A Guide to Emotional Multi-Tasking
In humor, life is redefined and accepted. Irony and satire provide much keener insights into a group’s collective psyche and values than do years of research. When a people can laugh at themselves and laugh at others and hold all aspects of life together without letting anybody drive them to extremes, then it seems to me that this people can survive.
Vine Deloria, Jr., Standing Rock Sioux, “Indian Humor,” Custer Died for Your Sins
He turned down the role of “disarmer,”
Or “a really good fit,” or “a charmer.”
He made fun of his peers
And that stirred up their fears,
Which pleased that professor named Armour.
A Hot-Off-the-Press Limerick
Now we are ready to ask an Academic Question, which is a safe kind of question to ask, because it is utterly unlikely to produce any practical result.
Richard Armour
Two Academic Questions
- Have academics courted unnecessary risk by taking themselves too seriously?
- If kicking a man when he is down is understood to be wrong, is it equally wrong to make fun of an institution when it is in crisis? Or could it be that crisis is exactly the right time for institutions to be treated with therapeutic merriment?
Since these two queries fully meet Armour’s criteria for Academic Questions—“utterly unlikely to produce any practical result”—it seems safe to proceed.
Richard Armour: Participant/Observer and Believer/Skeptic
“If you find it hard to laugh at yourself, I would be happy to do it for you.”
Groucho Marx
Given that hardly anyone in 2020 has heard of the writer Richard Armour, an introduction would seem to be in order. He was a career academic with a Harvard PhD in philology and the author of a scholarly biography of an entirely unknown English poet, Bryan Waller Procter.
Every reader is, at this point, about to move on to another question: “Why on earth should I keep reading about this guy?”
Before making any impulsive moves, quickly direct your attention to the excellent quotation from Groucho Marx that appears at the start of this subsection and also to my characterization of Armour as a hybrid of “believer” and “skeptic.” It turns out that he was a professor who loved academia and who made endless fun of it, modeling a form of emotional multitasking that people who devote their lives to academia would be wise to mimic. Over his career, Armour taught at seven colleges or universities, finally settling into Pomona College where he had himself been an undergraduate. It is my own conviction that the intensity of his mockery was the precise equivalent of the happiness that he found in his lifetime habitat of campuses and classrooms.
In 1965, Armour published Going Around in Academic Circles: A Low View of Higher Education, and in 1974, he published The Academic Bestiary: A Natural History of the Strange Species of Academe. One book is fifty-five-years old, and the other is forty-six-years-old. That timing presents a paradox: both books give evidence that they originated in a distant era, and they both offer commentary that seems very relevant to current times. Speaking of originating in a distant era, these books came into the world at exactly the right time for me. As I entered the academic world, Richard Armour’s unrestrained humor assured me that I had good company in finding aspects of that world to be very, very odd.
The images on the banner above this essay—“The Instructor” and “The Full Professor”—convey Armour’s alignment with the “humor, irony, and satire” that Vine Deloria, Jr. celebrated as a key to survival. These images first appeared in The Academic Bestiary (1974). A fellow named Paul Darrow, who had quite a breathtaking gift for translating written words into visual form, drew that book’s illustrations.
As we contemplate those images, it is time for a disclaimer. I have met hundreds—really, thousands—of Full Professors who do not bear the slightest resemblance to the figure that you see displayed here. On the other hand, I will not deny that I have encountered afew Full Professors who have expanded to the dimensions of this portrayal. But, on a more flattering note, I am happy to say that I have met quite a few people who remind me of the Instructor. I have liked those people very much and found myself enchanted by their high concentration of earnestness, if not by their hairstyles.
To complete the project of introducing you to both the Instructor and the Full Professor, here are quotations from the descriptions Armour wrote of them. I should provide the warning that Armour used the word “it” for the creatures he described, not because he was anticipating the emergence of the twenty-first-century cultural enthusiasm for gender-free pronouns, but because he was treating every academic identity, occupation, or phenomenon as if it were an unusual species, with the individual embodying the whole category (not exactly “ontogeny recreates phylogeny,” but close).
The Instructor
The Instructor will be found at the bottom rung of the Academic Ladder, looking up wistfully and starry-eyed at the Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Full Professor. The only creature lower is the Teaching Assistant, which has not yet placed a foot, or a hand, on the precious Ladder. Though the Instructor is in a low position, it has high hopes. Each night it dreams of ascending the Ladder, step by step, until it reaches academic Heaven as a Full Professor with Tenure. Each morning comes with the rude awakening to the fact that it is only an Instructor, without Tenure, Sabbatical, or Publications.
What keeps the Instructor going, though not necessarily upward, is interest in Students and love of teaching. The Instructor came to Academe with the idealistic belief that a Dedicated Teacher would be admired, respected, and given Quick Advancement. It soon learned, alas, that to most Deans and Professors . . . teaching though desirable is a Minor Consideration.
When the Instructor arrives in Academe, it is given a small hole or burrow, known as an Office. It is not expected to live there but only to stay there during its Office Hours.
And now, even more uncomfortably, we turn to my own species in the academic taxonomy.
The Full Professor
It is not apparent at first what it is full of, but there is an obvious fullness. In fact, it is so full that it seems ready to burst. It may, however, only be bursting with pride. At a closer look or, better, upon dissection, it will be seen that the Full Professor is full of such things as Information, Experience, and Authority. . . . The Full Professor is also full of satisfaction. Unless it goes into Administration, it is everything that a Professor can hope to be. It is also a Scholar, as may be seen by the brown patches on its elbows.
While it is possible that jackets with this adornment still hang in the closets of a few loyalists, Armour’s evocation of those brown elbow patches provides a clue that he was writing a half century ago. But that detail only emphasizes the most striking impression delivered by Going Around in Academic Circles and The Academic Bestiary.
With the exception of a few passages, these books do not seem dated. On the contrary, they still seem far from the expiration of their shelf-life.
Decades after Armour wrote about the Instructor and the Full Professor, prestige, status, and certainly salary all remain concentrated at one end of the academic hierarchy, becoming correspondingly scarce at the other end. The disparity between the positions of the Instructor and the Full Professor still adds up to an academic version of the national pattern of income inequality, an allocation of wealth regularly lamented by many well-educated liberals—a cohort that includes a good number of Full Professors.
More important, we cannot overlook the fact that there is something new under the academic sun in the twenty-first century: the lower reaches of the academic ladder have been extended, with rungs reaching into the subsurface and with The Adjunct occupying those lower rungs.
And now for my maiden run at adapting Richard Armour’s taxonomic methodology to fit present times:
The Adjunct
The Adjunct invested years of its life to acquire the Widget called a PhD. Despite the unmistakable collapse of the market for this commodity, the Widget Factory—more commonly known as the Graduate School—did not cut back its operations but, instead, persisted in the prolific production of PhDs. One reason for this market maladjustment was the persistent belief that the fullness of a Full Professor was measured by the impressive number of graduate students he or she advised. Another reason for PhD over-production lies in the fact that the Adjunct, as an organism, is suffused with an unending flow of hope. With insufficient funding for research of this phenomenon, endocrinologists have not determined which gland produces this super-abundance of cheerful aspiration. Whether the source is the pituitary, the thyroid, or a concatenation of adrenal glands and lymph nodes, the predictable result is hyper-activity of the sweat glands and the tear ducts. Since the Adjunct receives a modest set fee for teaching a course, it is set free from the burdensome paperwork that comes with a salary, health benefits, and retirement savings. Cobbling together jobs at multiple colleges and universities, the Adjunct finds abundant time for class preparation while driving from one educational institution to another; moreover, disenfranchised from faculty decision-making, the Adjunct has even more time to devote to grading tests and papers.
And now, having written this disturbing characterization of the Adjunct’s circumstances, and having decided that I will release it to the public anyway, I now find myself with a heightened interest in another Academic Question.
How did Richard Armour’s professorial colleagues feel about him?
The Power of the Past to Vex the Present
In 2020, when you put on record your admiration for a figure from the past, you know exactly what you must brace for: you are almost certainly about to confront character traits that you will find uncomfortable, creepy, disappointing, and disillusioning in the person you wanted to admire. This means that you are now called upon to perform the fancy footwork of our time, trying to explain why you are going to go ahead and admire this figure despite his or her deficiencies and failures.
Really, there are moments when a person of the present can be tempted to think that the people of the past took pleasure in knowing that their deficiencies, flaws, missteps, sins, and crimes would plague us.
And, in the enterprise of making a fan cringe, Richard Armour does not disappoint.
When I read what he wrote about women, whether “faculty wives,” female students, or even librarians, I am given a full cringe work-out. I do not want to deny you the opportunity to share my discomfort, so here is an example:
There is a sinuous, serpentine quality about the Co-Ed, particularly when observed from the rear as it moves from place to place. The males of all species in Academe, even and especially, the older Professors, are fascinated by every movement of the Co-Ed, whether front or rear. The Co-Ed is noteworthy for its curves, which have to be seen to be believed. These vary from Co-Ed to Co-Ed, in extent though not in location.
Once the cringing let up, I realized that these passages—on Co-Eds, Faculty Wives, Librarians, and, for heaven’s sake, Registrars, but not a single Professor—reveal a more serious flaw than sexism, making necessary a more brutal critique. In those passages, Armour’s mockery becomes thickwitted and leaden, formulaic and tedious. The tires go flat on his wit and cleverness.
[A Side Note: This is as good a time as any to acknowledge that, for a certain sector of the professorate, Richard Armour’s mockery may never seem anything but thickwitted and leaden, formulaic and tedious. For that sector, his ostensible wit and cleverness would register as flatter than tires that have only been driven on roadways regularly replenished with broken glass, nails, and tacks. But that, as would be obvious by now, is not my own opinion.]
But now for a full reckoning with the lesson of Armour’s attitudes toward women in academia. The passages in which he displays those attitudes demonstrate that higher education has made impressive progress. At the time he wrote his books, the status of women in higher education was terrible. In four years in college, starting in 1968, I had two women professors, one of whom was “visiting.” In 1972, I began graduate school, where I had no women professors. Compare the representation of women in the faculty today with those mid-century circumstances, and anyone who laments that higher education is locked in the past and incapable of change needs a time-out.
Richard Armour took a critical, convention-defying perspective on nearly every dimension of higher education. But he wrote two books that gave several uncomfortable aspects of academic life a complete pass. All the principal figures in higher education were white men—albeit, very goofy white men. And so Armour’s deficiencies offer another benefit: they are forceful reminders that we are ourselves susceptible to blind spots, and we are proportionately obligated to perform constant self-examinations to identify those blind spots, in a way that he did not.
Returning to the dilemma posed by people of the past who did not take a moment to think about the discomfort they would inflict on us, I will declare that I still admire Richard Armour. And yet I must note that he missed a now-obvious chance to spare me discomfort. When he was writing Going Around in Academic Circles, he lived in Claremont and I lived in Banning, fifty miles away. Although I was still in middle school, it would have been nice if he had thought to seek me out, make me entirely exhilarated at the notion that I could meet a professor, and ask me to take a pre-publication look at his manuscript. Geography, in other words, had him positioned to forestall the awkward tension that has now come between us on the issue of gender.
Really, it is such an irritation when the people of the past fail to see us coming and anticipate our concerns. I can only hope that I will be more foresighted than he was when it comes to reaching out to my future critics while they are still in their early teens.
Back to Firmer Ground
This full exposure of Armour’s flaws now licenses a demonstration of him hitting the nail on the head, offering an observation that qualifies, in several senses, as timeless.
The Curriculum
A Dean or a Professor may say, “[The Curriculum] was hammered out by the Educational Policy Committee.” That could explain . . . the bruised and dented look of the Curriculum, along with the patches and the obvious efforts to smooth it all out. There is no doubt that the Curriculum has taken a beating, and it will probably take one again, since the Curriculum is given little rest but is torn apart and reorganized from time to time.
The Curriculum is often said to be in a State of Flux, which is one of the larger states of Academe.
Every few years, the Curriculum takes on an almost entirely new form, and every few years it returns to the form it took before it took on the entirely new form. In short, the more the Curriculum changes, the more it remains the responsibility of Academians to change it until it is the same as it was.
Having been at the University of Colorado for thirty-six years, I can affirm that Armour knew what he was talking about when he wrote of the life cycle of the Curriculum. Over the years, I have seen the Curriculum behave like a child who cannot get enough of the music and motion of a carousel, and who rides round and round, begging for one more ticket and one more ride every time the carousel comes to a halt.
An Armour-Clad Remedy
In the not-the-least-bit-funny crisis of higher education at the start of the Fall Semester of 2020, what could have possessed me to choose this time to feature Richard Armour’s mockery of higher education?
I am possessed by the intense hope that higher education will emerge from the disruptions of the pandemic in good shape. What I am not possessed by is the hope that higher education will return to what it was before those disruptions hit. And, most intensely of all, I am not giving up on the dream that academics could offer a major service to our troubled nation. We could put forward a model of a confident profession, anchored in a sense of meaning and purpose, that accepts criticism, wastes no energy in protecting old customs that do not deserve any such defense, and performs—in public—an honest self-examination that leads to thoughtful innovation and experimentation.
That’s not much to ask, right?
Contemplating Richard Armour’s books provides a prime opportunity to build our capacity to rise to this challenge.
So, here’s the Armour Test, ready for a trial run. Actually, for several trial runs.
We make an inventory of the taken-for-granted elements of academic practice that provided soft targets for Armour’s mockery. If, fifty years later, these elements are still pretty much unchanged, we subject them to a searching reappraisal.
Armour used his books to put a spotlight on strange behavior, some of which might not enhance the cause of education and might actually obstruct it. He mocked this behavior because it had become entirely normalized, and the deployment of humor brought the strangeness back into view. Thus, he made an offer to his readers, inviting them to say, “Why do we do that?” rather than “That’s what we always do!”
That offer remains open to us today. Going Around in Academic Circles and The Academic Bestiary permit us to sort through our academic inheritance, deciding what works and what doesn’t work.
And 2020 is an ideal time for this sorting.
Throughout the country, colleges and universities are struggling with very difficult decisions in starting a school year in the midst of a pandemic. This crisis coincides with the onset of a massive intergenerational transition, as babyboomers retire and academics from younger generations compete to replace them, even as shrinking budgets limit the certainty that the retirees will be replaced. In federal land management agencies, in corporate circles, in multiple professions, and certainly in higher education, people who are over fifty-five and who occupy well-established positions face a choice of identity:
Would they prefer to be gracious and respected elders who welcome the next generations, or would they prefer to be dinosaurs and anachronisms?
This seems like a fairly easy choice, especially when you look up the word “anachronism.”
Here’s the definition from Merriam-Webster: “a person or thing that is chronologically out of place; especially: one from a former age that is incongruous in the present.”
In an arrangement that asks for a round of reappraisal, higher education’s customs in hiring have placed a lot of authority in the hands of anachronisms, human and otherwise. Even when they are “Incongruous in the present,” older Full Professors exercise great authority in selecting their successors. As gatekeepers with the power to offer some young people a path to permanent academic positions and to send some off to other lines of work, older professors have frequently invoked the criterion of ensuring that new members of departments will be “a ‘good fit’ with the department.” And thus, in a society undergoing rapid change, it has been very easy for the elders to slide into the habit of selecting young people with talents for thriving in a world that is about to disappear.
The launching pad of Armour’s humor was a view of higher education as a world onto itself, self-preoccupied, even self-entranced, holding onto arcane and mysterious practices that have come to seem normal and necessary to the inhabitants. Here is his concise mapping of this psychological geography, a geography that is now reaching the end of its useful life:
One of the strange things about Academe is that physically it can be so close to the Real World and yet spiritually and psychologically so completely out of it, often failing to understand it and sometimes bitterly antagonistic to it.
When the coronavirus started ripping through human populations worldwide, this long-maintained distance between the Academic World and the Real World dissolved.
Richard Armour lived with a deep affection for academia and an equally deep impatience with its insularity and self-preoccupation. Viewed from a distance, these sentiments may seem contradictory and incompatible, but they actually cohabit with surprising congeniality and familiarity.
I ought to know.
A Replay of Vine Deloria, Jr.’s Words on Humor,
with the Admission that I Have No Idea What He Would Have Thought of Richard Armour
In humor, life is redefined and accepted. Irony and satire provide much keener insights into a group’s collective psyche and values than do years of research. When a people can laugh at themselves and laugh at others and hold all aspects of life together without letting anybody drive them to extremes, then it seems to me that this people can survive.
Vine Deloria, Jr., Standing Rock Sioux, “Indian Humor,” Custer Died for Your Sins
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Photo Credit: Vine Deloria Jr. photo courtesy of:
Photo Credit: Carousel photo courtesy of: https://www.wallpaperflare.com/photography-of-carousel-horse-amusement-carnival-park-fun-wallpaper-abiqd
Photo Credit: Banner Image photo courtesy of: The Academic Bestiary, 1974, William Morrow and Company, Inc., ISBN 0-688-02884-5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Armour