A weekly reflection on life in academia
I wasn’t intending to post a Lost in the Maize blog today, having been struggling to get back from a fog-bound UK to the US for the past 48 hours. But reading Iain M. Banks’ Surface Detail on the flight back, I came across this rather delicious critique of academic life that I couldn’t resist sharing:
“The techniques learned in lecture theatres and later honed to perfection in faculty meetings were proving their worth at last. He could vaguely follow what was being said without needing to bother with the detail.
“When he’d been a student he had assumed he could do this because he was just so damn smart and basically already knew all they were trying to teach him. Later, during seemingly endless committee sessions, he’d accepted that a lot of what passed for useful information-sharing within an organisation was really just the bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their positions, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for up-coming failures and calamities that that were both entirely predictable but seemingly completely unavoidable, and telling each other what they all already knew anyway. The trick was to be able to re-engage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know you’d stopped listening properly shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth.”
Ouch!
Thank goodness it’s just a piece of fiction…
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hm. I really like a number of Iain Banks’ novels (but not all of them – a few are just way too violent for my taste) – but haven’t really been so enamoured of the “M.” versions. This passage is a bit, um, er… wordy – which I guess is the point.
“phatic” – I’m going to have to look that one up I think.
I like many of Iain Banks’ contemporary novels, but I actually think it’s in the SF where he really shines – although you have to have a stomach for violent/explicit writing. Here he’s able to write rich, complex and insightful novels that use the medium of science fiction to the full, while also maintaining a surprising level of scientific internal consistency.