Academia and Intelligence

I don’t know how to talk about these things without stepping on toes. And I’m sure that many of my observations are flat out wrong. Please take anything I say with a very large grain of salt.

There are a lot of thoughts swirling around in my head today. It’s making me a little dizzy.

I’ll pick one to write about, one that’s been on my mind a lot. I have not written about it yet because I don’t know quite how to express it without sounding like an ass, but here goes anyway.

Here at University, there is a definite caste system (see, that is the wrong thing to say already) of employees- you have the Chancellors and presidents and all those people first, then you have faculty (of which the above mentioned are part of, but higher than). As it turns out, faculty can be pretty vague as a term. In the library journals I’ve been reading, there’s a lot of discussion about whether librarians are faculty at various schools, and whether that’s a good or bad thing. Sometimes, librarians will have most of the rights and responsibilities of faculty, but not the actual title. Sometimes, they will hold the title, but with different responsibilities. Oddly enough, one study found that the lower tier the school, the more likely librarians will be classified as faculty. (Bolger)

I’m getting away from the point.

The point is, that in this caste system, I am the lowest of the low- an assistant, and I have “only” a bachelor’s degree. I noticed that there is a big difference in how I am treated, though, once I begin saying things like “I’m taking classes for my Master’s.” I’m no longer just someone who has their bachelors, but someone working on attaining a Masters, but that still does not put me as high as, say, someone working on a PhD. I can tell that for some faculty, this raises my value in their eyes. This bothers me for a lot of reasons.

First, school does not equal intelligence. I know a lot of people that are very intelligent and have a bachelors or no degree at all. There’s a lot of reasons one might choose not to go to college or pursue a degree past a bachelors- some jobs simply don’t require it, and I suspect that many of the people I know found school to be boring, repetitive, and unnecessary (my Bachelors was pretty much that way until my senior year). Plus, college is charging more and more every day, with no guarantee that you will get what you paid for with your degree. I also know a few people with higher degrees that are not that intelligent- they know a lot when it comes to a specific subject, but beyond that, they are quite hopeless.

Second, even if a degree confers some measurement of intelligence, at least on average, intelligence does not necessarily mean that a person will do a job better. A less “intelligent” person (I put intelligent in quotation marks because it depends on how one measures intelligence) might do a particular job as well or better than a more intelligent person. Of course, what a degree signifies more than intelligence, I think, is an ability to commit yourself to something, so it may indeed be a good indicator of being able to follow a project through.

Considering these things, I don’t understand why there is such a division between “faculty” and “everyone else” – there’s plenty of faculty only meetings, committees, etc. Not that I want to be part of these meetings, because I have quite enough as it is, but I wonder what the point is. I imagine they all go to a special secret room and don hoods and eat fancy foods or something. (kidding!)

Obviously I need to give this topic more thought. but my gut reaction is:

I am not my education.

Of course, I would probably look at this differently if I held a PhD. I hope that, whatever education I acquire, I won’t forget that there are plenty of people out there smarter than me, and most of them don’t hold a college degree. I also hope that, even should I fail to get a Master’s because I find some other path that I don’t beat myself up over it, because, again, I am not my education.

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Bolger, D. F., & Smith, E. T. (2006). Faculty status and rank at liberal arts colleges: An investigation into the correlation among faculty status, professional rights and responsibilities, and overall institutional quality. College & Research Libraries, 67(3), 217-229.