Toe The Line..
Discipline, discipline, discipline - conform, conform, conform.. If only I had a penny for every time I heard that.. Once upon a time many years ago, after 3 yrs of being the complete misfit in conservative Madras, somehow I had this romantic image of academia in the US being this haven of intellectual freedom. Some of Statements of Purpose began with "Squashed Genitalia" - naive doesn't begin to describe it. Needless to say, the cold reality of academic life in the US, is a little different from the free thought image. Could go on and on about the various myths the System puts out, but will try and be restrained.
The System would have you believe that it's all about respect for individual freedom, but of course all that is only as long you keep the blinkers and stay within the box, start to develop half a brain of your own, or horror of horrors, actually question the System and suddenly all that talk of individual freedom goes out the window. This latest bout of cynicism comes courtesy an overly harsh and unwarranted note of censure from the graduate program on teaching evaluations. "Maybe the guy just had a bad day" - is the explanation I get, somehow the frequency of people of authority having "bad days" seems to have increased dramatically in the last year or so, which by a remarkable coincidence is the time-frame that I've been fairly involved with the student union for. Oh well, am not going to apologise for my politics, so I guess this new year is a year for taking flak for political stances - so be it...
On a big-picture sort of note, to me the whole point of a PhD is develop as an independent thinker and researcher, not to merely go mechanically, assembly-line style from one quality control benchmark to the next.. But of course there's no room for such radical ideas in an era when education itself is a commodity..
The System would have you believe that it's all about respect for individual freedom, but of course all that is only as long you keep the blinkers and stay within the box, start to develop half a brain of your own, or horror of horrors, actually question the System and suddenly all that talk of individual freedom goes out the window. This latest bout of cynicism comes courtesy an overly harsh and unwarranted note of censure from the graduate program on teaching evaluations. "Maybe the guy just had a bad day" - is the explanation I get, somehow the frequency of people of authority having "bad days" seems to have increased dramatically in the last year or so, which by a remarkable coincidence is the time-frame that I've been fairly involved with the student union for. Oh well, am not going to apologise for my politics, so I guess this new year is a year for taking flak for political stances - so be it...
On a big-picture sort of note, to me the whole point of a PhD is develop as an independent thinker and researcher, not to merely go mechanically, assembly-line style from one quality control benchmark to the next.. But of course there's no room for such radical ideas in an era when education itself is a commodity..