Ivory Towers
Posted on March 1, 2007
Filed Under Teaching | 2 Comments
I subscribe to an international email discussion list about poetry. Tonight someone used the phrase “ivory tower” to designate the place that university teachers supposedly inhabit. I replied as follows:
You know, the cliché “Ivory Tower” always pisses me off. I suppose there are such places, but I’ve been a university teacher for going on thirty years & I have never inhabited an ivory tower & I don’t know many people who have. The idea that the lives of college teachers — at least outside the culturally if not educationally elite institutions — is any more cut off from “real life” (whatever that is supposed to be) than the lives of office workers or factory workers is not just wrong, it is offensive to common sense. And it presupposes pernicious barriers between the life of the mind & the life of the body & the life of the human animal in society. We don’t talk about Fortune 500 CEOs inhabiting ivory towers, but who is more cut off from reality? The phrase “ivory tower” has the fusty smell of stale Romantic categories. A fair number of poets now make a living by teaching, which is an honorable form of work. Are we to be consigned to the outer darkness through the employment of a phrase? Perhaps American academics are particularly sensitive to this usage because it has been used — along with its variants — by right-wing culture warriors to demean secularism & reason, to say nothing of imagination. Jobs I had before becoming a teacher: paint factory, car wash, cook, waiter, restaurant manager, bartender, house painter, plastic molding factory, porno movie projectionist, file clerk. And I have found the workplace politics of the university no worse than the workplace politics of any of these other places of employment.
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2 Responses to “Ivory Towers”
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Professor :-)
I read your last entry with interest because “ivory tower” is often a term used in political debates. So, following my curiosity I wiki’ed “ivory tower” and followed keywords to this site.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism
It’s fascinating that the political/social/cultural debates that go on everyday are permutations of the political/social/cultural debates of the middle decades of the 20th century.
In many ways Marx is still germaine!
P.S.-it’s been a long time since liberal arts institutions were inhabited by “ivory tower eggheads” who never mixed with “us po’ foke.”
On the other hand who was the last President or corporate CEO who did not arrive at his position of power via privilege?
Perhaps it’s time to coin the phrase “guilded tower cronies” to refer to individuals who are in positions of power and have lived lives of complacent privelege.
i lived in a genuine garret room for awhile, in an old church that had been (barely) reburbished: this was my ivory tower. i wrote in madeup languages, & painted pictures that could only be seen through special glasses. outside, the world burned, as it does; burned over & some of it burned out. what was i supposed to be doing? i wasn’t a fireman.
m.