In
this age of merciless budget cuts, admin has asked the DoD to justify its
existence. After our first answer –
having our department chair beatifically smile and simply hold up a flower –
was rejected, we had to settle down and find some less accurate answers admin
might like.
Some
in the department were tempted to trot out all the usual old saws about how
deviance is one of the Grundwissenschaften,
a foundational source for most all other forms of human inquiry. That pleased us, both because it sounded so
heavy it must mean we’re important and because hey, German. But ultimately, upon closer examination, it
also sounded rather silly in its self-importance. We might as well just tell admin we need to
exist because we are All That. Or, more accurately, the Primeval Source of All Your That.
We
then turned to our measurable excellences, such as our ability to produce
students who perform exceedingly well at standardized tests we find
intellectually dubious and rather loathsome.
This at least was the sort of quantifiable “learning outcome” admin
prizes. Still, it struck us as rather
spare and stingy in its instrumentalism, as if studying deviance was akin to
eating some especially potent vegetables or indeed a form of Popeye spinach for
the LSAT-taking crowd.
Our
next candidate for explaining ourselves was to emphasize the sometimes
radically critical aspects of deviance.
Deviance, we could say, is the brazen art of questioning
everything. It is untethered by
unexamined commitments and thereby performs a crucially important social
function. It brashly exposes weaknesses
in human understanding, pulls down idols of the mind, slays sacred cows, and
generally produces mayhem wherever people find themselves in thrall to bad or
ill-considered ideas. As heroic as all
this makes us sound, we decided it was more than a little overwrought and,
really, bizarrely pugilistic. After all,
we just want to know more things and
we’re not trying to be mean about it.
Plus, we’re rather fond of cows.
Next
we considered whether we should emphasize the ways deviance takes to the nth
degree inquiry all people pursue, an Olympics-caliber form of the wonder,
curiosity, and clarity-seeking all human beings sometimes exercise. This seemed initially attractive in its
emphasis on our common cause with people more generally, but then we realized
that the same may be said about many activities – lots of things that human
beings generally do can be done with extra punch and vigor. After all, do not avid scrap-bookers simply
pursue with uncommon intensity the human effort to remember? Finding nothing to block this intriguing
thought, we immediately became enchanted by the prospect of forming an alliance
with hardcore scrap-bookers. Just think
of the interdisciplinarity! We could be
the scrap-bookers of human curiosity everywhere and, not incidentally, buy
X-acto knives on the university dime and create our own Pinterest page too. But then we recalled the purpose of our
discussion and realized that pleasing ourselves with delightful imaginings is,
regrettably, not the same as satisfying admin.
At
long last, we resolved that we were closest to correct in our first
effort. Consequently, we sent our chair
back to admin with his flower. Since the
above deliberations did take considerable time, the flower was now quite wilted
and perhaps also suffering from the stranglehold in which our chair, no longer
beatifically smiling, held it. Still, we
concluded that all of this was for the best.
After all, a grimacing chair choking a dead flower was itself an
exquisite remark upon the transitory nature of all things. We now await admin’s response.
