After a long absence I am starting a course of study at UWI, St Augustine, again. This time I’m a master’s candidate, pursuing a degree in interdisciplinary gender studies at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies. Nobody who knows me is exactly surprised; when I announced on my Facebook page I was accepted to start this September, Prof Rhoda Reddock said it was “long overdue.” But it is a little creepy going back to school at the same time as my 14-year-old enters Fourth Form and my 21-year-old is herself a freshman at a US college. Of course there have been people older than I enrolling in higher education; my good friend Barbara graduated with her master’s—with high commendation—when she was in her 70s. I am doubtless my fears that my calcified brain is too old to learn new tricks are completely unfounded. (Perhaps not completely. Barbara Jenkins, after all, is sui generis.)
However, in going back to school I’m not only embarking on a new adventure as a 40-year-old university student, I’m entering academia with the intention of becoming—gasp—an academic.
To understand my horror you have to first understand that it has been nearly 20 years since I last donned the hat of an academic—literally, as I graduated in cap and gown from UWI, St Augustine, in 1998. Since I had matriculated in 1992, it has been 22 years since I was first a “fresher” on the St Augustine campus. In the intervening years I’ve done a lot of things, but most of my working life has been lived as a print journalist, a career in which I have actively struggled against using academic language. Two of my favourite words are “epistemology” and “ontology,” but if I use either of them in the papers I am soundly buffed.
And rightly so: it has often seemed to me as a journalist, a person in the business of making information and ideas widely available to the public, that academic language, far from being designed to clarify ideas, only serves to obfuscate them. Why not just say “ways of knowing” and “ways of being,” rather than using two words that perhaps 90 per cent of the population have neither heard of nor need to know? Worse than being a journalist, I’m also an author. People joke that those who can, do; those who can’t do, teach; and those who can neither do nor teach become critics. Critics aren’t always academics, but it is common that the most seriously regarded critics are academics, the kind of critic who pulls apart a piece of work and studies it the way a pathologist studies germs: exhaustively, microscopically and dispassionately.
Academics have the reputation of being in an “ivory tower,” studying things that nobody is really interested in and that have no bearing on real life. I don’t think that is absolutely true, especially in the field of gender research, which I believe has real relevance to almost every aspect of our lives. Academics very often do tedious but necessary research into the processes and materials underpinning progress or our understanding of the world, both past and present. As a journalist I had several of them, including Prof Reddock herself, on speed dial for when I needed a deeper technical perspective on an issue than my own research could afford. Academics create and make sense of statistical data, essential to both journalists and policy-makers. There are at least four areas in T&T right now I’d love to have current statistics and analysis on: maternal mortality, child sexual abuse, other forms of domestic violence and rape. Without knowing and understanding the prevalence of a phenomenon and conditions under which the phenomenon exists, you can’t make meaningful policy to address it.
For example, we can guess at the numbers of stranger and acquaintance rapes occurring in T&T, but without accurate statistics and analysis of them, we can’t know for sure whether stranger rape—the bogeyman of the PH-taxi-rapist, for example—is as prevalent as we think it is—and whether we therefore need to clamp down on PH taxis to reduce the incidence of stranger rape. My own intended area of research isn’t quite so urgent—I propose to look at Caribbean popular romantic fiction—but it’s still something that I hope will be useful to both authors and those looking at gender relations in the region. Anyway, academics aren’t so bad. Some of my best friends are academics.
