MEDIOCRITY

Since I find myself wandering about in the snow under which my old haunts in Boston lie, and since this causes a problem -- should I venture forth to Barnes & Ignoble which lies a steeping hill below my room just to get a little paper cup of espresso, ever lukewarm and Starbuck's, a brand I usually pass by? -- I would rather, I think, pass on two reflections from the new year, derived from old friends in Academia.

Well, how are things? I ask an old friend, self-exiled from what was once Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe. He teaches to crowded classrooms in a local university and recalls for me the bad old days in his native land. 'What always struck me so forcibly,' he says, 'was what happened to my old friends. We were all young, then, and in firm agreement that we had a government of shits and we fought against it with the pawky means at our disposal. It was the most vociferous among them who began, year by year, to retrench. Aided and abetted by Common Sense, they had reached the age at which they really ought to leave the parental cramped apartment and enter Real Life. That meant they would need to have an apartment of their own in which to accommodate the young women they were about to marry. They would also need to have regular jobs and, if possible, escape the penury their Opposition to the regime enforced on them. It was amazing to me how firmly they moved towards "understanding" the government and its problems and how consistently they began the brown-nosing of those they had spent their lives excoriating! They had scorned, hated and despised X. Now they could not say enough good of him. People like me who still opposed the regime were first abandoned by them, then bit by bit began to be scorned, hated and despised as X once had been.'

But how does this relate to your daily life? I asked him. 'Academia,' he replied, is very much like one of those sorry East European states. There is a shuffle at the top and Professors X, Y and Z suddenly find themselves loving those they had very recently despised etc.. Brown-nosing has fresh territory to sniff.'

In short, when the mediocre triumph over their betters, sound minds consider their own advantage, their needs -- those apartments, those appointments, promotions and perquisites. Nothing new to that. I pass on as comment what is the way of the world.

At this selfsame university, which was once mine, I asked a crotchety old friend why it was the case that in Academia, a fraught eastern nation occupied by Soviet look-alikes -- boring people in suits, dull minds with dachas -- real talent was so often opposed and mediocrity so often rose to the top. 'Resentment,' my friend replied. 'There are three classes, here as elsewhere. There are the truly first-class, a second-class that wants only safety and survival, and a third class that has ambitions. Third-class people -- which a good university seeks to weed out -- wants to have what the first class has. While the middle plods on, this rabble seeks to undermine what the first class does.'

If you put Mediocrity in charge, as has happened at my old university, the Middle will plod on, the top will emigrate, and the rabble will rise. That too is the way of the world. And not just in Academia.