Why I Was Not Meant for Academia

I just received an email from the National Communications Association concerning its annual conference. I have to share a few paragraphs that were included for the big conference speech.

This year's Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture, "Discursive Struggles of Relating," will be presented by Leslie A. Baxter, F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor at the University of Iowa on Thursday, November 12, 5:00 - 6:00pm. in the International Ballroom South at the Hilton Chicago.

Relating is a cacophony of disparate, often competing, discourses. Meaning-making emerges out of this dialogic agitation in which discourses bump up against each other in ongoing interplay. This view of relating is the central tenet of Relational Dialectics Theory, a theory of communication and relationships developed by Baxter and her colleagues and grounded in the philosophy of dialogism articulated in the 1930s by Russian literary and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Baxter will discuss the discursive struggles that animate relating in a variety of relationship types and will discuss, as well, some broader implications for how we can approach the study of communication from a dialogic lens.

It's this sort of thing really bites at me every time I think about the fact that I'm part of this academic community. First off, who are we trying to attract to this discipline if we keep making the discipline so ridiculously complicated sounding? One of the first lessons I learned as a writer is WRITE SO THE AUDIENCE UNDERSTANDS. One of the things that really gets on my nerves with academia is the desire for academics to sound really smart and really intelligent by using big 5 dollar words when dime and penny ones will work just as well.

What is this lecture about? Um, after reading it about ten times, I think it means that this professor, who studied a lot of stuff by a Russian professor named Bakhtin is going to talk about how difficult it is for people to talk to each other; essentially, if you talk to someone long enough, you start to develop meaning in your conversation. Yeah, of course it's difficult to talk to each other when you use words and sentences that nobody else understands!

I wrote a paper years ago that pretty much pissed off every academic reader who read it. It was entitled, "How Political Science Has Brought About the Demise of Political Science". Basically, it said that we tried so hard to be "science"-like that we made simple things complicated. In the end, we excluded other people from joining the discourse (conversation, for those who have not attended Dr. Baxter's lecture), because we wanted people to think we were really smart.

I'm starting to realize why I was never really meant to be an academic. I understand it all, and I love learning more about what we don't know, but I can't stand the posturing and the desire to be perceived as smart. I'm a Socratic (the early kind) who truly believes that not knowing something is so much more beneficial than claiming to know something. I guess that's why my calling was to be a writer. I like to communicate with people (not search for meaning-making through dialogic agitation). I like to be able to say what I want to say so that many people understand me, not just the people who work hours and hours trying to get through my sentences. To academics, I'd be somewhat of a luddite, if you interposed technology to be a desire to communicate, I guess. But what do I know?

Stumble It!