Last night at dinner, I tried to explain to Jillian why I had decided my factory years were more important to my current place in the world than were my years in graduate school. Graduate school, I argued, was a place where you were trained to do specific kinds of research in a relatively narrow field. When I wrote my dissertation, for instance, the idea was that it would demonstrate to potential employers that I could produce book-length manuscripts and that I had a deep and original understanding of one particular aspect of literature in English. The hoped-for result would be a tenure-track job in an English department at a university, where I would teach classes about my specialty.
When I worked in a factory, however, I was the stereotypical auto-didact: I learned haphazardly about whatever caught my fancy at the moment. Sometimes I read dirty magazines; sometimes I read Camus; sometimes I read the sports page; sometimes I read literary criticism. I didn't care as long as it was good and it appealed to me on some level.
I got the dissertation, but like so many humanities PhDs of today, I ended up, not with a tenure-track job in my designated field, but instead with a series of jobs in a variety of fields. Since I entered the world of college education, I have taught composition classes, literature classes, film classes, American Studies classes, classes on popular culture, Mass Communications classes, classes on California and classes on San Francisco. I've taught big lecture classes, I've taught small seminars, I've taught online classes. I've taught at UC Berkeley and at San Francisco State and at American River College. I've taught in English departments and American Studies departments and Mass Communications departments and Humanities departments. I have been, in short, a generalist who rarely gets to teach my "specialty," a teacher who oftentimes must learn about a new subject so that I might teach it.
And doesn't that sound like the kind of employment that is at least as well served by a decade of pick-and-choose self-teaching in a factory as it is by a decade of single-minded focus in the halls of a prestigious graduate program?
That's what I tried to tell Jillian. But maybe this is what I meant:
Terry Eagleton writes, in a review of a book by Susan Sontag [ed. note: link no longer works]:
To grasp what an intellectual is, think of the opposite of an academic. This isn't to suggest that all academics are dim, though a good few of them are of modest intelligence. But they are usually specialists in a single subject, whereas the classical intellectual has a more ambitious range. Sartre, who is every shopkeeper's idea of an intellectual, was dramatist, philosopher, novelist, political theorist, cult figure and Maoist militant. At its best, this lends intellectuals an admirable breadth and diversity, making them the true inheritors of the old-style sage, humanist or "man of letters". At its worst, it means that they can be bungling amateurs or insufferable dilettantes.
Steven Rubio: humanist, dilettante, intellectual.
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