A depressing day

I have lived one of these academic days that I particularly dislike. Times are rough: we are preparing our 4 years contract with the government. The governing body of the university, in all its majesty (the Vice-presidents and the director of human resources on a sort of podium) shared for a whole day the glorious message that the central bureaucracy of the French state sent to us, universities of the “D wave” (the “wave” is the round of evaluation in local language). A whole day spent listening to the governance of my university talking about the greatness of our project and the limitless demands of the government on us in order to give us some money. Even if I try to separate what I do not like about French people —obedience to authority, abstract considerations about structures without concern about reality, big plans and small achievements, well the enduring soviet-like aspect of France—from my basic point of view on French university and its fate—it is going bad, and going in the wrong way—I still am ill at ease with the whole process. And bored. I do not like to be bored. I chose my job specifically not to be bored. And I am bored nonetheless.

It is not the fact that we have to do those unpleasant things that administration means in any activity. It is more that we do it the wrong way. We all know that, finally, it will be a big mess, the right papers arriving to the wrong persons, if any right paper exists at the university. It will keep us spending time and energy, far after we should be free from duty at the university, and should get some rest or work on our research or whatever is of interest for an academic. This is not that we are working in order to get subsides. It is that we work for the red tape that will produce in a mysterious way, insufficient money that will be erratically granted.

There is something depressing about producing information on the basis of information we have not, or sometimes are unable to produce. We have to mind costs (good thought!) without having any figures about the cost (oh, yes somebody knows, there is even a Vice-President in charge of knowing those boring things, but how do you access a Vice-President to ask him how much a student costs?). We have to be managers but nobody dares say that if us, the crowd of talented academics, had wanted to become managers of some sorts, we would work for more money somewhere at some more lucrative business.

The saddest is that I see that people just pretend to consider the whole business as normal. Maybe so. At least, I am grateful to the unknown colleague who, after the long, useless round of meetings cried: “it is not as if people did not think in a university”. The sad thing is that we spent a day trying to do as if it was the case.

 

Eat and Read in Paris

As every year, I welcome a group from Ball State University, USA for a workshop in Paris. We visit different sites, businesses; I give a lecture about French society. It is always a pleasure for me, and worth the trouble of organizing things. I also get to see my friend D* who is my entrepreneurial colleague from Ball Sate who set up a few years ago this 2 week workshop in Europe (London and Paris). D* has always witty observations to make about life that surrounds us (either in France or in the US), and walking and chatting around with him is always rewarding to me. This year, I decided to write a little guide for the students about places I like to go to. Where to eat, mostly, because for the rest (visits and explanation), well D* and I do the trick. It expanded in a couple of pages that I thought could be interesting beyond the happy circle of BS students. So, I decided to post it as a page on this Blog. Enjoy!

 

Computer again

My website did not raise great enthusiasm around me. If I were totally true, I would say that that my websites have never raised enthusiasm except for me. I am pretty good though at thinking things (it is part of my job) and I know exactly what not to do, and what to do (and god knows that too many websites do what should not be done). I am afraid that I somehow fit in the old saying about teachers: “if you know how to do it, do it, if you don’t, teach the others how to do it”. To be a little less severe with myself, I should add that I “did”, except with not much abilities in terms of designing (which I have neither taught after all) and also note that the saying add: “and if you don’t know how to teach the others to do it, teach them how to teach.” I have not yet reached this last circle of hell.

The truth is that for my own website, well, I was experiencing. And experiencing the wrong way: with too few technical abilities. As a matter of fact, I used my website to learn how to do website and to be aware of the technicalities, the traps, and the different options. This allowed me to be a good consultant for people who actually had the technical abilities, and that is already a result. But I thought time had come for something more definite. Plus, said Anglophone friends of mine, the address looked goofy. With all these considerations in mind, and since I enjoyed a few relax days with not too much on my agenda, I dedicated my freedom to redesign the whole thing. I measured better my technical abilities, which I used to improve a ready made frame for the SPIP system I use (if you have never heard of SPIP, it is a powerful, free community developed based web design and publication system) instead of creating the frame myself from scratch. The result is a classy classic design and far clearer access to the over 120 pages of the website that you can admire at my new address thierryleterre.free.fr. This new address is linked with the fact that I now feel comfortable to appear in a web community under my own name. It might seem strange, for somebody who has talked to so many audiences, written so many articles and books, spoken on the radio and TV. But still, a virtual community was something else, and as I said, I was experiencing—to quote Descartes, I walked on to the stage of the (virtual) world with a mask on (take off the “virtual” if you want the actual quotation).

In other words, I am not able to do things the way people usually do them. I was shyer on the Web than in real life. I feel more comfortable now since my website is a decently sized one. Enough to be of interest beyond a few students; and also, well presented enough to have some sort of professional look. It looked good, and felt better.

 

Papers and Satisfaction

The price to pay for travelling around the world is that you have to deal with all the things that have been suspended while you were away… Unpacking, calling mom, receiving mails from the Dean (oh, there is at some point a faculty meeting, where and when the hell is that?), demands from the university (is it the 3^rd or 4^th time that they ask for a document that I have sent months before?), and, more generally, trying to get rid of the mass of papers that have accumulated on my desk, which also includes filling my French tax declaration (a task made a little more complicated because my university persists in making mistakes in the forms sent to the French administration, for some reason). In this mountain of paper (that, yes, makes me feel bad about environment) waiting for me or my intervention, some jewels catch my eyes. I am happy to find letters from friends, and… a letter of acceptation for a Fulbright fellowship. Once opened and read the good news, I must admit that I am happy and feel glorious. An aura of pride and self-indulgent satisfaction surrounds me.

Then, beyond the “I am happy to let you know…” that starts the letter of acceptation, I check the paperwork to be done… Even for the best things in the professional world, we are still glued in the “administrative world”, obviously. There is always a paper to fill, even for the best news. The positive side to it is that I think that whatever professional glory means to me, friends’ letters are yet better. None of my friends has ever asked me to fill proper paperwork to answer!

 

Same Sex Marriage and the American Political Science Association

Among diverse affiliations, I am a member of the American Political Science Association. This year, I will speak to their national conference on issues related to gender studies. APSA is a highly respectable and well organized — organized the American way — association, which I enjoy being a member of. To be honest, I have more interest in APSA endeavours in favour of political science than in my own country association, a member of which I am nevertheless. I have never really understood how it works, if it works at all (well most of my colleagues seem to be happy with the French association of political science, but I cannot decide whether it is because it is actually an interesting professional association or because my colleagues are as French as the association — at least it is quite objective a statement that the website of the French association, if not the whole association itself, is by no way very organized).

For a reason still unknown to me, APSA took fire on an unpredictable issue: the meeting site of 2012 in New Orleans. It happens that the state of Louisiana bans same sex unions in its constitution, which does not even recognize the validity of same sex unions contracted in other states. So, some members, considering that such a law is discriminatory decided to ask for a boycott of all places that would have anti-same-sex unions laws. APSA should not meet in such places.

I gave some thought to the issue, and I finally felt compelled to contribute to the debate though actions taken or not by APSA would have no impact of any sort in my own country — which is blessed with same sex CPU laws. I also felt all the restrictions with which a non-American should express himself regarding issues that primarily concern US citizens’ interests. But homophobia is not solely an American problem, and moreover, using constitutions to abridge human rights instead of extending them, especially in a country that was the birth place of modern constitutionalism is not only a problem for the Americans. It is a bad signal sent to the rest of the world.

This being said, I also think that academic ethics involves being suspicious of the use of academia for political ends.

My uncertainty increased when I considered issues of consistency. Some of them regard the positions of APSA as a whole, since APSA criticized in 2005 the principle of academic boycotts (in that case, of Israel). There were also issues of consistency at individual levels. A non-American member like me, well aware of many human rights violations committed by the US in the context of the war in Iraq, would find it hardly coherent to favour a boycott principle over the more nuanced position of the APSA in 2005, since in this case, I should choose to apply the same standard to my collaborating with US institutions or organizations. No country, no place, is immune from being contaminated by illiberal ideas and being tempted to cut on human and citizens’ rights. We should boycott the universe if we had to be coherent with a boycott policy…

Such considerations cannot lead to indifference to situations which harm people’s rights at a fundamental level — and I consider it the case in the matter we discuss. But it is as well true that more basic violations exist in the US such as the death penalty, which ignores the decent respect due to the opinions of mankind on a topic far less controversial in the rest of the world than gay rights. APSA has never addressed specifically this issue and so, the proposal for a boycott simply means that we are being selective on human rights related issues.

Taking the opportunity of meeting in such places as New Orleans or other places to voice dissent will probably be more coherent and efficient than ruling in favour of a boycott.

This being said, I did not want to counteract efforts to make the world a gay-friendlier place, and though advocating for not starting the boycott process, I let any concerned party know that I would nevertheless endorse the decision of a boycott should it be taken. I did so as a warm supporter of gay rights, and I am well aware that this position reflects more my partisan partial opinions than it is grounded on the objective view that an academic has to retain on any matter. When right is not available, the next smart move is to go for less bad.

• Found on the Internet another reaction of a colleague on his blog, Duck of Minerva:
  http://haloscan.com/tb/dnexon/7647642294889274014

 

Traveller

I have been traveling extensively these days, and worked like hell. In less than a month I delivered 5 lectures (3 in the US, 2 in France) and conducted two seminars in the US. In the US I talked at Georgetown University on “Islam in France” (I spare you the long title) a lecture which I reduplicated for Miami University, Ohio and on French critical sociology (Miami again). I went to Ball State, Indiana, where I delivered a talk on “why your French guest might starve in front of your fridge full of food”. It was not about food, mind you, but about the rather drastic sense that French people have of their privacy. In the US the spring was hesitating, and we had rain. But it was warmer, and with more pleasant days that I would have had in France which, after all, is a marvelous country for its weather compared to the UK. In DC cherry trees were blossoming, but I did not get a chance to see them at their full splendor, because of the rainy weather when I was free (or the sunny weather when I was not).

All these trips were filled with meeting with friends, whether they are from the academic world or “civilian” friends, and I had the opportunity to make new acquaintances. I met through my friends T*& K* in DC the lawyer that extensively wrote the case that overturn the Supreme Court decision about sodomy laws. I was very impressed to hear it (though T* only gave me this detail after I met his friend) since I teach this case every year in my Master’s course. All these encounters were so pleasing to my affections and to my mind, also: I have always loved this Aristotelician idea that thinking is better done with friends, even though we have to be “friends of Plato, but greater friends of truth”.

Back to France, I had the opportunity to remember that I had my PHD in philosophy before turning into a political scientist, and that I had extensively worked on the philosophy of sciences (which left me with a rather positivist, though not quantitative, approach of social sciences) and I gave a lecture on “Europe and science” in Versailles. Another trip, but this time in France, took me to Bordeaux where I gave a lecture on the American visa policy on which I have worked for a National Agency for Research project that is leaded by my friend S* whom I was delighted to see again, after many years we had kept in touch but without actually meeting. I had diner with one of his friend (who could well turn into a friend for me too) and with his wife I had never been acquainted with previously. We had great diner (good food—of course—and so great talk!).

 

My Presidential Day

In France, to be a presider is to be a president and today I spent my time being a president. I chaired the morning convening of the symposium that my colleague Pascal Dauvin organized on the “Jobs in communication”. I often joke saying that my department of political science specializes in both the problem and the solution, since we have a master’s degree in communication and another one in conflict studies. Kill each other, and then understand that it might be a good idea to talk. This morning was about the talk part obviously, though I was in a fighting mood since the catering department of UVSQ had forgotten that the 18 people of the colloquium were supposed to have lunch there. My colleagues had to find a restaurant able to welcome that amount of guests, and if you know France, you may know that for some reason, having lots of patrons is more considered as a problem than as good news. I opened the morning session asking for a minute of silence as homage to our late catering service. People laughed of course, and I thought that making people smile was a civilized way to express furious resentment. Despite this unfortunate beginning, it was a very interesting colloquium, I was happy to attend. I could not stay for the afternoon session though, since I had to attend my second half presidency of the day. I chaired the Habilitation Thesis or one of our Lebanese colleague Simon Haddad on the support to terrorism. Obviously from talk, I had backed up to kill. Haddad’s work is extremely interesting, by what it shows (the definite link between support to terrorism and radical Islamism) and what it demonstrates not to be (the link between terrorism and poverty). All ended well, which is that we have a new colleague who can supervise research in France.

NB for those who would not know: What is the “habilitation thesis”? A PHD in France allows competing for associate professorship and conduct research, but is not sufficient to become a full professor or to supervise research. Depending on the field, to become a full professor and supervise research you have to defend a “habilitation thesis”—which is sometimes as heavy as the previous PHD—or to pass a national competition for full professorship (which I did for political science). In this case, you may also defend your habilitation, which allows associate professors to supervise research.

 

Postmodern Academia

I feel with remorse that I am not the greatest planet friendly academic in the world. I far prefer the 40 mn polluting drive to my university than the alternative nearly 2 hour journey on public transportation to it-which, if you calculate correctly is nearly 4 hours of my life in a day. All this to say, I am only mildly satisfied with the fact that today happens to be dedicated to public transportation. Has it to do with this blog? Sure, since the cause is indirectly linked with my academic status. I am on a train because I have my car repaired. And if it is so, the cause is the fact that my salary as a French academic does not allow me to afford two nice cars (it allows for one, though). I should also reckon the sociological fact: with the same level of income academics’ cars tend to be less fancy than the executive’s ones, just because the scholarly crowd puts its pride somewhere else. You should see my little library compared to my small car and you would understand this fact. Okay, the comparison does not work with the lawyers’ cars in the parking lot of my faculty of law (and political science). Another sort of academic, truly.

For the longest time of my life, I have been a suburban guy, which means that metro and train systems are familiar to me. That is one thing that I like when I am in DC. It feels like home to me-the home of the anonymous connected suburbs of the world. With the 21^st century, though, I notice some improvement. I have a cell phone (so I can call my friend X* and let him know that I will be late at our seminar because of the public transportation-I want to underline that it is not unprofessional in this case, since it is a seminar based on excerpts of movies, and the time I will miss will be the watch and enjoy part of it). My cell phone is also a mp3 player and a radio. So I can play France Culture and then, when in the underground network of Paris, my favorite music (I have not ipoded my favorite radio programs since France Culture has invented a very complex system to download their stuff). I am comfortably seated in a newly furnished wagon, and I have my laptop computer. I write the minutes of the last department meeting. On my way back, I will write the proposal I meditate on “the decline of the West in values”, the same way. It is so strange: I am moving at fast speed in a train, I am in a crowd, and I am perfectly remote from my surroundings and keep perfectly still. Somebody could join me on the phone, but I hardly notice what is going on in my immediate perimeter. If the word “postmodern” has any sense, this is it: I am a postmodern academic.

 

My interests: long and self indulgent

There is something enticing about a note on one’s special interests and activities. After all, writing about one’ self is always a rewarding way of dealing with one’s life, more especially so when this “one” had a decent liberal education: we were taught at college, and we have retained the lesson as a precious one, that writing is the good part of life. And then, beyond my university student years, sweet memories surface of back to school days in my young time when the first assignment of the year was describing our holidays, or our… special interests. All this is very refreshing. Unfortunately, after having more closely read the instructions, this good and benevolent feeling turns into confusion with the last part of the sentence indicating what this essay should be: it stipulated that those interests and activities were the ones “other than academic or professional”.

That was indeed a difficulty.

I painfully admit it, since it may sound as such an unsophisticated statement, academia is my special interest as well as my daily activity, and it so happens that I was talented enough to make it my job as well. More to the point, I made it my job, precisely because it was my special interest. I enjoy reading and writing, developing and acquiring knowledge; there has always been the kick of research in me. The fact that I was less talented in physics than in logics and humanities or social sciences simply made my intellectual interests drift towards politics rather than towards cosmology. In the limits of these intellectual abilities, I have always been open to new ways of understanding the world around me in all of its aspects. Maybe that is why I have studied and written in more than one area of knowledge—as much as modern academic specialization allows it.

My curiosity is not a solitary game: I am fond of teaching, which is for me a way of sharing what I know, and also, of learning from the people I teach. I like stretching the inner sphere of my ideas and research, to reach other people. I, too, am the beneficiary of this process. Lecturing is about turning what we know into what the others need to know, or simply, are eager to learn. It is also turning what the others know in what we are delighted to discover. Yes, in my opinion my job is about reciprocity, and this is to me a great source of fulfilment. I am an academic because I enjoy making myself available to new ideas and new visions of the world, and audiences, whether of students or people attending public conferences, have this talent to provide you with this unrecognized expertise of vivid intelligences working. In a more abstract way, I also enjoy this process as a journalist, when I write my monthly column for La Croix, a French newspaper to which I am associated (years ago I wrote for the New Technology supplement of another French newspaper, Libération). I like it when readers send letters (I like it better when they send compliments than when I receive critiques, but in both cases I do enjoy the simple fact of a dialog, and I usually answer readers’ letters for this reason).

The process of exchange expands so far beyond the limits of my professional occupation that I think this is the reason why it is difficult to provide a note on my special interests other than academic. It is not, I believe, that my interests are narrow, or do not reach further than my professional activity, though I am far from despising this kind of work ethics. It is because my professional activity is in itself a source of renewed passion which is related to most of the aspects of my life.

Yet, I could pick up things in my life which are not related to my job or my scholarly activities. For instance, I could speak of my liking cooking from time to time. But coming from a country where many of my fellow citizens (especially, though, the female ones) are cuisine super heroes, my modest abilities would not rank very high. I could also entertain the readers of this essay with the fact that I play tennis. This would not be a professional topic at all: I am unskilled in the most unprofessional manner in this area of my interests. However, academia is never far away since I learned to play with a colleague and friend on an American campus. And anyway, I could hardly pretend that tennis is a “special activity” since my overall philosophy concerning those matters of physical exercise is accurately summed up by a very famous sentence by Churchill regarding the secret of his good health: “no sports”.

Another unprofessional topic would be my family life. As any father in this world I could write pages about my children, and this would take me as far from my professional interests as it is possible: I once complimented the teacher of my elder child, for his outstanding pedagogic talent: “thanks to you, I can be a father in the evening, and not a lesson tutor” (the French educational system is notoriously time consuming for parents). He did take it for a compliment, and I did respect him for that. But, to be honest, whether one has kids or not, there is not a more boring topic than children viewed by their parents.

In my search for special interests other than academic ones, once eliminated considerations about religion (coming from a lay country, I cannot help regarding this topic as a very inappropriate one for public disclosure) and involvement in associations (in my case, they are all related to academic life in one way or another) the regular “I like travelling” crossed my mind. I do like travelling, and taking note of differences in cultures and behaviours, as well as of similarities (there are a lot, among mankind). But I cannot help using my social scientist reflexes to assess situations, and anyway, most of the time, I travel to teach and lecture.

In a more technical fashion, I am also related to the great world by electronics. I have built websites since 1996, and I have learned a lot, beyond technicalities (I discovered something about myself too: I am not a designer). Since I am not a computer scientist, that could pass for a non professional special interest, except that I have taught multimedia (my department specializes in communication—and also, it always sounds like a funny mix—in conflict and security studies) and have built the website of my department. As for my blog, it is called, Academia first person. For the good reasons I tried to give previously, and probably for bad ones I do not really care to find, I have not so many special interests beyond my professional sphere of activity, after all.

I was there in my reflection when it occurred to me that I was taking the problem the wrong way. I was looking for things in my life which were not related to my job, and could not find that many I could talk about in an entertaining way. There was my mistake: I was neglecting the fact that I do not consider all my professional activities as touching special interests of mine. I have had a very serious administrative career after all—including many programs and departments directions, vice-deanship, and vice-presidency—and though I think I have always been a committed (and hopefully efficient) administrator and have devoted to it a rather large part of my professional activity, I would never consider sharing this experience as a special interest, interesting though it is. I would no more rank as “special interest” my role as an expert in different committees, rewarding though it is from a professional standpoint. This being noted, I eventually conclude on my special interests, with the belief that many of my academic interests are different from my professional duties, even if they are part of my life as an academic.

 

My interests: short and concise

Among my special interests I would like to share my interest in cross cultural matters. Despite the phenomenon of globalization, the world is still diverse. It was more so, years ago, when I started to discover it. My first real trip abroad was to Scandinavia when I was a student. In this time borders were still solid lines of separation (a few years before, I had spent a week end in Switzerland with my school, and my class smuggled some… chocolate: even that, in this time, was a customs matter). I circulated around Northern Europe thanks to a Euro train pass. It was my first cross-cultural experience, for the most exciting part of this trip was the people I met: this young Spanish girl admiring Copenhagen in a spontaneous “it is very monumentalistic”—a word that should deserve to exist in English, a Belgian man in his 40’s who had decided to take a year off and to ride his bicycle all across Europe, this Irish student met on the train back to France whom my parents then hosted when he stayed in Paris. Decades afterwards, landscapes and museums are sometimes fuzzy (though I do remember the crossing of the polar circle and the beauty of Fjords and the Munch Museum in Oslo) the memories of people and some conversations are still very neat.

And indeed, it was more than travelling. Somehow, I feel that we, the young Euro-backpackers of the 80’s, participated to a new kind of Europe, less tied by the tragedies of our history and more dedicated to a common spirit of mutual discovery.

Back to school, I mingled up with the (then) small group of international students of my university. After my Master’s degree I made the decision to spend a year in Ireland. In the following years, I made shorter trips, to Spain or Italy, Austria, and more recently to Poland, Lithuania, Latvia always keen on meeting people rather than on seeing things. The discovery of the East of Europe (rather that an “Eastern Europe” that, in a way, does not exist anymore), though made years after the fall of the Berlin wall, but soon after the integration in the EU, was a most striking experience. As a student, I had witnessed the development of a certain kind of Europe. I could see another step in the European development.

However, it was outside Europe that I started to feel European, when I discovered the United States, so close, and in a way, so distinct from the European territory, where the traces—and sometimes the scars—of history are everywhere. America is more multicultural, but also less diverse. Another significant experience for me was my numerous stays in South Africa, starting a couple of years after the end of apartheid, and seeing the fast evolution of the country, sometime seeing it evolving the hard way.

 

I am more a sojourner than a traveller and I have never been a good tourist. I note differences and resemblances in cultures and habits, as much as it is possible. I also have received from my stays abroad the most precious gift: a second language. English has come as close to me as it is possible for somebody who is not born in the language. And, just as seeing different cultures made me aware of my own cultural settings, speaking and writing in a different language, extended my sense of my own language.