Remembering a poseur who got away with it, I think

On an academic website, a professor whom I attended graduate school with mentioned the death of another graduate student we both knew.  His reference to her was somewhat guarded and ambiguous, and it raised some lingering questions I had about her.  The vast majority of people I've come across in the academic world are conscientious.  One can disagree with them on issues, but cannot accuse them of faking.  Only a very rare few elicit that suspicion, and that's because the pretenders usually get caught quickly and eliminated from the profession.

The woman attended a number of the same classes I did, which included some intense, difficult seminars.  One such seminar was at the house of a highly acclaimed scholar.  It began at suppertime and included a buffet prepared by the man's wife and ended when we finished with the agenda for that week's session, often around midnight.  I  gave my fellow student  rides home after the class.  I am not sure I could call her a friend, but we were very familiar classmates and knew each other well.  

One of the things that bothered me and others about her was that she constantly disparaged her professors.  She did not make note of their strengths and find flaws;  she totally disparaged them as scholars and human beings.  Her deprecation extended to the wife of the professor who provided the hospitality at the professor's  home.  Most of the woman's fellow students wondered why she attended graduate school if she found it so inferior.  

She had another ploy at which some of the women students were particularly miffed.  She was very good at  remembering certain phrases or statements that some of the more astute students would make in class.  She would repeat those statements as her own in other classes even if the comment was not relevant to the class discussion at the time.  She sounded intelligent and original.  Some of her classmates who shared classes with her recognized that some of her comments were, in fact, things they had said in other classes.  They had expressed their resentment to me a few times, and wondered if the professors saw through her.  I had noticed after a time that when she gave presentations in seminars, she seemed to string together what seemed like sharp insights, but with no coherent pattern.

I remember when she did that in a class I was in with her.  She said something that I could not connect with what was being covered in the class.   I was walking out of the class with the man on whose website I learned of the woman's death.  He said to me, "What was she talking about?"  I said that I couldn't figure it out either.  He said, "Can anybody?"  

Nevetheless, the woman graduated with her Ph.D. and landed a job at a Michigan school of some repute, where she worked for more than 20 years, and then moved to a Big Ten University, where she was until she died rather suddenly of cancer.   The mention of her death sent me looking for her obituary.  While she was a doctoral student, she lived with a partner with whom she had taught before they pursued their doctorate degrees together.  I got to know him rather well, and we were friends.  It was he who asked me if I would give his partner rides home from the evening seminar at the professor's house.  I looked for an obituary to see if he and she had formed a permanent relationship.

I could not find a formal obituary.  I found a laudatory tribute to the woman that was referenced on the web site where I learned of her death.  But it did not include the usual information about what family members or close associates survived or about any services in remembrance.  The obituary quoted the praise of graduate students, but contained no factual information or comments by colleagues.  As I searched, I found a rating sheet with comments by students that I would characterize as diffident.  She seemed to inspire the same dubious attitude during her working life that I witnessed during her time in graduate school.  She insinuated herself into good positions, but had a tenuous grasp on them.  

The absence of any acknowledgement by colleagues was striking.  She had been listed as the co-author of books and articles that had gained some recognition, but none of her collaborators or her departmental colleagues commented on her passing.  That fact emphasized the casualness of the reference to her death by my former classmate on his website which dealt with scholarly news.  And so, I conducted a brief look at the woman's scholarship, and found that she had allied herself with a peculiar speciality of literature within the post modern movement.  And all of her published work was done in collaboration with someone else.

The so-called post modern movement was a disaster for the field of literature.  In its name, some cogent and critical questions were raised, but many people were attracted to it because it seemed to offer the prestige and kind of complicated knowledge as quantum physics.  It produced some of the most abstruse, unintelligible academic writing ever to be published.  Many young English professors adopted the attitude that they were engaged in a theory of the universe that only a rare few had the intellectual capacity to understand.  This pretentious pose was offensive to other academic disciplines and create a backlash which contended that the movement was fraudulent.  The movement occurred at a time when universities were dealing with what should be a required curriculum and budgets were shrinking.  The study of English and other literatures lost out to science and technology as departments grappled for their share of required courses.  In many universities,  the study of English was largely reduced to the teaching of spelling, punctuation, and grammar--basic literacy--and many courses in literature were abandoned.  An ivy league university president remarked after a faculty presentation defending some English courses that no one had the vaguest idea of what the young English professors were talking about.  They put on a demonstration of their own irrelevance, he said.

As I reviewed some of the work with which the late woman professor's name was associated,  I read some sentences so clogged with academic jargon that they were impossible to paraphrase.  The former chair of a large university English department put it bluntly in regard to that kind of writing:  "No one can read that shit," he said.  I recalled what classmates had noted about the woman back in graduate school:  she used intelligent-sounding words, but no one knew what she actually said.

When the professor noted her death on his website post, he seemed to merely be expressing that she was gone.  She, and a few people like her that I've encountered (one was a journalist) are troubling.  They insinuate themselves into the work of other people and end up ruining it.  I cannot but wonder if that is reason my ex-classmate remarked upon her passing.  It occurred to me that the reason she inveighed so constantly against her graduate professors was because they were addressing her incoherence.  Her denigrations were an adverse experience for those of us who witnessed them. She's gone now.  May she rest in peace.