New Graduate Student Recruiting Initiative Arrives at DoD

We here at the DoD have somehow secured funding for a new effort at marketing our graduate program.  The university, as many know, has recently stepped up its own marketing efforts, the finest result of which is the new university motto, appearing on t-shirts, beer cozies, and stationary everywhere:

Out Standing in the Field of Excellence

It’s true that the English Department was dismayed by the inadvertent error in rendering outstanding as out  standing.  But we here in the DoD are enamored of this pithy accidental poetry and indeed often find ourselves out standing in fields of all sorts.  We doubt we have ever stumbled into the field of excellence, but we do live in hope.

Taking our inspiration from the university and taking the money they offered too, we have resolved to up our own game at marketing the graduate program.  We hired professional academic motto consultant, Stephen Ellis.  His sartorial choices – overalls that had seen better days – immediately convinced us that here was a consultant we could trust.  And indeed, Ellis delivered the goods.  The motto, like ourselves, manages to be happily wordy and yet indefinite all at the same time.  We are pleased and offer it here for your delectation:

We would like to think that we’re not so closed-minded

as to screw up our graduate students in the usual way.

The DoD has begun inscribing the motto on anything that does not move.  Physical plant is unhappy with our use of Sharpies to write it all over the bathroom walls, but we are undeterred in our efforts.  The DoD has also, naturally, notified the Grad Studies Committee to brace themselves for what will surely be a flood of applications.

DoD’s Exclusive Focus on Outliers Criticized

We here at the DoD generally try to steer clear of controversy over canons.  The fact that our own canon is perennially – nay, eternally! – under construction really helps with this.  As does the fact that our modest work is largely ignored in the vast reaches of Normalcy.  As we’ve learned from our dealings with admin, being forgotten by the powers-that-be can be a blessing.  Cats being away, mice playing, and all of that.  Most of the time, it’s practically Mouse-a-palooza around here.  Not lately, alas.

Despite our best efforts, the DoD recently came under fire for its indifference to Normalcy.  We may not have a competing canon, sure, but our efforts are proving a distraction to those who do.  While we carry on in our quest to know more things, some of the things already Normally known may yet not be totally known.  How, our critics implored, can you advocate for Deviance when Normality is not yet, not quite, not totalizingly, absolutely everywhere?  Priorities, people!  

Shocked, we decided to offer an apologia for our work.  And we decided to call it an “apologia” too, since throwing in a little Greek when you can reassures the Normal that however Deviant you may be, you have been put through the Normal paces.  While we achieved unanimous agreement on what to call what we were about to do, departmental opinion swiftly divided over less interesting details, like what to actually say. 

On the one hand were the Deviants who wanted to vigorously resist this bit of apparent Normal greed. After all, in contemporary academia, the Normal are many and the Deviant few, so it seems churlish to begrudge the Deviant their attentions to things Deviant.  Or to begrudge them commending the Deviant to others, even if that entails that not every single scrap of Normalcy will get funding and attention.  Commending things to others is part of the whole academic business after all.  And, to be sure, if some scrap of Normal does get neglected long enough, who knows?  Maybe it can become Deviant too! 

On the other hand were Deviants who simply wanted to reassure the Normal that we mean them no harm and carry no bias against them however much we may ignore them.  Yea, verily, some of our best friends are Normal.  (If you ask us to name them, we’ll have to get back to you on that.  Sorry.)  Our only trouble is that we are mortal and our budget finite.  We’ve heard it said that there is only so much one can be expected to try to know and only so much that can be funded.  We tend not to alibi our neglect of things this way, but hey, the irony here is just too delicious to resist.     

On still another hand, the truly pugnacious among us wanted to engage in a little armchair psychoanalytics and speculate about what dark fears may lurk in the hearts of Normal.  Perhaps, these Deviants wondered, Normality is worried about threats to its dominance?  After all, when we teach Deviance, students do seem to like it.  And some of the ones who like it are Deviant.  If that keeps up, Deviant could become the new Normal.  This faction of the department, in short, wanted to throw out an admittedly smug “don’t hate us because we’re beautiful” response to it all. 

On yet a still additional hand were those who thought it would be rich to offer neglected Normal a little advice, not unlike that often offered ourselves.  The trick here, we would say, is to do good work that Normal People will like and the attention will follow.  While we ourselves typically bypass this patronizing path toward Normality and instead wander off into the thickets of our own fancy, maybe others will find it appealing and plausible. 

Most persuasively, on the final hand, a wise and seasoned professor emerita of Deviance advised that the best apologia is silence.  After all, give the Normal five minutes and they’ll forget we Deviants exist again.

For those of you counting the number of hands we have, it’s true that we have more than the usual two.  We are many handed, not unlike Shiva the Destroyer.

DoD Institutes Moratorium on Invocations of Gadflies

We here at the DoD seek to lead with the idea that deviants know best what they are about and so generally eschew limits of most kinds.  However, we’ve really had it up to here (“here” being way up high, like above our heads, as far as our arms can reach high) with gadflies.  Well, that’s not it exactly.  What troubles us nigh unto perishing is people invoking the gadfly to explain their own ratty behavior.  Yes, we know that there is a long and storied history of useful gadflies, those stingers of the staid and stale among us.  But here’s the rub:  Thinking you’re the gadfly is, we have ruefully concluded, generally a bad idea, not least because: 

a) Thinking you’re the gadfly, the one delivering stinging truths to an otherwise bovine population, requires high confidence in oneself coupled with low estimation of others, a posture ill-suited to our fundamental mission here at DoD, the quest to know more things.  Sure, Socrates – that gadfly we count as both blessing and curse upon us all – got away with some of this, but he also had a daemon.  So, get a daemon, then we’ll talk.

b) Yes, thinking you’re a gadfly can be a marvelous alibi when you’re counting the reasons people don’t like you, but the risks of puling self-flattery are high here.  While it’s historically true that gadflies came in for some serious dislike, it would be high folly to act as if the only or most plausible reason people dislike you is that you’re just so much the bomb at telling hard truths nobody else can see.  Even worse, to imagine that others’ dislike of you is proof of gadfly status.  Yes, right, they also hate you because you’re beautiful. 

c) Maybe – just maybe – thinking you’re a gadfly is a self-defeating thought.  Sort of like thinking you’re wise.  Start thinking these things about yourself and you carry yourself several long strides away from them.  Leave it to others to decide if you’re a gadfly.  Or if you’re wise.  Less chance you’ll be wrong then, we think.

d) Finally, is there anything more bathetic than thinking you’re a gadfly when you’re really just practicing some garden-variety juvenile rudeness?  Probably, but we’d not want to find out.  And, at any rate, we prefer our self-satirizing burlesque to be of the intentional sort, not something we stumble into out of misplaced self-valorization.

For all of these reasons, we here at the DoD have decided that for the foreseeable future, we shall eschew invocations of the gadfly.  We recognize that this will leave us without rhetorical cover for a host of socially disagreeable sins and ills, but, well, that’s sort of the point.

Joint Colloquium Plans Disintegrate into Mayhem

Alert to how admin loves “collaboration” and “interdisciplinarity,” the DoD recently experimented with the idea of holding joint colloquia with the Department of Normalcy.  Our first colloquium was to be a session on Meiji era European philosophy, but planning quickly foundered on the rocks of what to call the session. 

Our Normal colleagues protested identifying any philosophy as “European,” saying such would be but trite “identity politics” and that the best philosophies cannot be contained within cultural markers.  In return, DoD representatives were simply confused:  Why not listen to the European philosopher first – after all, how the hell should we know whether European-ness matters in advance of encountering some?  We might even need to ask that European some questions and hear some answers.  Heck, we might even need to tarry in some heady uncertainty about ourselves before our questions even become good ones.

From there, the planning session went wholly off the rails – yea, verily, the trolley of “collaboration” wantonly mowed down entire villages of people just trying to get along.  What if, the Normals asked, our colloquium attracted Europeans to philosophy for the wrong reasons, seducing them into thinking their identity might matter?  Here again, deviant representatives were left wondering how the hell we would know if that’s a bad thing – after all, we’ve not yet settled on a set of right reasons for this, or indeed for all manner of human endeavors. 

It swiftly emerged that relative to our colleagues in the Department of Normalcy, we here in the DoD operate at an overwhelming a priori deficit, an affliction that has us persistently prefacing remarks with how-the-hell-should-we-know formulations.  We were game to keep trying our hand at this collaboration thing but, alas and alack, the Normal faculty departed the meeting as soon as the stale institutional cookies had all been eaten.  We appear to be running at a deficit in those as well.

Sacred Stupidity

Here in the DoD, we don’t just work on deviance.  We also farm - because having one job with a vanishingly small success rate just wasn’t enough for us.  We ambitiously need two, and the more luckless the better.  And, since it’s summer, we’re mixing deviance and farming (ok, mostly the latter), so forgive a predilection for agriculture talk. 

We here at the DoD satellite ag campus are ashamed to say that we used to seriously underrate quail.  Quail have a habit of running instead of flying off immediately when you approach their habitat.  Worse yet, they run straight on away, into the open spaces and in the direction you’re heading.  So if you come upon quail, they’ll “flee,” except their version of this looks a lot like trying to lead you on a 5k jog.  So here’s the shameful admission:  We here in the DoD once thought quail exceptionally stupid on account of this.  After all, if you’ve got wings, use ‘em and, if somehow that’s not on, then at least run into some brush and hide.

Quail are in fact quite clever, since this behavior is a form of predator misdirection.  They jog instead of fly so you’ll think you might catch them and so follow.  And they run in the open since that’s going to draw you away from their covey in the brush. 

To figure this out, we at the DoD satellite ag campus had to look into things (ok, we asked our uncle) and were struck that some healthy curiosity had not blocked our low opinion of quail in the first instance.  Nature can be a hot mess, sure, but it tends not to favor deadly behaviors. 

From this sorry episode of confident ignorance, it was a short leap to radical self-doubt since, in truth, we here at DoD are ever poised to make that particular jump.  Why, we asked ourselves, would we have assumed that quail don’t know what they are about when concluding that they are stupid is surely the least interesting possibility?  Too much learning, we ruefully reflected, and you start to think you know things - even, and maybe even especially, when you don’t. 

So we here in the DoD refreshed our resolve regarding fundamentals – to wit, we decided to lead with the thought that we are stupid and leave the smug certitude to other departments.  We would praise and valorize stupidity wherever we find people earnestly owning it.  Indeed, we concluded that the “revelation of our own slowness has seemed to make all stupidity sacred.”*

*Henry James, “The Middle Years.”