I worked in the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs as associate editor a couple of years ago, and had to edit articles written by professors for publication in the magazine.  One professor said absolutely nothing in her article. She delivered raw data that begged for conclusions, but she did not give any.  I called her on it and she told me she did not want any opinions in the article.  I told her that she had to at least make some basic summary statements, given all of her data.  But she was adamant--no, absolutely no conclusions.  She was up for tenure, and needed the article as part of her portfolio, but was not going to take any risk whatsoever of offending one of her commitee members with a wrong opinion.  Now, is this the system creating irrevelance, or is it the individual who has cowered before the system who does so?
Pound had his answer--both of them.
But then again, he was never given his chance to sweat under the scrutiny of a tenure committee.  Could his poetry have been the same, had he needed to secure a position? I think most of us would agree that his work would have been affected. If so, what should we think about the institutionalization of the arts and poetry today?  Any poets out there who have had to wrangle with this issue?
 
>>> Tim Romano <[log in to unmask]> 10/30 7:23 AM >>>
No harm done, Richard, at least from my perspective. The views
Robert expressed come from a neighborhood not too far from my own,
though mine is rather less safe for the unwary academic. I happen
to think Robert's college professor of literature/shaman analogy
aggrandizes the former profession. The shaman and witch priestess
play a role of central importance in their societies, whereas your
teachers of literature and lit theory are usually regarded as
irrelevant.  But relevance is not their forte; indeed, any attempt
to become relevant is likely to be regarded as "unprofessional";
and excellence in teaching (which, in the humanities, usually
means the teacher has shown how the subject matter is relevant to
heart and mind)  means diddly squat, or worse, to most tenure
committees. That both professions often resort to mumbo jumbo
nobody else understands is a superficial similarity only. The
irony is that a profession that has made itself irrelevant must
continually defend its relevance to university bean-counters...
Tim Romano
 
 
Richard Read wrote:
>
> Very sorry to both of them, but Tim Romano in my last should have read
> Robert Kibler.
>
> Richard Read.
>
 
Robert had written:
> > [...]
> >Psychology, like English, is one of those professions that has cloaked
> >itself in scientisms and argot in order to hide its sneaking suspicioun
> >that some kind of fraudulence or hokum is inside of its most serious
> >endeavor.....Jame Frazer notes the same phenomenon in shamans and
> >witchdoctors.  The successful ones, he notes, are those who actually do
> >not think there is a direct correlation between their dances and chants,
> >and the rain which comes to save the crops--or not.  So they always have a
> >way out, an alternative.  Somehow we (all professionals in the 20th) seem
> >to have lost the knack for objectively looking at our wisdom base and
> >seeing--even accepting--a bit of chicanery in it. Consequently, we
> >absolutely believe in the intellectual systems at our disposal as if our
> >lives depended on them--and we protect them with argot and authoritative 
> >studies. I can't help but feel that there is some kind of loss to culture,
> >when the successful witchdoctors can't occasionally question the greater
> >value of all that they do, give a whoop and a holler, yet put the headress
> >back on and take the next customer.
> > [...]