Quentin Wolfsbane, NUT faculty-senate chair of parliamentary protocol, I.M. Wright Professor of Food Fetishism, and author of Totem and Tabouli

When I first started graduate school, several members of my incoming cohort conspired to create a kind of shadow “school” that was supposed to offer a satirical critique of what we thought about our earliest academic experiences. We had been reading work from the Collège de Sociologie in France, a group of intellectuals/iconoclasts from the 1930s (including Georges Bataille and Alexandre Kojeve) who organized themselves around a series of informal discussions and debates in response to their sense of the limitations and psychologizations of a surrealist movement that some of them had helped to create.

The Nepotistic University of Tropes was supposed to be a kind of counter-disciplining, a way for us to speak back to (and caricature) what we considered the insular excesses and self-referentialites of contemporary academia. NUT: The Nepotistic University of Tropes. The name flagged both (i) our suspicions about the politics of citationality (objective criteria only, we railed, hardly justified why a few authors seemed to get all the play) and (ii) our pet peeves about the over-use of certain academic terms. For us, “trope” was a master trope of the latter.

It was also just an attempt to vent and commiserate about the challenges of academic life. And the joke was on us as much as on our professors. We were both thematizing our own anxieties about potentially not cutting it as would-be academics and sublimating those same fears by transferring them to the figure of a capricious and cartoonish academy.

Some of us periodically penned one-sentence manifestos (usually lone sentences that aspired to Proustian lengths, sometimes several paragraphs long) that were supposed to instantiate NUT’s contention about “the inevitable brevity of genius.”

We each had named titles, pseudo-endowed chairs in NUT. I might have been the Professor of Tropes, or it could have been the Professor of Nepotism. I can’t quite remember. But either way, it was a fairly prestigious post.

If I’m remembering correctly, there was also a Professor of Professorships, an Everyman Professor, a Professor of Life, and several professors that specialized in single texts: Professor of The Predicament of Culture, Professor of Orientialism, Profeessor of The Invention of Primitive Society. Individual texts were all these scholars were supposed to read. They were only responsible for reading that one. They simply consulted different sections of it depending on the discussion/debate — no matter the topic and especially if the book’s theme wasn’t ostensibly linked to the topic of discussion at all. NUT assumed that all texts were intrinsically complete, and that such completion was only recognizable if a scholar was willing to forsake all other distracting texts. The side benefit, we argued, was that we didn’t need to read so many different books. We could just chat with the specific professor in question.

Of course, we also whispered critiques at classmates who didn’t seem to demonstrate the same kind of self-consciously satirical reading of our graduate training. We wanted a kind of critical distance from our own academic upbringing, and we dismissed less parodic responses to our plight as complicit with it.

I only bring this up because I am speaking to (and writing letters for) graduate students who are on the job market right now (that time of year again), and a couple of them are particularly cynical about what their graduate training has really amounted to. They seem to express concerns about their past and future trajectory in the academy that mirrors the angst we tried to lampoon (and thereby defang) as struggling graduate students at Columbia University in the 1990s.

NUT only lasted a couple of years, and I’m not sure it did much of anything except make us laugh together about how far we could push one stupid little joke. But part of me also thinks that some of us were able to use this faux-critique as an institutionalized mechanism for humorously negotiating the anxiety-riddled early phases of academic life. The Nepotistic University of Tropes was a joke that helped us “laugh to keep from crying,” as the saying goes. It was pretty silly, but it also allowed us to differently and more substantively (i) contexualize the pragmatic facts of our disciplinary training and (ii) comprehend many of the theorists we were responsible for knowing as budding scholars. Thanks NUT faculty, wherever you are now. And I wish that more graduate students these days had a similar form of serious silliness to help them get through the difficult stretches of academic life. Some of them probably do, more of them should.

(Photo by Flickr user DerrickT)