Hanging out

I must really be back in blogging mode, because I feel compelled to do that most bloggy of things — explain why I haven’t been blogging. My excuse is simple: I’ve been making great progress on my aforementioned book on Star Trek, which has left me very little energy for other writing. But I’ve been mulling a post on this topic since returning from my trip to the UK. The conference — at which I delivered my first official presentation on the Qur’an — was rewarding, and the trip My Esteemed Partner and I planned around it really hit the spot, with a more casual vibe in Edinburgh and a busy couple days in London. But what really stood out to me was how energized I was by simply hanging out with my academic friends. The combination of genuine friendship, shared intellectual interests, and — crucially — unstructured time was absolutely rejuvenating. We weren’t catching up over coffee in an appointment made months in advance, we were all simply there and available and up for conversation.

I italicize all these seemingly insignificant aspects of the situation just to highlight how bizarrely rare they tend to be in my life, and I assume most of our lives. I hit the trifecta late in college, then again in grad school. Cultivating various kinds of “third spaces,” like regular bars where I at least knew the bartenders enough to have random unstructured socialization, was also a good strategy, though primarily in my grad school years (when there were a lot of other Chicago-area grad students who similarly hovered around my regular place). At times, the old independent Shimer could approximate that feel, too, as there was a critical mass of people who had common intellectual points of reference and a willingness to kill some time, but the smaller size of the current Shimer faculty and student body has made that more difficult to achieve (though I’m hopeful that can change). I assume my experience now is more like that of a typical “busy” academic, who is relatively isolated outside the classroom and at many schools will not have ready intellectual interlocutors due to the perceived need for specialization and “coverage.” Often conversations among colleagues at the same institution will veer toward the shared topic of office politics, which can be cathartic but is not rewarding in the same way.

When we got home, I brainstormed with My Esteemed Partner about how to cultivate something similar in my normal life, and we came up short. Realistically, I probably need to wait for those recharge moments at conferences — or maybe I should plan to head to Berlin next year, so that I can have ready access to (apparently) every American academic in a humanities discipline. Yet it seems like a sad commentary that the settings that appear best positioned to provide that kind of intellectual community instead wind up dividing and exhausting us, so that we don’t have any energy to spend our rare free moments together on anything but venting impotently about the institution.

Part of the problem, surely, is that we haven’t read and thought about the same things. That is definitely crucial to my friend group, as to the conference itself. (The structure of the conference brought that home, as there were two “streams” with very different backgrounds and interests, so that it became very difficult to have productive conservation with the whole group.) That doesn’t have to be a static “canon” — I have definitely picked up things simply because people I admire are reading them and I want to keep up. Specialization and the demands of scholarly productivity seem to militate against the formation of that kind of open-ended sharing of interests in many cases, as do heavy teaching and administrative loads. I’m exceptionally lucky, as so often, in the Shimer setting, because we have all read the same evolving core body of texts, and hence I can always redirect the inevitable office-politics venting to something more worthwhile, at least for short bursts. But often even people in the same small department will not have that kind of overlap.

And of course there is the sheer issue of time, especially as so many of the young academics who most hunger for this kind of contact are starting families. I don’t know what to do about that other than to suggest potentially radical changes in our living habits — let’s start a commune! — that I myself don’t actually want to do. But it does seem like there’s still room to rebuild some of the social habits and casual third spaces that collapsed in the pandemic. For instance, I notice that the culture of riding the train together has fallen by the wayside among my North Central colleagues who live in the city — maybe it’s worth making more of an effort to aim for the same train home? I don’t know! Or I could just hang around in the local Irish pub on “if you build it, they will come” grounds. That’s it — I’ll do that. Problem solved!