January 2020: Back to Academe

2020. My God. Perhaps because I'm listening to Sun Ra's spacey music as I type, the mere idea of 2020 seems positively intergalactic, redolent of travel in rocket ships manned by Dan Dare and Digby, his overweight sidekick with the kiss curl. Given what's happening on Planet Earth, anyone with any sense should be off travelling the space-ways in search of a place where life (in harmony) is possible. 

Had fate dictated that I would follow a career, I would be thoroughly retired in 2020. I'd be living off a pension, that thorny issue that has provoked anarchy in France these past months. When I took our daughter to the railways station in nearby Souillac at the beginning of the month, hers was the only train running south to Toulouse that day. It was late and neither of us – worriers both – believed in it till its sudden appearance, seemingly driven by someone on amphetamines. Tilley the Kid fretted about missing her plane back to the Yuke, but she made it in good time and I wasn't required to drive her to the airport after all. The amphetamine-fuelled driver must have picked up sufficient time on the journey south.

By then, her last-minute dissertation was almost in the bag. Looking back, a career lecturing on some obscure niche subject in a provincial university might have suited me down to the ground: the odd tutorial, the odd seminar, the odd lecture, the odd academic paper, and plenty of time to chew some rarefied intellectual fat with fellow wasters. The trouble was, a Masters year at Sussex provided fairly conclusive proof that university lecturers were a load of tossers. Their rarefied lives and their concerns seemed to bear no relation to the reality of life. My marks plummeted from a double A to a double D as my interest faded and my disenchantment grew. To find a post somewhere, I would have had to go through another three years or so, researching and writing a PhD. Foolish youth that I was, I wanted to get out into the real world. 

The real world of work opened up a can of mediocrity. Pretty soon I came to the stark realisation that my glory, glory days were behind me and the only cerebral stimulation I was going to find would be outside the wonderful world of work. And then, of course, I began to think, Well maybe it wasn't such a bad idea, an academic career. After all, the only thing I'd been really good at was passing exams, so I could help the youth of the day pass theirs. But then came the realisation that it was probably too late in the day to start all over again.

Just as well, judging by our girl's dissertation. For days, once Christmas had been digested, she sat in her bedroom with her laptop, giving her parents the misguided notion that all was well, that she was getting on with it. Then the Good Wife, for 't'is usually she, discovered that our kid was well and truly blocked. She'd been doing more and more online research, without getting down to the business of writing her 6,600 words or however many it was. Why don't you go and speak to your dad, Debs urged her. Despite all her best efforts, EFT had failed this time to shift the blockage. She works miracles with clients, but her nearest-and-dearest often put up the most stubborn resistance. No, I refuse to get better!

So she came to see her dad – for a dose of academic Kruschen Salts. It didn't take long to figure out where the blockage was located. All through her education, she has been hidebound by rules about what she can and cannot do. I thought it would be better once she got to the Disunited Kingdom, but apparently not. The introduction had to be xxx words, the conclusion had to be xxx words; she couldn't use the shorter conversational form of words like cannot, should not, do not etc. Anything personal seemed to be frowned upon. Rules schmules! I reassured her that the best essay I ever wrote in Academe was one in which I ignored all rules, lectures and what not and wrote from the top of my head. That reassured her, but not much. The French system has drilled it into her that she can't, sorry cannot, step out of line.

So, I worked within the parameters she gave me. I showed her how she could structure her wealth of notes and gave her some pointers for the introduction and the conclusion. That did the trick; it got her started. For the next few days, she sat on her bed with her laptop and knuckled down to the last-minute task at hand. I kept her nose firmly to the grindstone with my intermittent visits to enquire how it was going or to throw in an idea or two.

'Dad, do you think I'll get it done on time?'
'You have to get it done on time. There's no alternative.'

And she did. When I read through it to check her spelling and correct a few grammatical tics, I was hugely impressed. It was interesting, to-the-point and very well written – especially since she never learnt to write English at school, only how to spick it weeth a vairy shtrong Frainch acksonte. It was gratifying, too. She done me proud. Perhaps I did miss a vocation after all, helping the youth of the day to tailor their work to meet the stringent rules of Academe.

But, as Elton John once sang, then again no. What I have seen and heard about today's academic institutions does not lead me to believe that things have changed much. Only the fees that one now has to pay. The lecturers still seem to have their heads stuck firmly up their fundaments and they have minimal time for their young clients who pay, or whose parents pay, the fees and thus their fairly generous salaries. My Protestant work ethic would have been constantly at odds with all that swanning about. Even now, in my rapidly approaching dotage, it barely allows me time for Sun Ra, Dan Dare or my current tome: Barry Miles' biography of Paul McCartney, a helluva lot (sorry, hell of a lot) more entertaining and insightful than some po-faced academic paper.