The nutty professors là tên một bài giới thiệu sách ở tờ New Yorker: quyển Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University của sử gia William Clark:
Anyone who has ever taught at a college or university must have had this experience. You’re in the middle of something that you do every day: standing at a lectern in a dusty room, for example, lecturing to a roomful of teen-agers above whom hang almost visible clouds of hormones; or running a seminar, hoping to find the question that will make people talk even though it’s spring and no one has done the reading; or sitting in a department meeting as your colleagues act out their various professional identities, the Russian historians spreading gloom, the Germanists accidentally taking Poland, the Asianists grumbling about Western ignorance and lack of civility, and the Americanists expressing surprise at the idea that the world has other continents. Suddenly, you find yourself wondering, like Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, how you can possibly be doing this. Why, in the age of the World Wide Web, do professors still stand at podiums and blather for fifty minutes at unruly mobs of students, their lowered baseball caps imperfectly concealing the sleep buds that rim their eyes? Why do professors and students put on polyester gowns and funny hats and march, once a year, in the uncertain glory of the late spring? Why, when most of our graduate students are going to work as teachers, do we make them spend years grinding out massive, specialized dissertations, which, when revised and published, may reach a readership that numbers in the high two figures? These activities seem both bizarre and disconnected, from one another and from modern life, and it’s no wonder that they often provoke irritation, not only in professional pundits but also in parents, potential donors, and academic administrators.
Phân tích và dữ liệu trong quyển sách rất thú vị. Clark cho ta biết nguồn gốc của phương thức tổ chức và các thủ tục phổ biến trong các trường đại học hiện đại, như các kỳ bảo vệ luận án, ý tưởng “mở cửa” cho sinh viên ngoại quốc, các báo cáo thường niên, cái syllabus, các bài thi, …
Đọc cái này mới thấy phương thức tổ chức các trường đại học ở Đức hồi thế kỷ 18 đã cực kỳ tiến bộ, thậm chí có những điểm tiến bộ hơn các tổ chức đại học ở VN hiện nay. Ví dụ, những điều sau đây người ta vẫn còn đề nghị trong các bài viết về “trường đại học tiêu chuẩn quốc tế” gần đây:
If a university wanted to attract foreign students, it must appoint professors who could engage in such scholarship. At a great university like Göttingen or Berlin, students, too, would do original research, writing their own dissertations instead of paying the professors to do so, as their fathers probably had. Governments sought out famous professors and offered them high salaries and research funds, and stipends for their students. The fixation on Wissenschaft placed the long-standing competition among universities on an idealistic footing.
…
Between 1750 and 1825, the research enterprise established itself, along with institutions that now seem eternal and indispensable: the university library, with its acquisitions budget, large building, and elaborate catalogues
…
The new pedagogy prized novelty and discovery; it was stimulating, optimistic, and attractive to students around the world.
Họ đã biết tận dụng kinh tế thị trường:
At the University of Göttingen, for instance, a hub of innovation only half a century old, he found an interesting anomaly. Professors tended to remain frozen at their acquisition salaries unless they could extract more money with the leverage of an outside offer.
Mục tiêu chính của quyển sách vẫn là để giải thích charisma của một tổ chức đại học:
Today, academic charisma—and the ascetic life of scholarship that goes with it—retains a central place in the life of universities. Scholars in all fields continue to gain preferment because they are “productive” (the academic euphemism for obsessive), and students continue to emulate them. Future investment bankers pull all-nighters delving into subjects that they will never need to know about again, and years later, at reunions, they recall the intensity of the experience with something close to disbelief—and, often, passionate nostalgia. The university has never been a sleek, efficient corporation. It’s more like the military, an organization at once radically modern and steeped in color and tradition. And it’s not at all easy to say how much of the mystique could be stripped away without harming the whole institution. If you thoroughly rationalize charisma, can it remain charismatic?
Câu in đậm trên nói đúng quá!