A metaphor from the 19th century, an ivory tower is a place where people are happily cut off from the rest of the world in favor of their own pursuits. To describe the university as an ivory tower suggests that it is a place of privileged seclusion, filled with professors who pursue their research interests under the mantle of academic freedom.
At the start of their university career, tenure is their
goal. They eventually achieve this by publishing books (preferably nonfiction)
and writing scholarly essays to publish in journals, or read at conferences in
their disciplines such as, the Modern Language Association and Philosophy
Research Society.
A colleague once told me that he had recommended for
promotion an associate to full professor and found out later that the candidate
had submitted a fake resume, he found out later. He told me, “I owe the
university president an apology.” It’s too late. The president is deceased and
my informant colleague and fake professor have retired.
Non-scholarly topics vary from the trivial to the salacious. I once attended a talk by a colleague on the “Leitmotifs in Wagner’s Operas.” He punctuated with recorded passages of music that, at least, made the lecture bearable. A leitmotif is a "short, recurring musical phrase" associated with a particular person, place, or idea.
Another
paper speculated on Mark Twain’s correspondence between the writer and his
“Aquarium,” inhabited by girls he called his “angelfish.” (John Cooley has
edited the letters, short manuscripts and other relevant materials that further
illuminates this tantalizing story, including his euphemisms for sex. I do have
a magnetic sticker on the refrigerator with an image of Mark Twain and the
quote, “Go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company.”
Once
tenured, it is as difficult to fire a tenured professor for wrongdoing. The
best that the university president could do was to dock the errant professor
half a year’s pay, after learning from a divorcing wife of his, her former
professor, that he had given her an A for a class she never attended. He had to
live with that reputation for the rest of his teaching days. A cautionary tale
for those who are tempted to have sex with their students.
I once
gave a university-wide lecture on attending a Zen retreat on Mount Baldy,
boasting that I had something in common with the Canadian poet and singer
Leonard Cohen: We both had the same Roshi. A dubious claim, it seems, after the
L.A. Times broke the story that the Roshi — while counselling women — asked
them to disrobe.
It was,
however, very fruitful “research” for me. It led me to Thomas Merton’s Catholic
Buddhism, a theme in his Zen and the Birds of Appetite. (I did read his The
Seven Storey Mountain as an undergraduate in the Philippines.) And just as
important, the Zen retreat led me to Heidegger’s Phenomenology that has
since shaped my writing.
The
ivory tower image is reinforced by ranking of colleges and universities under
various criteria, and comes up with the nomenclature: ivy league, state
university, and city college. Instructors are also ranked according to their
education level: Ph.D., M.A., B.A., and T.C. (a post-baccalaureate credentialing
degree required for teaching).
Cambridge
University has issued a sort of manifesto entitled, “This Idea Must Die: ‘The
University is an Ivory Tower.’” It cites innovation expert Diarmuid O’Brien who
claims that ideas created at Cambridge create impact on a global scale. It
suggests that the university is not cut off from the world (April 30, 2021).
There is
one sense, however, I would argue, that as far as the teaching environment is
concerned, the university is an ivory tower compared to teaching in middle and high
schools. I arrived at this opinion when I supervised student teachers doing
practice teaching at schools in Torrance, Long Beach, and Huntington Beach.
You do
not begin to teach when the period starts at these schools without first
dealing with disciplinary issues: students talking, fiddling with cell phones,
and exchanging notes when the teacher is writing on the board. I once saw a laser
light flash on the board which could have impaired the teacher’s vision had she
caught it in her eye. In another class the student teacher, illustrating the
iambic pentameter, began to recite “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day . .
.” when a boy interpolated “Shall I kung pao (a Chinese dish) thee to a
summer’s day.” I once saw a boy with his face on his arms on the desk
throughout the period, and a girl combing her hair and applying lipstick.
While
waiting in the hallway for a class I was going to observe to begin, a spindly
girl came out and was followed shortly after by a burly teacher, who said to
her, “What must I do in there to keep you from talking?” The plaintive plea was
met with a shrug, as the bell rang and the students filed out of the
rooms.
Compared to the emotional toll it takes on teachers of middle and high schools, how pleasant it is to teach in an ivory tower university. The only thing you must worry about are the student evaluations at the end of the term.
o0o
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