Wednesday, September 9, 2015

I'm just saying -- No, that's not it Part II

From somebody I follow on Twitter, there's this link.
http://www.vox.com/2015/9/8/9261531/professor-quitting-job

The professor blames all his problems on academe.
No, that's not it.
The problem is he woke up from his fantasy and he's blaming others for the fact that the real world doesn't match his fantasy.
In other words, due to his background he's entitled to have everything the way he wants it.
When he arrived at the university they were supposed to immediately recognize his awesomeness and bow down before it.
Instead, they insisted on their own value as human beings.
They didn't like being treated like annoyances and they showed it.
The whole first paragraph or two of this is supposed to impress the reader with how intelligent the writer is.
So how come he wasn't smart enough to know that the best and brightest don't go to school for liberal arts degrees?
They go for science, engineering, math, computers, pre-med, pre-law, nursing, and so on.  This is the same crisis as Oxford and Cambridge went through about 1800, when trade schools and military schools and the University of London bled off all the bright people by offering them a future.
How come a history professor doesn't know  that?
People don't go to university to become historians (or classics scholars).  They know they can't make money that way.   They know they can make their pile in other fields and pick up with the humanities later.  Some of them became famous for it.
What the writer had in class were the people who will be successful in the future, who were punching their tickets as having  a well-rounded education. 
Or he had people for whom he felt contempt because they were majoring in the liberal arts but they weren't as awesome as he is.

Finally, the writer wasn't intelligent enough to realize that where there are people, there are social dynamics.
Social dynamics are at the heart of history.
If the writer was so incompetent at social dynamics as appears from his article, he must have been lousy at history because he probably had absolutely no rock-bottom realistic understanding of why history twists and turns the way it does.
If  he's that bad at social dynamics, what must his home and social life be like?

So before you buy into the fairy tale that intelligence and getting tickets punched entitles you to have things the way you want it, turn around and look at what happened in Virginia within  the last couple of weeks.
A guy who felt entitled to a job in which  he displayed horrible social dynamics reacted as if he had been victimized, and he killed a couple of people.
You're not entitled to anything.
If you don't get what you want you're not a victim.
Wake up from the fairy tale and learn how to cope with real life.

I'm just saying...
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

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