April 29, 2026

I wouldn't want anyone to take from my last installment of this series the notion that I have always raged against the educational machine. After all, that machine made me and financially sustained me for my professional life. In fact, with a university professor father and an intellectually curious mother who completed multiple college degrees after having children, I might have been destined for a life of higher education. No alternative path for my career was ever contemplated, although several years part-time at Lowe’s reminded me not to stray:

I didn't know what was in store

Until I got hit hard on the head

By the 2 x 4. (“The 2 x 4” 1985)

After writing that, I spent forty years still not being ready for what was in store. In higher education, idealism is the 2 x 4 that will smack you on the head . . . repeatedly.

My head includes a bump that is all that is left of a benign bone tumor first noticed when I was 6 or 7, so maybe I have been unresponsive to such smacks on the head. To begin with, I wasn't particularly intellectual or studious growing up, more interested in Freddie Mercury than the planet Mercury or the element Mercury. Somewhere around 7th grade, school started to bore me, remaining that way well into my undergraduate years. Nevertheless, thanks to my parents, something pure about academia surrounded me through those years. As I wrote in "Progressive Dinners" (2016) not long after my parents passed, I have incredibly fond memories of the social milieu often found in our house:

How many kids can say their night was

Populated by at least the physicist, the chemist,

The anthropologist, the political scientist,

The economist, the engineer,

The musical or the feminist theorist?

(Or, so many more that came through the door.)

In retrospect, the great shame of this poem is I viewed the diversity of those dinners too narrowly through a discipline-based lens. Guests or regular attendees at dinners throughout my childhood included the kind couple from El Salvador, the stately German, multiple hilarious Australians, several exotic Japanese, and an occasional distinguished Belgian, none of whom are represented by the fields above. My parents’ friendships as developed across the university and the world seemed normal to me because their work took me out into the university and world, as well as brought them back to me. 

In short, I was made, at a young age, into an academic wanna-be. However, what I wanted, without fully realizing it along the way, was those friendships, that camaraderie, and the acceptance of such a spectrum of intellectual interests. If I idealized anything, it was the company I might keep. 

For most of their professional careers, academia reasonably supported my parents, or at least that is how it appeared to me. West Virginia University, and the applicable related institutions that tapped into my parents' expertise, served both of them well (their papers and memoirs generally reinforce this notion). Thus, we'd be safe to assume that my belief in higher education would expand beyond the communities it created.

Sadly, I did not achieve that level of belief about higher education, never turning into the missionary zealot many of my future colleagues became. For all their successes, both of my parents had been wounded early on by the slings and arrows of academic arrogance with experiences well known in the family. For my father, an asthmatic Montana transplant, provided with a minimum scholarship to achieve Harvard’s 1950s version of diversity, his undergraduate years were not without unnecessary hardship. I captured the most bothersome moment in 2016’s "Re-Buffed," when, in order to pass a required swimming test, Dad had to take swimming lessons in the nude. Beyond the obvious, please also don't forget the breathing challenges for an asthmatic in 1950:

But calisthenics didn't touch the shame

Exposed in the swimming lesson lanes.

The endurance of swimming is enough,

But why must it be done in the buff?

Apparently swimming in the nude

Was proper form by those who collude

And refuse to challenge the traditions

Of their sacred academic missions.

When young and impressionable, I assumed this nudity provision was a university requirement. In reading some of his memoirs recently, I now hypothesize that it was less an institutional policy and more of an individual instructor's rigidity (trust me, it takes everything in my powers not to insert here an applicable double entendre). In the end, it doesn't matter, as either an institutional or an individual indictment can be judged equally.

As for my mother, the painful moment hits me twice as hard because I was indirectly responsible for it. Having just started back in school when pregnant with me, she had planned my conception so that my birth would come during Spring Break, meaning she wouldn't have to miss any classes. We got close, but in the end she missed a midterm, which the psychology faculty member would not allow her to make up. I tried to purge my own personal pain associated with this transgression through 2016's "A Son-ography."

From embryo to fetus to new-born

I accompanied you to revered rooms

Where pedant professors glared with scorn:

"Pregnant women shouldn't be in school," fumed.

As with "Re-Buffed," my disgust’s directed toward an individual faculty member given way too much latitude to use personal beliefs as policy, not with an institution that outright condoned such policy (although perhaps WVU did). It is not hyperbolic to say that from my birth, I have waged a love-hate relationship with academic freedom, a central tenet to an intellectual's belief in the power of higher education. Over the years I came to see more grievances than simple misuse of academic freedom, but I get ahead of myself.

My inability to embrace academia idealistically isn’t helped by my late blossoming into a potential scholar. 2 1/2 years of my undergraduate studies show mediocrity at best, and only late in my junior year did I start to see higher education as a clear future destination and complete my coursework more appropriately. Choosing English, specifically literary studies, as my specific path also didn't help spur such idealistic views. A reader might be surprised by that statement. After all, it’s the field of poetry and drama, of love and ideas. How could that not make you see the best in the subjects and their people? Well, because it is the field of poetry and drama, of love and ideas. English departments are notoriously one of the worst for the kinds of romantic dalliances that plague the public perception of colleges and universities. At one point, I was a student in an English class taught by the second wife of an English professor, who she met while in his class, during a period when his first wife had been one of my favorite teachers through grade school. It's all just icky stuff (and I am hardly of a Puritan mind, as I found when I took early American Literature classes).

Still, I pursued graduate work in literature as I do love the printed word, fascinated by the historical record a piece of writing provides. Initially, as I was trained to move from lover of words to interpreter of words, I wasn’t even turned off by an academic’s desire to convert such historical documents into philosophical dialogue. However, the relentless push of graduate work to make theory, not text, the focus of literary studies eroded my idealism for my specific field. 

There's theory over there.

There's theory over here.

Men in suits are building bridges

That vanish into thin air (“Theory” 1987).

I don’t always remember exact moments of inspiration for stuff I wrote forty years ago, but my guess is that “Theory” may have come during one of the IU English Department graduate school parties where in-coming graduate students boasted about having not read a book, only critical theory. I suppose they were at least smart enough to see where the industry was going; colleges and universities were more likely to hire these ideologists than some romantic clutching his book of Romantic verse. I didn’t even have to travel to national conferences to see these followers of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Mikhail Bahktin filling the room with nothing but air. During both my WVU and IU graduate school days, I was fortunate enough to be asked to contribute to the planning and then participate in academic conferences (a Shakespeare conference at WVU and a Literature of the South Pacific conference at Indiana). The latter was surprisingly laid-back, perhaps because world literature still fell outside of the canon; that could not be said about the former, which left my head spinning:

How can you reassert what it is you invert?

How can you analyze what it is you despise?

All of these literals and these implieds

Make the heads swim of those who can't hide. ("Literals and Implieds" 1986)

As described in at least one of my Therapy Sessions, I found a niche for my deflowered idealistic self, despite Indiana University’s prudent self-interest to drive me to one of those theory-based, tenure-track positions at some research institution, by accepting a full-time faculty position at Detroit College of Business. I found contentment teaching my introductory-level classes where exposing students to the joys of writing, reading, speaking and viewing art was all I needed to feed that part of my soul that craved meaningful work. However, I probably wasn't ready at all for the stuff graduate school can never teach us: the mind-numbing hours spent in meetings, especially once I started accepting administrative opportunities.

They formed a committee, two dozen strong,

Met twice a month, conversed happily along,

Argued endlessly, then discovered they're wrong,

Reconvened several more times, a process gone on too long. ("What Is My Time Worth" 2000?)

As doors opened for me to impact the classroom more through administrative work, those thresholds often led to substantially more painful hours spent listening to educational consultants, change agent leaders, or the self-appointed academic egghead pontificating about everything and nothing at all:

This was more numbing

Than I could have feared.

Brilliant minds made dumber.

Faces lapsed into blank stares. ("Of Visions and Initiatives" 2007?) 

So I do wonder now, thinking back to those 1960s and 1970s progressive dinners, if I was missing some of the conversations as I ran in and out of the room. Were there laments about awful meetings? Complaints about the University President? Criticisms of arrogant colleagues? Reading my father’s memoirs recently show he harbored such negative thoughts, so it seems likely some or all of these possibilities were posed over servings of Sopa de res. I may have been more idealistic as a boy than I realized. 

Certainly as my career took off and his wound down, my father’s despair (not too strong a word) about higher education infused my own perception. He probably was a bit surprised as I made my decision to implant myself fully in the middle of the very contradictions that bothered me. I had no dream of changing my industry, merely my small part of it. However, I no longer needed to hone my craft via reading the latest literary criticism, now I had to stay current in the affairs of higher education broadly across the industry. I needed working knowledge of financial aid, accreditation, dual credit, alternative credit, compliance issues, Title IX, and so forth, shaping myself into what I might despise, a person, as XTC sang in "Funk Pop A Roll," “already poisoned by the industry.” The good thing is that if I am going to see myself as anybody, there is nobody more idealistic than XTC’s Andy Partridge. Only idealists want to churn out enough angst railing about what they love.

Anyway, at the time, It’s All Academic was not meant to be an all-out rant against the industry. I primarily wanted to present some of the insanity found at an executive academic level to complement the wealth of satirical novels using the same poker to reveal the insanity at a faculty level. However, that was 2010 and the insanity only increased. Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Ed bestowed daily headlines (or comments) that deserved scrutiny. The satire and parody just kept writing themselves, and there were not enough masks or second identities to hide behind. As a result, for the last fifteen years, I tried to save the part of me that was still idealistic about higher education’s value to the world to come out in meetings or public conversations, leaving this website to house what the rest of me couldn’t (or wouldn’t and probably shouldn’t) say out loud.

What I shouldn’t have been saying ends up a pretty eclectic group of movie and television show satires, song parodies, original poems, top ten lists, and imaginary dialogues. Now that can be an ideal post of words mostly unread until another day.

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If interested, fuller readings of the sources mentioned here are linked below (with poems available at the ever-expanding "The Blog Under The Bed").

The 2 x 4

Progressive Dinners

Re-Buffed

A Son-ography

Theory

Literals And Implieds

What Is My Time Worth

Of Visions and Initiatives

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A Life In Words Mostly Unread Series Home Page (with all 4 installments as of 4/29/2026)