The last week or so I have been really struggling to share on the blog. The readings and class time have become something for me to look forward to every week and I feel like I'm taking in more than I have in any other class, but I still keep feeling this pull away from the university.
For a long time I was convinced that a university curriculum was not somewhere I would find what I was looking for, and this led me to push back strongly against traditional education for years. But after about 5 years of actively and strictly antisocial behaviour, I eventually found my way back to school. Since then, I have gained more than I can describe from the generosity of a few amazing profs and students, but I always feel this push back against the institutional structures and authorities in the back of my mind. I cant' seem to shake the part of me that thinks it's all bullshit. Over the last few months I have been nearing the end of my degree and putting more time towards outside endeavors, and while doing so I have been struggling to maintain the connection to the spaces I discovered at school. I've been try to rework a past project, but I've found it hard to interact with even my own thinking and writing from just 6 months ago, almost as if I were reading the work of another and not quite grasping the concepts. This feeling has been pervasive when it comes time to write on the blog. During class and my readings I feel engaged, but once it comes time to write I seem to have lost touch with whatever prompted me to express myself through academic means.
So this is what I have been struggling with. And my feelings of aversion towards the university as an institution were compounded (crystallized/ actualized?) today when I received an email informing me that a prof (with whom I had some small issues last winter) has filed a charge of academic misconduct against me. The charge is related to my honours thesis - written over the course of the last academic year, two sections of which were used in part for other courses. This had been discussed and arranged with my other profs due to the scope of the work I was trying to produce, however I did not consult the person in question before using an excerpt of my thesis to contextualize a research-creation work that I submitted. It didn't even occur to me that this would be an issue, since it was abundantly clear that I was working on the same project across these multiple contexts.
6 months later, I am being officially accused of misconduct and may lose much of what I was given in terms of institutional validation, as well as potentially receiving a permanent tarnish on my record. It's a strange feeling to have a project I put so much work into and was so proud of thrown back at me as 'evidence,' as they are calling it, in a dossier. Funnily, or not so much, tomorrow night I was supposed to attend an event at which I was to receive an award from the Dean for my work last year, but instead I need to use that time to sit down with a student advocate and build a response to this claim. This situation is making it much easier to feel like I had it right at the beginning - none of it actually mattered- it can all be taken away on a technicality: I had permission, but not quite enough of it. I am now learning first hand what was at one point discussed (in hindsight, quite ironically) in class with the very prof who started this procedure: bureaucratic rule doesn't leave much room for nuance.
These are the things giving me trouble with school at the moment, but they also make me even more thankful that this class, and the space it sometimes occupies, are available and accessible to all, despite their physical belonging to an organization that often seems to endeavor to accomplish the contrary.
For a long time I was convinced that a university curriculum was not somewhere I would find what I was looking for, and this led me to push back strongly against traditional education for years. But after about 5 years of actively and strictly antisocial behaviour, I eventually found my way back to school. Since then, I have gained more than I can describe from the generosity of a few amazing profs and students, but I always feel this push back against the institutional structures and authorities in the back of my mind. I cant' seem to shake the part of me that thinks it's all bullshit. Over the last few months I have been nearing the end of my degree and putting more time towards outside endeavors, and while doing so I have been struggling to maintain the connection to the spaces I discovered at school. I've been try to rework a past project, but I've found it hard to interact with even my own thinking and writing from just 6 months ago, almost as if I were reading the work of another and not quite grasping the concepts. This feeling has been pervasive when it comes time to write on the blog. During class and my readings I feel engaged, but once it comes time to write I seem to have lost touch with whatever prompted me to express myself through academic means.
So this is what I have been struggling with. And my feelings of aversion towards the university as an institution were compounded (crystallized/ actualized?) today when I received an email informing me that a prof (with whom I had some small issues last winter) has filed a charge of academic misconduct against me. The charge is related to my honours thesis - written over the course of the last academic year, two sections of which were used in part for other courses. This had been discussed and arranged with my other profs due to the scope of the work I was trying to produce, however I did not consult the person in question before using an excerpt of my thesis to contextualize a research-creation work that I submitted. It didn't even occur to me that this would be an issue, since it was abundantly clear that I was working on the same project across these multiple contexts.
6 months later, I am being officially accused of misconduct and may lose much of what I was given in terms of institutional validation, as well as potentially receiving a permanent tarnish on my record. It's a strange feeling to have a project I put so much work into and was so proud of thrown back at me as 'evidence,' as they are calling it, in a dossier. Funnily, or not so much, tomorrow night I was supposed to attend an event at which I was to receive an award from the Dean for my work last year, but instead I need to use that time to sit down with a student advocate and build a response to this claim. This situation is making it much easier to feel like I had it right at the beginning - none of it actually mattered- it can all be taken away on a technicality: I had permission, but not quite enough of it. I am now learning first hand what was at one point discussed (in hindsight, quite ironically) in class with the very prof who started this procedure: bureaucratic rule doesn't leave much room for nuance.
These are the things giving me trouble with school at the moment, but they also make me even more thankful that this class, and the space it sometimes occupies, are available and accessible to all, despite their physical belonging to an organization that often seems to endeavor to accomplish the contrary.
I wonder what else writing can do - how writing can cut across academic form or complicate he relation between knowing and unknowing. I am terrified about how academia might curtail the force of writing/learning as it is clearly threatening to do in your case, Jesse. What kind of survival techniques can we invent together that can re-ignite the flow and allow the process of learning/unlearning to leak from world to classroom and vice-versa?
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