The Long View from the Ivory Tower
by Alison Powell
During my first semester at the GC, I’ve been struck by the complicated relationship many of us are negotiating between our responsibilities as academics and as citizens of a troubled city, country, and world. Many of my fellow humanities doctoral students have a latent social worker or justice advocate inside them, and I’ve enjoyed debates where we consider how our political commitments should or could be integrated with our research and writing. I took the longish way around to the PhD, taking several years off to work in the nonprofit sector, and I’ve recently found myself considering what originally compelled me to work in non-profits, when I’ve always felt most at home in academia. Passionate as I am about my politics, they feel, ultimately, less deeply a part of me than my obsessions with poetry and literary criticism (subjects hard to apply, say, in day-to-day work at a women’s health clinic).
Immediately before coming to the Graduate Center, I was a fundraiser for a nonprofit focused on ending the death penalty — at times a Sisyphean task. My involvement in the movement arose, strangely enough, through research I’d undertaken in a graduate class on theories of corporeality. The course nurtured in me a fascination with theorists like Judith Butler and Gilles Deleuze; this, along with reading about executions in early modern England, had me riveted. Theory can do that — the puzzle of the theory enabled me to look politically abhorrent subject matter squarely in the face, and even enjoy doing so. Yet the same year, I visited the classes of a close friend who is the Program Director of the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison, and overheard some of her students discussing the impending execution of Stanley “Tookie” Williams. An early leader of the Crips, he was later credited with negotiating a truce in one of the largest gang wars in the nation, and nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his books to help disenfranchised youth. Though he maintained his innocence in the killings for which he received the death penalty, he was executed at San Quentin on Dec. 13, 2005.
I returned to my program troubled with the implications of considering the death penalty in the context of such esoteric theory. I had really enjoyed asking, and formulating tentative answers to, questions such as “How were public executions related to medical advances in the late 1500s?” Meanwhile, condemned inmates in our own country — economically disadvantaged, subject to the racism and classism of their juries, burdened with incompetent representation — were being executed via state-sanctioned lethal injection. A few books (including Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood) and one documentary (The Execution of Wanda Jean Allen) later, and I left my program, packed up my car and sped away to a job in California. It would be dishonest and self-aggrandizing to pretend it was solely altruism that led me to such a decision. I craved a break from the teaching/non-earning lifestyle, from the loose-at-ends non-schedule of grad school, and the Midwest (it’s easy to trade the bleak winters and conservative politics of Indiana or Missouri for the ocean, redwood forests and anything-goes of San Francisco). In general, taking a break between graduate programs is something I recommend.
Over the next two years I met heroic individuals — appellate lawyers, religious leaders, the families of murder victims who oppose the death penalty, staff who every day brought optimism to their work. But writing copy for direct mail appeals to members, or designing a new t-shirt, I found myself wistful about my life in grad school. Like everything else, graduate school churns out self-deprecating, embarrassing situations (like my first literary seminar when I pronounced Borges with a hard “g”). Still, our primary obligation is to read what we would (hopefully) already read anyway, and then be intimidated but inspired as scholars in the field talk to us about the work. In the 9-to-5 grind at the office, planning some fundraising event, I missed having, say, my weird obsession with 16th century religious sermons encouraged. I missed the jolt of conversing about something absurdly specific with others who are as excited. Then there was the schedule: as a fundraiser, I had to be at work at 9 until 5 or later, and work some weekends; now I do a whole lot of my work in pajamas and I do it whenever I want.
Social justice work, though, does provide a very real sense that your work has an immediate impact. Trying to fight the death penalty in the United States is tough, but we saw measurable progress. At Planned Parenthood, there was satisfaction leaving every day having armed some sixteen year old girl with bilingual safe-sex pamphlets and contraceptive information. But I think the idea of a fundamental difference between social work and academia is, to some extent, a false dichotomy. Coming from a conservative state, I was at college before I learned to be skeptical of politicians and demagogues, to marvel at the power of individual resistance, and to understand the complexity of institutionalized racism and sexism, inadequate distribution of wealth, and the abysmal conditions in our prisons
For the vast majority of us here at the GC, we don’t get the direct satisfaction of seeing how our own activities help to solve the various social problems that concern us (I should note that I’m thinking very much as a person in English lit; it may be easier to visualize a connection to social change coming from the disciplines of history, sociology or the hard sciences). There is no dearth of students here who brilliantly and responsibly integrate their politics into their lives as academics (the upcoming election happily digresses a number of seminars; buttons abound), and we should keep in mind how our work contributes to the “greater good.” Having visited San Quentin, I truly believe that having read Foucault and Bentham allowed me to comprehend what I witnessed in a more meaningful way; that experience has helped me nurture the long view (not to be confused with the “Oh my, it will be fifty years before I pay back my student loans” long view) and to see that our work, which can at times feel absurdly narrow, has implications far beyond our own disciplines. As teachers, for example, asking our students to analyze everything from Legally Blonde to the Canterbury Tales encourages them to wrestle with their environment in a more empowered, complicated way.
While ambivalence about the potential for change through grad school may be natural, the work of universities is to improve our critical faculties and sense of history. What universities contribute isn’t only the result of overtly sociopolitical theoretical stances — queer theory, feminist studies, African-American studies, Chicano studies, etc. But even the very act of posing highly specialized questions has ethical merit with powerful implications. As the world becomes increasingly general and high-speed, we participate in a global consumer culture, reaching for what’s in front of us without discipline or reflection; well, if we don’t exactly resist that — if we, too, participate in it — we at least complicate it by avoiding the split-second reward. I mean, nothing English lit scholars do is fast.
We can’t position ourselves as consistently integrated and relevant to the nonacademic world, not practically, not yet. We want to: there’s a healthy desire to demolish the ivory tower. But it seems important to remember that, as college teachers, researchers and writers, we are somewhat removed from the 9-to-5 world of commerce, government, service industries or (as my radical, social-justice careerist friend called it) the “nonprofit industrial complex.” It’s easy for us to think about what is intimidating and taxing about being a graduate student, and we fetishize a bit the difficulty of the PhD route, in a way that sometimes rings false. Sure, at times reading Hume or prepping for a seminar at the Shakespeare conference makes me want to hole up in my increasingly shrinking living space, watch Almodovar movies and drink inadvisable quantities of red wine. But maybe I bemoan the work to feel a teensy bit less guilty about what I’m not doing — collecting signatures, handing out sandwiches, organizing protests. I’d bet all 35 square feet of my living space that GC students fret more about the problems facing our nation today than your average twenty-something; yet we spend our time on decoding the Romantic ethical imagination or reading 16th century antitheatricalist texts that have seemingly little relevance to the problems of poverty right outside our doors on 5th Ave.
Don’t get me wrong: the work we’re all doing is deeply challenging, sometimes absurdly so. But still, for many of us, we’re here because we have the amazing luxury of pursuing our favorite thing in the whole world. The long view, for me, means reckoning with the fact that, sure, the paper I’m developing on medicine and sacrifice in Donne won’t end the three strikes law, collect those signatures, or get health care to people in need, but my awareness of this disparity reminds me to enjoy what I’ve got, and also motivates me. I may not exclusively do work that privileges a political agenda — I am far from advocating that — but I will continue to consider what’s come historically from this ivory tower, and celebrate how that work was later used as fodder for social revolution.
