Chapter 9: The Skunk In The Yogurt Cup: Postformal Academic Blues as Praxis

During my doctoral training in courses with critical powerhouses like Joe Kincheloe, Jean Anyon, Stanley Aronowitz, and Michelle Fine, it was quite unusual for students who weren’t critically oriented in their thinking to be enrolled. It was a wonderful privilege to develop and deepen our critical understandings of the world with such brilliant scholars, but the experience was also insulating in many ways because students were not exposed to the harsh reality of what it would be like to occupy a marginal position in the academy. In these courses, criticality was encouraged and empowering. None of our professors ever blatantly told us just how very riddled with oppressive politics the culture of academia is despite its very liberal facade. Yet, if I think back, I can hear Joe Kincheloe’s warnings as he critiqued the hypocritical “necro culture” of academia. I can also hear warnings from outside my studies in conversations I had with my father (also an academic) who told me when I was interviewing for jobs, “just tell them what they want to hear.” And then when I actually got the job, “People think tenure exists to protect faculty from administration, but tenure is also there to protect faculty from each other.” I suppose I could have paid better attention to the writing on the wall, but as a young idealist who was growing confident in her newfound critical lenses, perhaps I just wasn’t ready to listen.