Porter Abbott on Teaching and the University (Page 7)
From UCSB English Department Knowledge Base
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Professor H. Porter Abbott (Emeritus) discusses his 40+ years of experience teaching at UCSB.
[edit] The Increased Pace of Faculty Life (and Life in General)
Porter Abbott:"Another problem, I think, is the pressure on young academics to keep their nose to the grindstone and work really hard and not diffuse their focus. I sympathize with them. The competition is ferocious, so much so that there are far more Type-A personalities in our field now than there used to be. It's kind of sad. We used to have parties all the time when we were assistant professors, though for all I know, maybe assistant professors are still partying up a storm. But I think the ambience was different when I came here in my 20’s. We had more time to get around.
Ryan Boyd: Do you think that has to do with how literary studies has become more 'institutional,' or has America become more of a nation of workaholics, or what?"
PA: "That's an interesting question. The whole field has moved in the direction of a more systematic anthropology, and there's less of the old, more relaxed world of belles lettres--”
RB: “The man of letters.”
PA: “--yes, the man of letters, so called. Certainly, as many people love and adore literature now as they ever did, but I think there are certain curbs on the expression of this. You are forced into a more analytic posture; more of your days are taken up with that. It echoes the move into “theory” that took place during the 1970’s. Some people moved into theory and took up residence there and hardly came out for air.
“I tell you, when I first came here, we would have lunch down at the UCen every day--it was open then--with biologists, and sociologists, someone in Portuguese, three or four people in English. And we would have a full hour of lunch! Talking away. And then after about, oh, six or seven years, more and more we were just having lunch with each other. English would have lunch with English, biology with biology. Now, mostly, we eat lunch in our offices.
RB: “Why do you think that’s happened?”
PA: “Getting more and more out of less and less time. I absolutely think that this is part of what lies behind the “Flynn Effect”—the fact that IQ goes up every generation by something like three or four points. It has been going up for as long as IQs have been tested. Doesn’t make any difference where on the globe you are: it’s just simply going up. I think this is an epiphenomenon of the bombardment of more and more information, and the need to handle it in less and less time. E-mail is a sink, as you know; and the Web is, too. It’s hard sometimes just to keep your head above water.”
RB: “Do you think there will ever be a push back against that, or are we just in an endgame here?”
PA: “I see little signs of that here and there. Who is this guy, Siegel?”
RB: “Lee Siegel.” [N.B. Siegel’s recent book, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, is a polemic against Web 2.0 culture. We had been talking about this before the interview.]
PA: “With luck, people get places in the country . . . like where we are for a good portion of the year, where we don’t have television.
RB: “And this is Michigan?” [N.B. Prof. Abbott and his wife spend spring, summer, and fall in rural Michigan.]
PA: “Yes, and there’s no DSL, there’s no cable, there’s no wireless. We have dial-up, very slow dial-up, which I use at 5 o’clock in the morning, when the wires are less jammed. Then I’m free of it for the rest of the day. I think people are driven to simplicity simply to stay alive, to take care of their heart. I love the pace of life up there . I can work in the afternoon--physical labor, which I enjoy a lot, and in wonderful air that you can breathe.
RB: “That’s definitely something we do less of, physical labor. Academics are desk-bound by nature.”
PA: “Yes, academics have tended to be that way. But is there a general reaction to the speed at which we are forced to process information? Will there be a reaction? I don’t know. It may depend on how much our brains (and our hearts) can stand. Lord knows we were not designed to live the way we do now. In the Pleistocene, when we took final shape, life was quite different. But by accident we now have these huge multi-purpose brains that can be pushed to do all kinds of things.”
RB: “Hopefully it won’t be too much of a shock when we figure out at what point we’re maxed out. Maybe we’re past that already.”
PA: “People seem to be able to live with an enormous amount of stress. I don’t know how they do it. Look at that film Michael Clayton, the intensity of that corporate world. It’s almost intolerable. Tilda Swinton in her role reflects that brilliantly.”
Page 7
Interview Date: February 18, 2008
Conducted by Ryan Boyd
