Happy Blog Rubs Off

It’s funny. Almost everyone I know has passed through some sort of higher education, and like everything else in life it has been (for most of us I presume) a mixed blessing. Deadlines, assignments, marks, degrees. It is a funny business.

Most of us, however, started out with a kind of shining idealism, of what academia’s place is, or ought to be, in society. In theory, the academy (like the Internet) is a place where what matters is contribution, rather than contributor. Truth over fantasy and fancy. And — at the risk of becoming saccharine — light over darkness.

Somewhere along the line we lose sight of this. Being a student is a demanding job… Somewhere amongst the mechanics of our discipline we lose touch with that idealism. Focussed on some sub-problem of some sticky issue being studied by hundreds we feel very distant from those ideals which in retrospect seemed overly romantic.

Some days, though, the fire is there again. Again it feels like academics as a vocation beats all else, by any measure. And it is those days that we must cling to as times get tough, the prospect of progress becomes murky, and politics, the bane of the academy, makes its rounds in the ivory tower.

What has spawned this grandiloquent entry you may ask? Why a post in ladyjaida’s livejournal, a blog of a 17 year old freshman at Columbia (coincidently where our conference was this summer) who is at the glorious beginning.

For some reason, enthusiasm like this is infectious to me. These entries come about very infrequently as I’m scanning around for online reading material. There must be 10 000 entries about girlfriend problems for each gem like Jaida’s, I’ve mentioned this before in a previous entry which also made me happy. I choose to believe that people tend to live the highs and blog the lows… at least we can hope.

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