20151019.0619

For having made no updates over the weekend, I apologize. Illness befalls even me from time to time (and I will not be rehearsing the unpleasant details thereof), and although work continues even so (I completed a freelance piece and some paperwork for my regular job over the weekend), my capacity to do other things was greatly diminished. Unpaid work had to give way to paid work, in the event, but since I seem to be feeling all the better now, I can return to whatever it is that passes for normalcy for me. Hence this writing, and hence the return to the job hunt, which had been more or less suspended in favor of getting work done now. After all, I have to get through the now to get to the long term for which I hope to be preparing.

In any event, another thought occurred to me while I was in the shower this morning. Academia is often described as an ivory tower, one in which scholars isolate themselves and grow detached from the "real" world. I have written about some aspects of that isolation and that tower in such places as here, here, and here (the last of which I find particularly useful as I move forward in my writing). More seriously, in one other place, I ask off-handedly why the tower is ivory; the question returned to me amid the falsely falling water with which I cleaned myself this morning. To put it more plainly (and in a way that I would shudder to see among the essays my students write): Why is the ivory tower ivory?

Some ideas suggest themselves. The Biblical and doctrinal implications of the phrase--it derives from Song of Solomon 7:4 and is used by later medievals as a Marianic reference--come to mind to a medievalist, given the orientation of all concerned, but I do not think the term as used to apply to academia has so pleasant a set of overtones as purity and the promise of salvation to come. I am sure there are later literary or political constructions that account for the device, as well. I have to wonder, though, if there is not something else going on. Ivory is linked to the elephant, after all, which never forgets, and the scholarly memory is supposed to be long, indeed. It also proceeds from the maiming or killing of the elephant, and there are many who argue that academia, in being overwhelmingly liberal, maims or kills the things for which the elephantine political party in the United States ostensibly stands. (I am aware that there are many problems with such an argument. Academia is not nearly so liberal as many outside it think, and the party in question is not nearly so committed to what it purports to be as it purports to be, as its actions should indicate.)

Is it a thing that can be reclaimed? That should be? I am not at all sure.