Territorial Pissing?
California State University Northridge math professor Tihomir Petrov was arraigned last Thursday for urinating on the office door of a math-department colleague. Yes, that’s right: there really are security cameras everywhere. And yes, the dude must have been really “pissed.” Surely “colleague” doesn’t quite capture the tenor of the relationship, one imagines; if we can talk of “frenemies,” perhaps we need to mint the term “collenemy” for this. Yeah, all right: it doesn’t really work, but you see what I’m getting at.
The story was all over Facebook and Twitter, amongst those I “friend” and “follow”: forwarded with some kind of ashamed knowingness by colleagues, with some kind of schadenfreude by my friends and family outside the professorate. Smart People, Stupid Choices. Or perhaps intellectual giants, emotional gnats. Or as my wife Robyn likes to taunt me, modeled on the taunts hurled at the apostle Paul by Porcius Festus, the procurator of Judea: “Your great learning is driving you mad!”
After quickly realizing that I couldn’t wish the story away—that a professor had, again, brought shame on my profession—I did take some time to wonder about the precise manner in which Petrov chose to, um, mark his displeasure? Urine the hallway minding your own business and then, before you know it, urine court. (Urine: you’re in. Get it?)
So what does it mean? I’m no expert in feral behavior; all I know about an act like this one is what Kurt Cobain taught me in “Territorial Pissings.” And with no disrespect intended to the mighty KC, I think the entire message of that song is right there in the title, one of Cobain’s many semi-incoherent tirades against machismo run amok. Was Petrov attempting to “mark” his territory, then, in the way a golden retriever marks a fire hydrant?
Possibly; certainly anxiety over one’s top-dog status is not foreign to the academy. But rather than interpret the vandalism by urination too literally, it seems to me we ought to focus on the feelings that might provoke such a barbaric act. Put simply, college and university professors aren’t always incredibly well socialized. In his book We Scholars, David Damrosch points out that doctoral training in the humanities, at least, is almost a recipe for selecting anti-social personalities: take an intelligent young adult, put him through a couple of years of course-work credentialing, perhaps follow on by hazing him with qualifying examinations of some sort—and then send him to the wilderness of the library stacks for three, four, five, eight years, to pursue his research. Award those who emerge out the other side of the process with a PhD. It doesn’t take a genius to see that those of us who are like Barbara Streisand—people who need people—are at a severe disadvantage.
That’s not David’s point, exactly, but I think it’s an obvious corollary to the scenario he describes: if we want to populate the academy with real humanists, surely something needs to change in the way we train and credential our professors.
Another corollary, it seems to me, follows from this first: that if you have a modicum of social skills and do somehow manage to make it through that credentialing process, you’ll end up some kind of college administrator if you’re not careful. But that’s a story for another day!
Wow… being implicitly included in a group having “a modicum of social skills” (I assume being Chair counts as being “some kind of college administrator,” although what kind, exactly, could be up for discussion). Starts my day off with a warm glow. And not, fortunately, a warm yellow glow, seeping in under the door.
Undoubtedly, elements of this story will either be recalled inaccurately, or were relayed with less than perfect detail by an art professor about 30 years ago, but I think of the story in which Picasso, when asked about the patina on his bronzes, claimed that he pissed on them (just as he pissed on his critics).
Of course, Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole . . .
Well, it could have been worse.
My first year at Stanford, an ancient, non-progressing PhD candidate in the Math department snuck up behind his advisor and did the Maxwell’s Silver Hammer thing. For real. Which caused profs in all departments to re-orient their office desks so they faced the door. You gotta give yourself a fighting chance.
I remember that event, but hadn’t put two & two together and realized you were there at that time. How terrifying.
Terrifying for my advisor, perhaps. He did seem a little edgy when I visited him in his office, now that I think of it….
I guess I’m glad Scott bailed at the ABD mark instead of … um … leaving his mark. If a group is ever formed to overhaul the doctoral process so that it’s a learning and growing experience instead of an endurance test, sign me up.
I don’t know how I missed this a month ago. Now I really have penis envy!