Suppose you are a
student of the Arts and Humanities and end up spending five graduate years
reading the works (all of them) of some well-known writer/thinker. Along the
way, you submit an MA thesis and a PhD. After all that, only two outcomes are
possible:
Either you think that
the writer you have studied is truly one of the greats, deserving of the most
careful and prolonged study, exegesis and discussion. Having read all the major
works (of which there are many), you will now go on to read the minor works,
the correspondence, and the shopping lists. You will build a reputation as an
expert on X.
Or else you conclude
that your writer is entirely mistaken, wrong-headed, positively evil (in the
case of Marx or Nietzsche, say) and that it is your duty to build an academic
career exposing their fallacies and faults. You will be the scourge of all
those still deluded enough not to spot the errors, the confusions, the dangers.
What you will not conclude
is this:
Yeah,
I spent a lot of time – years in fact –reading this guy. There are some good
ideas but overall – and there is a lot of stuff to get through – it’s not so
brilliant as some people make out. Frankly, it’s not worth doing the criticism line
by line and, well, now I’m going to turn my attention to other things.
That italic passage
could only be spoken by someone willing to write off a very heavy graduate
school investment of time and money. Life is short and to write off five years of
school is more than most of us have the stomach for. It is as a result of human caution that we end up with
tenured academics who live off the intellectual capital they banked in their
youth.
I see only one way of
avoiding the usual outcomes. You just have to discourage young researchers from
putting all their eggs into one basket. Make them move around a bit
intellectually. Fine if they want to settle down with a mortgage and a dog and
a human partner, but try to keep them away from intellectual monogamy. Maybe
later in life; maybe in retirement when they can invest as much as they like of
their leisure into whoever does it for them.
I think I was fortunate
in my early academic career. I never really got a crush on anyone, or at any
rate, a crush which lasted. I shopped around. I don’t regret it, though in
terms of a career it was not a sensible way of behaving.
