The life of an amateur

I wanted to be an academic who was actively engaging with the public--the old-fashioned public intellectual, even if I could not ever be at the high quality. After all these years, whenever I look at my CV, well, frankly, I am impressed with myself.

I really did not think it would work out this well.  Especially because I am always worried that people might find out that I am an impostor.  I have always felt like I am an amateur who was dangerously close to the edge.  It is, therefore, comforting to know that such a thought of being an amateur is a good thing:

Being an amateur is nothing to be ashamed of. Edward Said embraced the term. For him it was the mode of the intellectual. Amateurism, he said, is "the desire to be moved not by profit or reward, but by love for an unquenchable interest in the larger picture." It is a desire, he continued, that lies "in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a profession."
As an amateur you are naturally anti-instrumental. You’re largely indifferent to extrinsic rewards or status. When doing research, you’re not interested in gaining an elevated position among your immediate academic peers. You’re just interested in keeping your job, making sure not to get fired.

I like that description: "you are naturally anti-instrumental,"  I do what I do not because I am chasing "extrinsic rewards or status."  I care for the ideas that I explore, for the students I serve, and as long as I continue to have the job that I have, all is well.  As simple as that.

As amateurs we need to be open. And we need to experiment with different outlets, and work on how we get our ideas across.

Exactly.  In doing so:

Are we writing about topics worth caring about? Topics that move us? Topics that move other people? All too often we seem to write about topics that move no one and have no resonance to anyone, anywhere.

In my early years of engaging with the public, it was always a struggle trying to figure out how to convince the reader that what I write is important.  Where was the hook for the local reader if I wanted to write about India or Tanzania?  Why is that relevant to them?  The only thing I knew was this: I did not want to come across to a reader that I write because I am an expert and that they ought to read my stuff because I am an expert.  That, to me, was an unequal partnership that would never work.  I detest the tone of "listen to me, because I am an expert who works at a big time place."

I am willing to bet that this meaningful op-ed writing and engaging with the public has also made me a better teacher.  Or at least a less-horrible teacher.  After all, it is the same mentality that I take to the classroom: How do I convince the audience--even if they are captive--that the content is relevant to them and their lives?

When writing for academic journals, you’re lucky to be read by more than a handful of people. With teaching, however, it’s different. Not only can we reach many more, but, as Russell Jacoby wrote in The Last Intellectuals, we "have students who pass through and on to other things." And with students passing through the university each year, you might have an impact after all.
As an unapologetic amateur you should like to experiment with form.

It is a pleasure, and perhaps quite an ego trip, when students do make those connections.

At the end of it all, I find more meaning in what I do.  There is no unbearable burden of calculations towards professional advancements.

Many aspiring intellectuals have put their professional careers at risk in favor of something more meaningful. They’ve cared less about their careers — and more about the world. Which, we think, is laudable.

In the meanwhile, there are students to serve.  After the spring break, which even wannabe intellectuals need ;)

If only the world had listened to me!

Many moons ago, when about this time of the year I had started planning for the migration northward to Oregon, I was scanning the local, downtown, community newsletter of sorts--I think it was called the Village News, perhaps modeled after the Village Voice.

In that, and unexpectedly, I received one of the best compliments that I have ever received.  The editor had noted my departure from the university and the town with a comment that the area was losing a public intellectual. I was pleasantly shocked.

It was all the more wonderful because it came from a person whom I had never met. This meant that she had based her comment strictly on my op-eds in the local newspaper, the Bakersfield Californian.

I knew even back in my teenage years that my life would be in the intellectual arena.  Further, I knew that I wanted my intellectual activities to be in the public, and not in some obscure office, not because of a need to be in the spotlight but because of an obsession of sorts to understand social issues and to discuss and debate with others my understanding.

But, of course, I had no idea then of a phrase "public intellectual."  It was one of the many new ideas that came to understand over the course of six graduate school years.

A couple of years ago, a student told me that he wanted to engage in the kind of public discussion of ideas like how I do, and asked me for suggestions on how he could go about it.  That stumped me.  I had no idea what the formula is.  I agree with the author here:

The phrase has come to mean an academic who occasionally addresses a general audience, as if all academics were intellectuals, and some of them were also public ones. In fact, academics and intellectuals are antithetical types. An intellectual is not an expert, and a public intellectual is not an expert who condescends to speak to a wider audience about her area of expertise. An intellectual is a generalist, an autodidact, a thinker who wanders and speculates. As Jack Miles puts it in a stellar essay on the question, “It takes years of disciplined preparation to become an academic. It takes years of undisciplined preparation to become an intellectual.”

I love that description of "years of undisciplined preparation."  I might never have come up with that phrasing, but that has exactly been my life until now.  Undisciplined preparation. 

The intellectual’s job is to think past the culture: to question the myths, metaphors, and assumptions that limit our collective imagination. The founder of the breed was Socrates. As Kazin also said, an intellectual is someone for whom ideas are “instruments of salvation.” Becoming one requires a little more than setting up a blog.

Indeed.

Engaging the public has been far more productive in terms of creating and sharing knowledge, than my formal scholarship can ever be.

Back in graduate school, I was cautioned against gong this route by one of my graduate school professors.  Jim Moore applauded my passion for this approach, but warned me that academia would care only about the formal academic inquiries via the publish-or-perish peer-review process, though they would certainly get jealous about any notoriety that I gained from my approach.  Jim was, and is, correct.  But, it would not be me, and not my life, if I did anything other than what I wanted to do.  I carried on with my Quixotic tilting at windmills.

Every time I visit India, my father asks why I don't write for the Indian newspapers.  I have found it difficult to explain to him that the op-eds in the newspapers there are not the kind of the public intellectual discussions that I favor.  Often they are filled with jargon, written by experts and not by intellectuals.  The writings often seem to have an undertone of the specialist having decided that the ignorant public needs to be educated with his/her expert opinion.  As if the public policy issue would be solved, and solved easily, if and only if the public listened to that expert.  That does not strike me as the role of the public intellectual. 

There is so much to talk about ... never has there been a better time.  It will also be nice though if people listened to me! ;)

There's something in the air!

After deplaning and exiting the jet-bridge, we were in the terminal of the fancy and modern airport in India's capital city.  But, even the inside of the airport was polluted.  My eyes started watering even before we exited the terminal ... and the outside was infinitely worse!

Such is life in India, where a suburb of Delhi--Gurugram--has the notoriety of having the world's dirtiest air.  India, whose prime minister chanted the mantra of "India First" well before tRump started yelling and tweeting about "America First," is perhaps not too thrilled that India is first, indeed, when it comes to air pollution!

Worldwide, air quality seems to be worsening.  Even in places like Oregon, the summer wildfires, brought on by extreme weather events that are related to climate change, make the air un-breathable sometimes.

The worse this gets, one would think that the world's billions will rise up and demand an end to pollution.  We would think that humanity would want to breathe free and look up at the blue sky.  Right?

Wrong!

Instead, we are apparently creating fashion out of the masks that we need to wear to get through the choking pollution!  Yep, masks!!!  If you build a better mask, the capitalistic world apparently will rush to your door and flatten it and you in a nanosecond!

Enter the face mask, an accessory ripe for the market in these dystopian times. People who live in desert areas have long known to cover their mouths and protect their lungs from dust. But in the past few years, a handful of companies have started making air filtration masks engineered specifically for both fashion and function. In California, a company called Vogmask has all but cornered the market with its brightly colored designs. And abroad, companies like Airpop and Respro are entering the fold, hoping to provide an attractive alternative to the standard white painter’s mask.

This.Is.Sad!

I mean, come on, look at this photo:

Source

Seriously?

And the logic for why this is a "fashionable" add-on?

And there’s an accessory these brands can look to as a historical example. “If sunglasses didn’t exist today and you were going to pitch an investor on sunglasses, you would sound insane,” Hosmer says. “‘Hey, we’re gonna put this thing that covers, like, the window to your soul, the most communicative part of your body; we’re gonna put something in front of it so that you can’t see it, and that thing is gonna essentially be able to protect you from your environment.’ They would be like, ‘What? That’s stupid. No one’s gonna do that!’” Masks are no different, he says.
Xu also pointed to sunglasses when I asked her about the issues Americans might have with covering up their faces. “I’m not actually someone who likes to wear sunglasses,” she said. “And I’m struck by how common it is for people to cover up one of the more expressive parts of their face all the time.” How different are masks, really?

Seriously?

In the future, these masks may be outfitted with tiny sensors that detect everything from hazardous chemicals to the electric fields nearby. And with all that additional data, Hosmer thinks people will better understand the kinds of risks our environment might pose. “So there will gradually be a familiarity with, if not an acceptance of, knowing what the invisible threats to your and your family’s health and well-being are.”

I hope I am gone before that day arrives when people are walking around with hi-tech fashion gear that covers their nose and mouth.  Oh the humanity!