25 January '08

I am going to abandon the regular tone of these transmissions, for the moment, in favour of that more vitriolic. This week, after the miles and miles of Canadian highway where the horizon stretches in a great circumference from pole to pole, I returned to Columbia for the first week of the spring semester, the final semester of coursework required for my degree.

As I mentioned in an earlier transmission, I had very high expectations of Columbia as some sort of bastion for the intellect, a university at the vanguard of research, at the coal-face of all that is new and changing and exciting about this usually dry academic world. I had further expectations that because of the absurd, almost grotesque amount of money that myself and my family needed to scrape together to pay for a year’s tuition,¹ I would be treated by the university the same way a patron with Bennys dripping from his back-pocket is treated by the staff of a hotel. I do not mind that the first expectation was not met. After all, it would be naïve to think that the intellectual rigour of one institution is markedly different from that of another. Great minds exist universally, institutions exist merely to contain and direct them. And I do not mind that I am not treated as a celebrity. That expectation, too, would be naïve given that in a lifetime I am unlikely to earn what the university is bequeathed most days.

What irks me, and what has been compounded this week, is the complete antipathy, the arrogant indifference, the institutionalised marginalisation that Master’s students are met with at Columbia. Example: one component of the MA degree is a thesis. A thesis requires a supervisor. Last semester, after much wrangling, I managed to meet with a professor whose interests aligned with mine. That professor, after some deliberation, decided he did not ‘have the time’ to supervise me. ‘Fair enough’, says me, ‘I’ll try someone else’. That I did, only to receive the same answer. Beginning to lose hope, I tried again, with the same result. One of the great fallacies of the academy—and I’m sure this is not restricted to Columbia—is that once faculty are conferred tenure, there is very little impetus for them to do, well, anything. Teaching becomes an obligation, supervising a distasteful affair with no real reward, research a token exercise to keep up appearances. Thus, the lowly MA student enters his second semester unsupervised, seeking—with the same desperation that a dog at the pound seeks an owner—the acceptance of a professor. Example two: this semester I enrolled early for an anthropology class that seemed particularly interesting. During the first iteration of this class it was clear that there were more people who wanted to take it than there were spaces. Even though there were non-anthropology students in the class, it was the anthropology MA students who were excised, cut from the class like some festering ganglia, the scalpel a token email professing the professor’s ‘profound apologies’. When I emailed the professor asking for his rationale in cutting students, he did not answer.

These examples may seem petty to an outsider, I do not know. While they are, of course, subjective generalisations, they are examples shared by many of the other MA students at this university, and others. Given that Columbia is unlikely to offer some prostrate overture by itself, I will have to bring the situation to its attention.

***

As I mentioned, this week marked the return to school after a month of break. The last few days of that break were spent as the last week was, driving. Driving relentlessly in that spaceship minivan that, like Bucephalus, brought me home to victory, in the end. Now it is a new semester and a new year. There is much to be done. Many trees to rattle and many strides to take, many ideas to fructuate. There’s revolution in the air.²

***

¹ The cost for two semesters at Columbia as an MA student is over $36,000 US dollars. Most doctoral students, in comparison, pay nothing, have their housing taken care of and are provided a monthly stipend.

² Well, the revolution was stymied by technology. My laptop, for reasons I prefer not to expand on, toppled from my window ledge and fell ten metres to its ignominious final position as a scattered mess on the concrete, its parts distributed in a sick constellation of plastic, wire and steel, its insides revealed with the same disinterest as a stripper reveals her body. Whatever the cause (okay, the explanation: my laptop overheats, my room is often tropical, I was talking to my sister on Skype when the computer overheated and shutdown, I perched it on the window ledge so I could continue talking, the last thing my sister heard was “oh shit” then the ominous sound of the phone being disconnected (‘ominous’ because I’m in Harlem), the laptop, my main vehicle for communicating with the world, spent the first part of the week being further dismembered in an attempt to save my data and the second part of the week first in a garbage can, then a garbage truck, and now, presumably, lies in state beneath a pile of rotting pizza and plastic bags. The computer has now been replaced, most of the data saved, and with the onset of school work all, including the regularity of these transmissions, returns to normal.