Female Role Models in Academia.

                                                                         

I don’t think I have gone through a learning process as intense as the current one, which started in the days after arriving in China in 2006. But, though China, of course, never ran out of surprises, I did come to terms with Chinese society.

 I came to understand Chinese social mores, and the horrific historical baggage which so many still carried on their backs. While I deplored many aspects of my life in China, I understood too the causes and attitudes under which these had come about. I knew adulation and utter contempt; but knew exactly where both were coming from.

And I knew what my value was to that society.

In retrospect, learning to urinate squatting over a hole, facing an open-weave basket full of discarded, unwrapped sanitary napkins, used toilet paper and excited blow-flies, with my students, caused less anguish than coming ‘Home’ did.

The things I’m learning now that I am a full-time, permanent resident of a “Developed Nation”  have, just as those years in China did, caused me to shift my way of looking at the world. And of the people within it.

And out of all that I have learned this one random tweet stands out:

Poor officer. If them wanted to kill themself, then them should have been them enough to do it themself. Why involve an innocent normal person. Them was obviously mentally disturbed and super selfish.

The fact that  this was said by a University student after a recent shooting of a fellow student by a police officer in the USA, contextualises it.

I sat looking at these caricatures of sentences and found myself sinking into a despair so profound  it was only slightly leavened by the intense anger that was stirring away on an ever deeper level. The anger now appears to be taking over.

Because this self-conscious set of words is not just bullshit; it destroys the purpose of language. The person who, after a fellow student has just been killed, in public, is able to compose this collection of characters in this particular way has normalised violence. 

Having done so they have sub-divided violence into two types: good violence and bad violence. Good violence is that which Authority practices. Therefore this person has just witnessed a successful outcome. To express sympathy for the victim would be anarchic. While taking to a public platform to laboriously construct a couple of sentences which Neanderthal humans could probably present more understandably is edgy. Am I, in my angst however, swimming against some sacred stream that has declared that, in Western Universities, students are different beings to those elsewhere?

Since coming West, I have had all my ideals and certitude  - which had only been enforced by a lifetime of living in places like Asia, Africa and the South Pacific - shredded in a way I could never have imagined. My life so far had served to show me that the human condition provided us all with similar emotions; skill-sets, fears, ambitions and the need to laugh or cry.

The role of higher learning, of Universities as centres of culture, knowledge, discovery, and humanitarianism had been, also until recently, a constant in my mind. Universities are the indivisible components of a nation’s cultural capital. The purpose they serve is to advance humanity. They were, I had always believed, the beating heart of advancing knowledge.

 What happens to society if they become even more devalued than at present?

Recently I saw another tweet asking what female academics can do to be role models to their students?

I think, primarily, we can be honest. We have no imprimatur which demands we protect students from life – but to prepare them for it: warts, slings, arrows and all.
We can make it clear to them that tolerance is what we must strive for.  We don’t need to construct codes to refer to other human beings. We do not need to encapsulate them in little boxes, seal them in and stamp each box with usage instructions and divisive nomenclature.

We can help our students through the process of learning to be adults by striving for the clarity and vision which helps them to understand reality.  We can refuse to drive wedges between the genders and undo the work our foremothers have died for. We can forbid weasel-words or phrases. We can ensure they know how to find the truth. 

We owe it to them to help them find ways of empowerment that are not made at the expense of the opposite gender. And, for fuck’s sake – we owe them a coherent and objective definition of what Political Correctness is. And what it definitely is not.

Most of all we have to make them see that Walt Disney did not write the script for the world. Nothing, anywhere, has ever happened to even suggest that it is any person’s right not to be hurt. Or not to be offended. (As every educator in the world can attest!) 

From the Vedas to the Scriptures, no religion has ever taught that life, here on earth, is going to be fair. It’s no-one’s right to claim respect because they’ve been through bad times. The world, quite frankly, could not give a flying fuck that any of us have had some bad times in our childhood – and that’s simply because the world is trying to deal with their own bad times, past or present.

For those who are convinced we must do something more; that leading by example is not enough, I’m going to close with an anecdote I’ve told before because it was yet another light-bulb moment for me: -

My adult son had engaged in a behaviour that surprised me, and which concerned a total stranger. The person concerned thanked my son effusively, but my son said “No, don’t thank me, it was just something my mother taught me.”
Afterwards, I cornered him and said “I’ve never taught you to do things like that! I’ve never said a word about it.”
“Geez, Ma, I’ve been living with you all my life!” he started laughing “Of course you’ve never told me to do stuff like that. It’s not what you say: it’s what you do.  I don’t listen [a very truthful statement]. I just watch you BE.”

So, as pedestrian and Victorian as it sounds,  I think the way we come to be worth emulating is to strive always to be the best we can.

But my problem here, and now, is what can I BE in this strange environment I now find myself in? And how the hell am I ever going to find out?

And, FINALLY: We could also ensure that every female student who considers herself a feminist has a copy of  Dale Spenders' There's Always Been A Woman's Movement In This Century .