Academic feud au lait

So, my last thread (of five?) on the Rave’s ESL Au Lait Japan forum has been locked and that is that. There was lots of raging passion, some (but much less) civilised debate, a lot of chest beating and territorial pissing, and two or three people who were just there for a fight and ruined it for everyone. Although you have probably realised by now that I would hardly claim to be an academic, there seemed to be a lot of letters after names on the other side and the whole thing reminded me of a classic academic feud, of which you can see a recent example here:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/22/healthscience/21gender.php

Although the main reason people with more certificates than friends tend to get all het up about these things and keep those feelings for life are probably “they are human”, it amuses me to brainstorm some other reasons. And as this is my blog, that is what I will do! But first of all

Warning: If you have lots of letters after your name and are the kind of person to take slightly tongue in cheek generalisations personally, I would suggest reading no further. Unless all of that is true and you have also indulged in an academic feud or two, in which case this is for you:

Reasons why academic feuds happen more often and last longer than people-who-think-Aliens-was-better-than-Alien-or-visa-versa feuds:

• People with more letters after their name than in their name spend far too much time on their computers or at their desks and not enough moving around, so physical feelings of frustration and aggression build up and come out in flame mails
• They actually set too high standards for their personal behaviour in terms of things like not using offensive language  (being PC) etc. and so the pressure builds up until they burst
• As they were not jocks when they were younger, they never learnt the “have a full-on fight and then forget it” school of conflict resolution
• They got bullied at school and enjoy doing the intellectual equivalent to someone else in revenge
• Their self-image is so tied up with their ideas that any attack on their ideas cannot be seperated from a personal attack
• They spend so much time explaining their ideas in words of one syllable to the dumbed down youth in their university lectures that the last thing they want to do is more of the same in their free time, so any “can you explain that more” question is the snapping point (Stephen Krashen, this means you my son!)
• If they took all those qualifications and got a nice university job to get praise from their families, they are hardly likely to take anything but praise from anyone else
• After all that time and expense doing an MAPHDTESOLEFLSLA, they think they should get a bit of extra respect. If not, what was the point of doing that instead of watching tentacle porn?
• They do indeed usually get that extra respect, so they are about as unlikely as a North Korean leader to understand it when someone treats their opinion as equal to a man off the street
• That’s all for now

If you don’t agree, I would be glad to hear from you. However, please remember the comments policy of TEFLtastic, which consists of just four words: Try to be nice.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 6:10 amand is filed under Linguistics, applied linguistics and SLA, MA TESOL, Rave Spelling's ESL Au Lait, TEFL, TESOL, Teacher training, Teaching in Japanese universities, Teaching in further/ tertiary education, Teaching qualifications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.