Ego & Argument

INTERVIEW

My friend—I’ll call him Adam—is very smart, very kind, and very self-aware. When you see him angry on his own behalf, you almost expect a voiceover from David Attenborough to roll, explaining how rare is this display of wrath in the North American mensch.

If you knew Adam, and if you had been present for an academic talk he gave a couple of years ago, you would not have been expecting him to be thrown into a (literal) blind rage during the Q&A. But he was. As another academic questioned him about his research, he was so overcome by some roiling cocktail of adrenaline, testosterone, and dudgeon that later he couldn’t remember exactly what he had said or done in response (a friend had to fill him in). He just knew he’d won.

Adam had defended plenty of papers, and knew that disputation was a normal part of academic life. I asked why he reacted so strongly to this particular incident.

Two surprising realizations came out of this experience. The first was that having his “academic life threatened” was as pleasurable as it was harrowing: “The thing to not underestimate about this kind of activity,” he recalls, “is how enjoyable it is. It’s very fun, very thrilling.” Adam got an undeniable rush from having stared the academic reaper in the face and lived.

The second surprise was that the terror and anger this encounter induced in him seemed to actually improve his performance. We might expect that a surge of adrenaline would make a person better at fighting a bear—some survival instinct surely hardens our fists and quickens our movements—but can a sense of terror make us better at fighting a philosopher? Adam says it is so:

As he considered the role of ritualized conflict in scholarly life, Adam searched the world of sport for metaphors, as is his wont:

If a sense of real threat—not just to one’s ideas, but to one’s job—causes valuable bursts of insight, what can we make of the enchanted armour that is tenure? Adam acknowledges that he knows a woman for whom tenure changed everything about the way she related to other scholars:

Adam was, in the end, reluctant to conclude that visceral hostility between academics actually improves the quality of scholarly discourse. “But in my experience,” he said, “I guess that seems to be the case.”