Opening for Ben Folds on his current tour is the group Lady Danville (I'm pretty sure the "New Song" video was taken at the Chicago show I attended). They are, to me, amazing. Three young dudes making great music? Yes, please. I went up front to buy their CD and there was one of the members of the band, selling their stuff. Even though I'm pretty sure I have at least ten years on him, I gushed like a school girl: You guys were awesome. So great (giggle, blush - ugh). Funny thing was, he was as excited and giddy as I was: You really liked it? Thanks! That's so great! Thanks!
Art and academia are often seen as being very isolated and isolating professions. For many artists, you spend hours or days or years locked up in a room somewhere, by yourself, creating. Academics spend the same amount of time, apparently, in libraries, archives, offices, labs, out in the field, again, by themselves. But of course, that's completely false. At one point or another, the artist emerges and shares their art. So, too, with the academic.
But that art is often rarely created in complete isolation. That's we have schools, movements, collectives, troupes, and other ways that artists support and work with each other. While in Chicago, I also met a young woman who had left her small town in rural West Virginia to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. She was working with a bunch of artists whom she had met in art school and they were working and supporting each other in order to create art and make a living. She was living her dream and loving it.
I come home and I read about how reference letters in academia for women that talk about collaboration are held against the candidate. “We found that being communal is not valued in academia,” it read. When I told my husband about the findings, he was completely unsurprised. Communal, he said, isn't as important as being independent and self-motivated. My fellow University of Venus bloggers (ok, she's one of the founders), Mary Churchill, tweeted "grad training is currently creating insecurity, arrogance, and depression rather than collaboration." Why are we recreating the worst stereotypes of the solitary, tortured artist, when the artists themselves long ago rejected that model?
If anything, academics should be learning from artists who look to collaborate and share their work with the widest possible audience. We should be open and honest about how challenging the life of the mind can be, but also how rewarding it can be, much like choosing to become an actor, musician, or painter. There are still academics out there who want to share with their students and colleagues. (For two examples, check out here and here). After reading these tributes to being a teacher and academic, can you imagine either of the two writers doing anything other than what they currently do? I can't, and I can't imagine it for myself, either.
We cannot give up hope in higher education, in some form or another. And to survive, we're going to have to start working, and I mean really working, together. Things are going to have to change.
Let's go. Who is with me?
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Brilliant. Why indeed.
ReplyDeleteI've seen some interesting analyses of this focus on the individual tortured artist that relate it to Romantic notions of art and then link that back into academe. Seem pretty plausible. And maybe academe should move on from the 18th Century :-)