The Painted Porch – or – The Academy is Where You Find it

Maybe it is because I am coming to the end of my graduate experience, or maybe it is because I have spent the last 6 years longing to have this experience bound in a specific physical space that would serve to narrate this path – but I find myself very focused on the idea of the university.  But more and more I have come to understand that the trappings of the university are meaningless in someways (although I am not discounting the importance of the university structure).  What I am driving at is that the real university is in the mind and in the mind’s relation with others who occupy this non-space.

Yesterday, I received an email from a German colleague, a PhD student from Berlin who I met at SIPP in 2005.  He noted that he was also nearing the end of his program, and that his dissertation was about to be reviewed by his committee.  He attached the manuscript to the email – all 118 pages of text.  In this moment – what my wife would call a liminal space – after years of journeying toward the end of the doctoral process, and after the stifling of our social being in order to produce research that is hopefully novel and interesting, I think there is a need for recognition and communion.  To share what we have produced.  And yet most people beyond the committee either do not have the time or interest to engage deeply with us in this final mile of the process.

I was flattered that my acquaintance from Europe felt strongly enough to send me his manuscript.  In a few years – with any luck – neither of us will have the time to spend reviewing a manuscript that doesn’t pertain directly to our own subdiscipline.  But at this moment, I find joy in walking with him toward his path of completion, honoring the document itself, and recognizing the sacrifices that each of us makes as part of this process — even though most remain unspoken.