. The fact that I'm an introvert (an identification which I believe Schuman also claims), and that I'm generally not good at schmoozing/networking almost certainly has, but that's a different (though possibly related) issue. I'm pretty sure a good schmoozer/networker could carry off the ginger ale trick with aplomb (and that drinking doesn't make expert schmoozers of awkward introverts, despite legends to the contrary).

      But it probably varies by disciplinary and local academic culture, too (and Schuman's field, German, sounds very old-school).

      Delete
  2. I think you show very poor taste in scouring the bowels of the Internet to find an unattractive picture of the author. Your bitterness over her success is showing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I agree that this is not an appropriate photo. Heck, Katie got a nice image and Rebecca is no Katie.

      Delete
    2. As someone mentioned the source of the photo below, do you think that Schuman's very own Twitter account is "the bowels of the Internet"? I use Twitter, I know its terms and conditions, and so would Schuman. If she didn't want that photo to be widely available, she wouldn't have posted it.

      Delete
  3. I like Schuman's writing. I like it when it's linked here. That's really her in the photo. I did a Google image search. It's on her Twitter page. She's a nice looking lady and this is just a silly picture.

    Why she hates us, I'll never understand.

    Oh, I guess the drinking. Never mind.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You say "the drinking" like it's a problem. It's a feature, not a bug.

      Delete
  4. I couldn't find the link on Harris' website, but I'm reminded of one of my favorite cartoons: "The Proceedings of the Stolnikya Conference on Molecular Analysis."

    "...and then we all went to the Globus Hotel and drank gin and tonic till dawn ... at this point Vorchak pushed Smiller-Noyes into the pool ... Prof. Grantz dressed in his wife's clothes..." I don't believe we can publish this.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Sure, slobbering on your students is bad. Sure, getting "handsy" with a collegue, because of alcohol or not, is reprehensible. Sure, that prof who takes "orange juice" in the morning is a scandal, not an amusing anecdote.

    But there are a few differences between faculty and students drinking.

    The first is that we've proven ourselves, to some degree, to either be non-alcoholic or at least high-functioning if we are. We got the freaking PhD, we got the faculty job, that takes some work that is not easily done when your shitfaced. Plus, we aren't in our still-forming-the-brain years; the physiological effects are not as bad as on the studentia.

    No evidence is given, I notice, that academics drink more than any other profession, or that it's socially abused more. Yes, we joke about it, but so does everyone.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Our Drinking Faculty has a Hamster Husbandry problem.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. OK, that actually sounds worse than I thought.

      Delete
    2. At elast you didn't mention the sheep husbandry...

      Delete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.