Some wag once said that academia was a pie-eating contest in which the prize was more pie. The reason this evokes rueful chuckles from academics is that, like all good jokes, there is truth in this hyperbolic description. (The more gloomily inclined among us will recognize a deeper existential truth in here: life can allContinue reading “Academia As Pie-Eating Contest”
Tag Archives: academic anxiety
The Academic’s Peculiar Dissonance
The academic state of mind is distinguished, I think, by a peculiar kind of dissonance; the academic is able to entertain two conflicting states of being simultaneously; each informs the other and brings to it its peculiar intensity and torment. At one end of its affective and emotional spectrum lies the well-known impostor syndrome: theContinue reading “The Academic’s Peculiar Dissonance”
The Acknowledgments Section As Venue For Disgruntlement
In The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre (University of Chicago Press, 1985) David P. Jordan writes in the ‘Acknowledgments’ section: With the exception of the Humanities Institute of the University of Illinois at Chicago, whose fellowship gave me the leisure to rethink and rewrite, no fund or foundation, agency or institution, whether public or privateContinue reading “The Acknowledgments Section As Venue For Disgruntlement”
My First Academic Conference
The first academic conference I attended was the 1999 Annual Meeting of the Association of Symbolic Logic, held at the University of California at San Diego. I submitted an abstract for a presentation, which was accepted, and so off I went, hoping to gain ‘experience’ and ‘exposure.’ My paper was based on part of myContinue reading “My First Academic Conference”
Fearing Tenure: The Loss Of Community
In ‘The Clouded Prism: Minority Critique of the Critical Legal Studies Movement‘, Harlan L. Dalton wrote: I take it that everyone drawn to CLS is interested in specifying in concrete terms the dichotomy between autonomy and community. If so, talk to us. Talk TO us. Listen to us. We have lots to say, out ofContinue reading “Fearing Tenure: The Loss Of Community”
Of Therapy And Personal And Academic Anxieties
Reading some of the discussion sparked by Peter Railton’s Dewey Lecture has prompted me to write this post. In the fall of 1996, I began studying for my Ph.D qualifier exams. I had worked full-time at a non-academic job for the previous year, saving up some money so that I could take a month orContinue reading “Of Therapy And Personal And Academic Anxieties”
Samir Chopra 