in defense of academics
malcolm gladwell gave a great speech at Columbia a while back about david galenson's theory of creativity, which I liked a lot (and found via snarkmarket via points of note via NYT). briefly (though I do suggest you read the speech): david galenson weighs up picasso against cezanne and presents them as encapsulating two diametrically opposed approaches to creativity -- the explode-on-the-scene genius of picasso versus the painstaking crafting of steady growth that embodies cezanne's approach -- and how our society today has come to value the former over the latter. as malcolm gladwell puts it, nobody today would wait fifteen albums for a band to hit the bestseller. as soon as your first album blows, you're out. but what if you're the kind of artist that needs space and time to mature into genius? what if, as gladwell puts it, you're fleetwood mac?
I thought about this in context of where I am now -- a fledgling academic. how academia is so increasingly looked down upon, and how, in david galenson's terms, this is because academia is sort of like cezanne mecca. it's an entire institution in which swathes of people labour for a seriously long period of time over problems that can and often do only assume their true proportions in retrospect, i.e. without immediate return. and in society today, we are all about instant gratification. microwave meals, fast food, instant noodles, airplanes, email, one-click shopping. for society, academia is actually worse than having to wait for fifteen albums: it's having to fund the production of fifteen albums, but not actually getting to listen to any of those albums until they're all finished.
I realized it's essentially a problem of valuing potential. it will always involve speculation, and there will inevitably be risk, e.g. the duds who turn up at the end of the time period with fifteen CDs of white noise -- the musical equivalents of the sort of PhD students who, at the end of three years, turn in magnificently arid theses on the history of black-soled men's leather boots in seventeenth century Hull, England, or somesuch.
but academia (especially in the field of history) really is one of those systems that rewards this painstaking ripening. on a daily basis I'm faced with the floodgates of information to assimilate, and I'm constantly frustrated at the slowness of my progress; I want to know more, and I want to know it immediately, but historical creativity just doesn't work that way. and now, whenever I read a journal article or a scholarly book and look at its footnotes and its bibliography, I see how humanity's knowledge is like galenson's cezanne writ large -- this laboriously collective filling in of gaps by the miniscule scritch-scratching of individual pens, to reach some always distant peak point of genius in which, god knows, histories of black leather boots in seventeenth century Hull might just find their heyday. in a world subsisting increasingly on minute-meals, academia is one of the last bastions of delayed gratification; we're right there with cezanne, fleetwood mac, pharmaceutical R&D and wine. I say, give us a chance.