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At the beginning of the meeting yesterday Paul said that everyone in the room is in some way dissatisfied with academia and are a seeking an alternate mode of inquiry. There are two ways in which this is misleading as far as it relates to me and one way in which it is on to something.

How it might be misleading

No angst. I am not, and am trying not to be, dissatisfied with academia. It seems to me that there is no one thing called academia. Instead there are layers of institutional practices which make possible different things: teaching, writing, personal growth, social interactions, making a living, education, etc. I think praising or dismissing academia as a whole leads mainly to confusion. Each person has to figure out which aspects of academia are working for them and which need improvement, and try to modify their life and the institutions they are a part of accordingly. So I am not for angst about academia or anything else. I very much enjoyed when people emphasized that one could be engaged in this conversation in a purely positive way.

No overall group narrative (yet). An assumption behind Paul’s statement seemed to be that there is an overall narrative about the group which each of us shares and which brought us together in the room; dissatisfaction about academia was meant to be one such narrative. But I think there is in fact no overall narrative yet. I am in the room because I made a commitment to come; I made a commitment because Paul mentioned the group and I trust his judgment, and because I am open to something exciting happening here. This sense of excitement and my trust in the people I have gotten to know have only increased with our first meetings. But this is still very far from a group narrative of any kind or on any topic. I am not sure if there is any topic or concern or ideal which unites me with others in the group. This is fine because seeing if such connections can or will be formed is one of exciting things I signed up to see and participate in.

How it might be onto something

Testing ground for positive changes. As I said, I don’t see the group as a space for rejecting academia (though if one did feel that way, the group I think is a place to talk about it). Still, this doesn’t mean that the group has to fit images of a group we are already familiar with: reading group, cross-disciplinary, etc. The freedom afforded to the group can be used to highlight features of academia which can be improved, and the group can be a space to try out how to envision and impliment such changes. So the group can be a testing ground for trying changes or questioning assumptions which are treated as unquestionable in the normal course of academic life.