BEWARE: RANT AHEAD

Every so often, just when you start to question your path, something comes along that makes you realize that you've made the right decisions...

Over the past month or so, I've had a few moments of weakness, in which I questioned my decision to leave academe. I've wondered if, having lived in the rarified atmosphere of the university for so long, I am capable of surviving in the "real world," or if I am destined, like a crack addict, to return to the only environment that truly feels like home. I've wondered if I have the survival instincts needed for a life outside of the classroom.

What makes this harder is the fact that I have a nasty little addiction to teaching. I was a very good teacher and I really loved my students. I got a kick out of exposing them to new things and watching them get excited as intellectual doors opened a little wider and things seemed a little more possible.

Worst of all, it seems like everyone in New York is taking a class or working on a degree, and seeing my fellow subway riders reading textbooks and cramming for exams is a little tough. It also doesn't help that I'm surrounded by universities. All this combines to make me feel like a recovering coke addict who just got transferred to a job in Medellin, Columbia. When people find out that I'm a former teacher, they ask me if I'm looking for jobs at colleges. I respond "Hell, no, bitches! Colleges be lookin' for ME!"

Actually, I don't say that at all, but I'm working on my ghetto smack-talk skills.

I was recently starting to weaken, to make the sorts of little deals that hearken back to the days when I was quitting smoking. I told myself that, maybe I'd just teach a little class in one of the community colleges, or get a sub job or something. You know, a little something to tide me over (imagine me wiping my nose on my sleeve at this point). Just in the nick of time, my old pal Bob sent me an e-mail to remind me why I left in the first place. Apparently, a teacher in my old department is about to make a presentation titled "Telling Stories about Genocide: Ethnicity, Memory and Polyphony in Rwanda." In her own words, this presentation features:

Some unfinished thoughts about using poststructuralist theory to address issues concerning storytelling and memory in the aftermath of great tragedy and violence, plus some pictures of memorial sites.

Ooooh! Vacation pictures!

For those of you who are lucky enough to be unfamiliar with Poststructuralism, it is, basically, an academic parlor-trick in which the individual theorist uses double talk and clever rhetoric to deny the existence of any sort of absolute reality or truth. It tends to be a springboard for overgeneralized statements about "The Patriarchy," "Colonialism," and "Western Imperialism."

The French are big fans of Poststructuralism.

Personally, I think Poststructuralism is a great way to annoy friends and make yourself look smart, but it grates against my humanist leanings. When I see it applied to any real human tragedy, I start to get creeped out. This, after all, is the tool that we use when we want to talk about how 9/11 wasn't really an immoral act, and how the Holocaust was a matter of perspective, not a verifiable historical fact.

Added to this is the fact that I personally know the person making this presentation. I sat in her class for a semester and watched her wage personal attacks against several of her students, specifically targeting the males. Later, as an instructor, I had to put up with her regular assertions of moral and intellectual superiority and, again, got to watch her treat her colleagues like dirt. I have no doubt that the department will embrace her clever interpretation of this tragedy, and her presentation will become yet another feather in her cap as she continues her grim, endless accumulation of academic power.

At the end of the day, this is, basically, a university professor climbing the academic ladder over a pile of corpses. I tend to think that using tragedy to play out a narrative about the variable nature of meaning borders on the blasphemous. To see a teacher that I personally know do it reminds me of why, exactly, I am glad to be out of academia.