some of the academic bloggers are having a discussion on "what is a scholar?"

Well, my first, and most simplistic answer, is that I think of this painting ("Willie Gillis in College" - Norman Rockwell, 10/05/1946.)

I guess my view of what a scholar is is very romanticized. And maybe kind of populist. I tend to think that just about anyone with a modicum of smarts, and more than a modicum of interest and tenacity, can be a scholar about something.

(I just love that picture, though. It just makes me so happy - the whole backstory, that this is a guy who fought in WWII, and survived, and came back, and now has the chance to go to college. I knew a man who fought in WWII - he was my mother's graduate advisor - and he often made the comment that he felt every day he had to live after WWII was over was a gift from God - he had expected to die in the war, and so he was incredibly grateful for every day he had after that. And he lived to a fairly advanced age. Back to the picture - when I look at it, I think about how I fantasized college would be when I was in high school: sitting in a sunny window, reading a book, looking out over an old university building. The history! The tradition! Of course, by the time I got to college, to my surprise, tradition was on its way out the window, replaced by careerism or apathy, and sitting reading in windows was replaced by How Drunk Can You Get, How Loud Can You Be, and How Much Can You P*ss Off the Serious Students. [of which I was one. There were many nights when I walked the floor of my dorm room, cursing the partiers and their penchant for coming back from the bars at 2 am, and playing the theme song from "Fame" as loudly as they possibly could on their stereos.])

But anyway. I guess I tend to think of scholarship as being interested in something for its own sake - not for how much money it will eventually make you. It's caring about the history and meaning and facts and truth of a thing, and honoring them by learning about them and sharing that learning with the world.

One of the things that makes me sad is the increasing commodification of learning - with online classes, with degrees that promise you to be done "in only three years! Of attending classes on weekends only!" I realize that that kind of training has its place, but it's not really scholarship - it's training. It's like learning how to use a particular piece of equipment rather than learning why the equipment is used.

There is also a trend to "fast Ph.D." or "fast graduate degree" programs. I have no idea how many of these are "real" (in the sense of "you actually get something for the money you send in") but I don't consider them "real" degrees in the same sense as one for which you actually do research, and write a real dissertation, and work in a lab or an office with several fellow grad students, and have an advisor with whom you have regular meetings...it all seems so VIRTUAL to do it online - so fake. I almost want to curmudgeonly say, "Call it something, but DO NOT call it a Ph.D.; that is a dishonor to those of us who actually did the research and sweated through the prelims and proposal defenses and dissertation writing and dissertation defenses."

I'm also disturbed by the trend to the "distributed campus" - where there isn't really a university, or where certain traditional university facilities are missing (a friend e-mailed me about a small college she knows where there is no library - everything is done via document reading over the internet or a form of interlibrary loan. That just makes me sad - it removes some of the serendipity of going into the library building and finding things other than what you originally searched for).

I think being a scholar is somewhat like being a monk. You are focused on things that are not immediately profitable - in fact, much of what you do is misunderstood by people more driven by the profit motive. Professors - scholars - are often seen as impractical (at best) or "a waste of taxpayer money" (at worst), because they do things that don't immediately generate profits.

And yet, I think our world would be a much poorer place if everyone only did things that immediately made them rich. I think we need artists and monks and scholars - people who are not cynics (in the Oscar Wilde sense of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing). We need people who can see the intrinsic value of things - and old book is not just an old book; it is a manuscript contianing Manutius' writings. Dinosaur bones are not just a cool thing to put on display in a museum, or have spoiled-rich bidders fight over at auction as a thing they can display in their front halls; they are keys to the evolution of life on Earth. Early human artifacts aren't just something to be sold on eBay and used by people as a marker of their wealth, status, and "taste;" they are items that might unlock the development of civilization.

And I worry about the commodification of things - the fact that there's a great temptation for people to sell their fossils to the highest bidder, or the students who complain about learning about plants because "I'm going to be a doctor and I shouldn't have to know this." Or people who go to school solely because they think it will make them richer financially. Or people who never read the books they are assigned - who read the SparkNotes instead - because "time is money and it's not worth it to me to read some book for some dumb class that has nothing to do with what I'm going to do with my life." Money is not all there is to life, and I believe that when you get down to it, it's actually one of the less important things. I saw too many rich but desperately unhappy folks when I was a college student to be able to believe that your paycheck is the main marker of who you are.

I've told prospective graduate students that the only reason for going to graduate school is that you really, really want the degree - you have to want it over and above any kind of compensation it can bring you. You have to want it beyond "my employer told me to get a Master's." You have to want it for the EXPERIENCE, for the being able to say you did it, for the being able to look at your bound thesis or dissertation on the shelf and feel some kind of satisfaction at the achievement and what you learned in the process. It's not unlike climbing a mountain.

And online courses worry me for this reason - they seem to take a very "means to an end" approach. (I realize - there are some individuals: disabled people, people who live on distant ranches, people with extreme agoraphobia - for whom these classes are a great blessing and perhaps are the only way they can have some sort of college experience. But for most students, I think there's a lot you miss out on online. And as a prof - there's a tremendous amount you miss out on. One of my friends is running an online course right now and she complains about how she's basically a webmistress and nothing more - that instead of talking to the students about their interests or potential careers, she deals with emails saying "the system's down! what do I do?"). Online courses seem to boil things down to the most thin thread of human relations - you never actually talk to the students, you don't get to hear them discuss things in class, you never have an experiment go wonky and have to try to figure out what happened as a group.

I think one of the other things about being a scholar is that - that you have contact with like-minded people, that you talk over ideas and concepts with them, and try to enlarge your view of the world (and maybe enlarge theirs too). Many of the scholars I know have a deeply contradictory personality situation - they are mostly extremely shy people, some even pretty socially awkward, and yet, they crave the contact of other people like them - the chance to discuss things or even, in some cases, just shoot the bull about the possibility of photosynthetic chihuahuas and the like. And the trend towards online courses, and loading people up with sixteen contact hours, and isolating people, and using divisive competitive business-type tactics*, goes against the grain of people who are, by inclination, scholars.

(*I heard a story about a saleswoman who sued a - I think it was an auto dealership? - for sexual harrassment and humiliation because she was spanked as part of a "drive up the business" promotion. On a great many levels, that reminds me of why I am not in the corporate world.)

That doesn't mean to say we won't or can't work hard. Many academics* are incredibly hard-working - putting in 12 or 14 hour days, working on weekends. But we also need a certain flexibility, I think, and also time to think, time to kick ideas around. If there were a strict "no talking during breaks" or "you will take your break at 10:15 and there will only be the same three people taking a break at that same time as you," I think there's less chance for collaboration, for that kind of kicking ideas around.

(*and regardless of what Professor Zero says, I'm going to assume academic = scholar. I don't know anyone with one of those quickie degrees who's actually teaching in a university.)

I also think there's also an element of polymathism among the really intense scholars - they care about other subjects even if they don't understand them. (One of the most frustrating things for a teacher is to have students come into your class and roll their eyes and say, "*I* don't know why *I* have to take *this*....I'm going to be a elementary school teacher/graphic artist/business owner..."). Many of my colleagues in the sciences read deeply in other areas - or if they don't, express distress over how little they know and how little time they have to learn.

I also guess that to be a scholar, you have to love reading. Not merely like it, not see it as a means to an end, but be able to IMMERSE yourself in it and enjoy reading for reading's sake.

I guess for me, the main idea of being a scholar is being passionately interested - and knowing a lot about - something that won't necessarily make you financially wealthy. It's seeing value in things that others might see as valueless ("History is bunk"?). In this age, in particular - with the antiintellectualism of the popular culture, with the polarized and screechy trend of political discourse, with the coarseness and stupidity of much entertainment - I think of scholarship as being kind of like the old monks of Iona during the Dark Ages - quietly and patiently transcribing manuscripts while the world around them forgets how to read. And I hold out hope that someday, the things we preserve will be held in esteem again, that being someone who lives the life of the mind will not be seen as trying to be a neo-hippie or a parasite on society - that we'll again have an era when the Willie Gillises of the world sit in a sunny window, next to their golf clubs, looking out over the old chapel building, and read deep books and think deep thoughts and see that there's more to life than beer, cars, coeds, and "networking."