Flying over the assembly line

Yesterday, I called a former teacher to explore the way to return to teaching in the future. During the conversation, the teacher kept popping up words like "number of articles published in core journals per year", "teaching volume", "basic salary", " The teacher kept popping up such words: "the number of articles published in core journals per year", "teaching volume", "basic salary", "lecture salary", "title evaluation rules", "project application", "five-year evaluation"... ...I was suddenly blindsided, is this the life I want to live? Is this not an invitation to enter the jar?

I always had an urge to go freelance. The other day a TV station replayed Jack Nicholson's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". I watched it with great interest and imagined that Foucault was sitting next to me, explaining how the increasingly rationalized civilization was destroying the free nature of human beings. I thought the director might have read Foucault's "Madness and Civilization" and decided to make a film to footnote it. Today, I suddenly feel that the film is not only a footnote to Foucault's book, but also a footnote to my life. I often doubt the academic circle, thinking that it is just an assembly line of "academic products". It has nothing to do with wisdom, but standardization is important.

In the case of the so-called "China Studies" scholars in the United States, there are only a few "processes". First, to a city or a county or a township in China to collect a little in China is a person will know, but can cause the U.S. academic circle tsk-tsk "empirical material. For example, China now has a lot of land disputes, retired factories are protesting, officials are very corrupt, farmers are petitioning, township enterprises are not working ...... Second, sort out these materials, word code, line division, history to get a chapter, the current situation to get two chapters, prospects to get a chapter; Third, add some "theory Third, add some "spice" of "theory", "different from that whoever said ......, these materials illustrate ...... "Anyway, there is no definite theory of liberal arts, we turn around and say the original words is, the year before last A said social trust is the lubricant of economic development, last year B said social trust is not useful for economic development, this year C said social trust is the lubricant of economic development, and the year after D said social trust is not useful for economic development... ...useful ...... useless ...... useful ...... hundreds of people depend on this for their livelihood. If you are engaged in comparative literature and so on, this process must get some fancy words. For example, "this in", "modernity", "logocentrism" and so on. Fourth, to come up with a common sense, with my grandmother's cognitive level, or sometimes even less than my grandmother's cognitive level of the conclusion, and then with this conclusion around the meeting, issued papers, books, evaluation, as experts.

The other day I went to a lecture where the professor studied a general strike. I listened for half a day and felt that the basic conclusion was that the order of the leaders of the strike was originally Li Lizan, Liu Shaoqi and Mao Zedong, but later, for political reasons, it was amended to Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi and Li Lizan. This seems to be true, but is it necessary to spend a few years for this conclusion, research fund tens of thousands, get a book and several papers?

Every time I listen to such a lecture, read such a book, at the end I always have a feeling that: So......?

In my eyes, the so-called China studies in the United States are basically a series of in-depth news reports - which had a special meaning in the era of information embargo, but after the gradual liberalization of information, their function can be almost replaced by news reports. In a sense, it is worse than journalism: journalism requires clear and concise language, timeliness and "freshness," and a journalist cannot expect to eat for five years on a few interviews. Academics, on the other hand, have made it their mission to be "boring" - they are committed to finding the world's least interesting way to express a point of view, and they are becoming increasingly adept at it. They may not be able to say anything fresher than the news, but they have clearly found the most effective way to prove their intellect: by putting the shades of jargon on simple things to make them seem confusing.

The hallmark of most American social science learning is this: exquisite banality. The system doesn't care much about whether you are mediocre, but it cares a lot about whether you are sophisticated. An economics friend once told me that as long as I used several complex models as a method of argument, even if my conclusion was such nonsense as "people want to drink when they are thirsty", many magazines would be willing to publish my articles. Of course, refined mediocrity is better than crude mediocrity, which is the characteristic of many Chinese social science works nowadays.

In my experience, the term "Ph.D. in political science from Columbia" itself is like the term "Ph.D. in literature from Harvard", "Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford", "Ph. The term "Ph.D. in history from Yale" and so on (not sure about science and technology) is hardly informative about a person's level of intelligence, sensitivity, insight, or talent. I know a large number of ridiculously mediocre liberal arts PhDs, and a large number of non-liberal arts PhDs with extraordinary insight into social phenomena. The name "PhD in liberal arts from a prestigious university" is a good indicator that a person is not too bad at English (you have to pass the GRE and get solid grades, right? Let graduation), that's all.

The first thing you need to do is to get a good idea of what you're talking about.

Obviously there are very smart, very good people in this system, but surviving in this system does not require you to be very smart and good. You are more "good", more obedient to the production rules of the assembly line, for survival is more important. Even sometimes "aura" may become an obstacle, because people with aura easily produce the impulse to resist "standardization". Of course, another possibility is: I'm just lazy, too lazy to provide a solid foundation for my own inspiration, so I don't hesitate to describe others' meticulous work on the assembly line as self-defeating.

The reason I've been thinking about this "flying over the assembly line" problem lately is not because of "rebelliousness", but because it's more miserly. I think, assuming that five years is the cycle of manufacturing a "scholarly product", five years and five years to spend time to carve up the mediocre to exquisite, is not a great waste of human resources? There are also various meetings, pleasing various editors, undertaking various administrative headaches, writing applications for various projects, writing exam questions and correcting assignments ...... These chores are a kind of torture for people like me who only want to face their own spiritual life. Of course, it is also possible that my expectations of academic life are too high. For most scholars, engaging in academics is just a rice bowl, just as programming is a programmer's rice bowl, analyzing data is an analyst's rice bowl, and cleaning is a bellhop's rice bowl. As a rice bowl, what obligation does it have to cultivate your sentiment and purify your soul?

The Shawshank Redemption", those who squatted in prison for too many years, in the end, prefer to continue to squat in prison rather than get out, because they already do not know how to leave the prison life. Am I also institutionalized to this extent? Occasionally, I think about "flying over the assembly line", but I am afraid of the abyss beyond the "assembly line". I said "the sea is wide and the sky is high", but I also said "the sea is wide and the fish are choking, and the sky is high and the birds are falling".