#3: Barack Obama

Obama has a cult following in academia. They love him. Senior history professors -- who always try to be objective -- write facebook status posts about how proud they are of their president (and academics are rarely proud of politicians). English professors no longer care about post-colonial theory or the "Otherness" projected by Western nations. Philosophy professors suddenly care less about theories of power and hegemony -- not to mention post-modernism -- and much more about getting health care reform through the Senate. Those rare conservative academics who happen to disagree with Obama dare not speak. Not on campus, anyway (they'll probably write blog posts about it instead. See #1). Opposing Obama, or his policies, is tantamount to admitting that you are not, after all, an educated person. There are many reasons why academics love -- repeat LOVE -- Obama, including but not limited to the following:

1. He's educated. (Not to be confused with "ed-ju-cated," Mr. Bush). Academics like that he attended Columbia, occasionally famous for its radical politics; and Harvard, where he served as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. After all, most academics who love him were themselves rejected by Columbia and Harvard, so Obama MUST be smart.

2. When talking about Iraq and Iran, he pronounces it "ear-rock" and "ear-ron" -- not "eye-rack" and "eye-ran." (Thanks, Mr. Bush, for bringing this to our attention). This matters to academics. This also matters to Arabic- and Farsi-speaking peoples, and to the Middle East in general. Academics hate to offend "oppressed" peoples by pronouncing words wrong.

3. He's not white. No, really, I'm serious. Virtually half of academic departments in the social sciences and humanities were established to symbolize the end of the domination of white Western civilization. Nevermind that most academics are white. Think of "Area Studies" departments and their quest to bring a voice to "subaltern" (i.e. non-white) peoples. Think of the obsession of post-colonial literature and theory, which analyzes human culture from the point of view of former colonial subjects. Think of the proliferation of Black Studies departments, and compare that with the lack of White Studies departments. Academics love Barack Obama because he's black and because Africans love him, but most of all because it seems to them that they did, after all, make racial equality a reality in American culture and politics.

4. He's liberal. This should be obvious, but it requires an explanation in relation to the academic world. Academics are the hardest working and most educated poor people on the planet (well, at least in the West, which many nevertheless try to subvert). Obama's promise of welfare expansion and universal healthcare is greeted with adulation by academics. First and foremost, their intellectual convictions make them care about poor people more than most other demographics do. Perhaps, too, academics need welfare checks so they can continue to rent pricey apartments two blocks from campus, and so they can keep going to Happy Hour three nights a week, where they buy $3 pints by the half-dozen. Academics also need these welfare checks to stay abreast of art shows and indie concerts, and most of all so they can sample foreign food from award-winning restaurants. Most of all, they need to buy lots of cigarettes, and the tobacco tax just went up. These same academics need universal health care because they're too poor and too busy -- and too disorganized -- to get it otherwise.

5. Obama smokes. This is a great comfort to academics, who also smoke at the following times: (i) between classes; (ii) before and after lectures or TA sections; (iii) after every chapter they read at the library or office; (iv) after every paragraph they write; (v) at Happy Hour; and (vi) during all their leisure time. Academic smoking is proportionally related to the amount of work required of them at any given time.

6. He's more British than American. His mother actually was British (ethnically, anyway). It also helps that his mother was a Ph.D. in anthropology and that she lived abroad for half her life. Obama's father was a subject of British Kenya (major kudos from the academics described in point #3). This makes him vaguely European without compromising his non-whiteness. Major kudos all 'round.

7. Europeans love him. For academics, this is a major feather in Obama's cap. Europe has everything that academics wish America had. Europeans have welfare states and universal healthcare. They're liberal. They're green. They're more educated. They have public transportation and tiny cars. They don't go to war without just cause.* They speak eight languages by age five.** They don't shop at Walmart. They're skinny. And they smoke. Enough said.

*Not recently, anyway. And not unless they depend on American goodwill.
**This statement may or may not be exaggerated.

#2: Old Clothes

Many academics wear old clothes in their attempt to look (and smell) the part of a stodgy professor. They're almost always men. This type of academic usually studies one of the old mainstays of the humanities: English, philosophy, history, or classics. That's because these subjects saw their golden years long ago. This type of academic is also something of an antiquarian: they love all things old. They go to used book sales to find old copies of Oliver Twist and Anna Karenina, of Gibbon and Marx, of Wordsworth and Homer. They secretly wished they had lived in those simpler times, 100 or even 200 years ago, when people actually read great writers (for lack of an alternative) and when said writers generally hailed from the leisured upper classes.

This type of academic also tends to be elitist. They hold themselves to be superior to their more "modern" counterparts in the academic world. Some of them believe they are modern-day aristocratic elites; others boast of their aristocratic ancestors (even if they're American). They care about surnames. They enjoy talking about their ancestors who signed the Declaration of Independence or who once owned sprawling plantations in Virginia. English names fare best: Kennedy, Williams, Bennett, Lloyd, Thompson -- these are several that can trace elite ancestry. The really common names are less desirable -- Smith and Jones, for instance -- because they're undistinguished. Some foreign names also fare well, particularly if they can be associated with a currently serving foreign leader.
Their favorite item of clothing is the tweed suit, complemented by traditional leather dress shoes (usually brown wingtips) and an English flatcap (otherwise associated with golf, another aristocratic British pastime). When tweed suits seem too dressed-down, they go with traditional black three-piece suits and a bow-tie (see above photo).
If these academics are able, they grow beards to help them look the part. There are no strict rules on academic beard growing, but they're invariably trimmed and always full. If the academic is a grad student, the excuse for growing a beard usually has something to do with looking older for their job as a teaching assistant. If they actually are older, the explanation generally has something to do with keeping their face warm during the winter months.

Goatees are unacceptable. Mustaches are too closely associated with dirty white cops and 40-something military guys. Some, however, succeed brilliantly with Edwardian mustaches (see photo at left), especially if they're experts on the late Victorian era or on the First World War.













These old-fashioned academics also wear corduroy and sweater vests, often together. The alternative is to substitute a turtleneck for the sweater vest, and to cover it with an old looking suit. One never wants to be too obvious or excessive, however. The key for an antiquarian academic is to blend the old with the new, just enough to inspire one's elite heritage without seeming to be an elitist.

#1: Blogging

People who blog roughly fall into three categories. (1) "emo" people who write trivial and mundane things in the hope that someone will notice and take an interest in their life; (2) aspiring writers who harbor secret desires to become famous without having to find a publisher; and (3) intellectuals who believe they have something profound to say about the world that isn't already said in the New York Times or by another published author.

Academics -- and especially graduate students -- fall into this third category. Their most devoted readers will be family members, so their posts will be both informative and self-ingratiating. They need to prove to their father and other knowledgeable family members how much they're learning and how well they're doing in school. They need to inform their mother and other uninformed family members about things in which those relations have no knowledge to speak of. And they need to prove to their undergraduate friends how well they've done for themselves since they graduated.

If the graduate student is bold, he or she will write about politics (see later posts). This is a dangerous balancing act because the graduate student likely came from a conservative family but needs to also prove to their grad school colleagues that they have, in fact, become enlightened with liberal thought. They must say nothing that angers their father or upsets their mother; and they must say nothing that turns their grad school friends against them. The best way to achieve this balance is to talk about politics in the most oblique way possible. This could mean making an extended blog post about Edward Said and critical theory as a way of opposing the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their parents will be impressed with how well they seem to understand complicated theoretical ideas (without recognizing what they're actually saying, of course), and their grad school counterparts, who also understand these things, will be pleased with the outcome of their post. The other main strategy is to write an extended piece about an historical event (or events) and to sneak their political views in without anyone taking very much notice. Owing to their greater knowledge of the subject, their conservative friends and relatives won't be able to challenge what they wrote about the historical event, and their grad school friends, again, will be pleased with how well they made their historical knowledge "relevant" to current events.

Most of all, always remember that academics write blogs to get noticed (and generally because they aren't getting noticed -- yet, at least -- in academia. So leave comments and let them know you read what they wrote. Every academic knows that "neglect is the death of a scholar."