TAs prove point
Brandon Fogel
Graduate student
Sigh. Graduate students have been defamed again. Our characters have been maligned, our capacities questioned, our motivations doubted.
But it was not Katie Hughes's clever April 17 Inside column that proffered these slanders most effectively; it was the lifeless responses elicited from the graduate student body itself.
Katie's excessively witty column about TA culture demanded a sly, irony-saturated response. Apparently wishing to demonstrate a pervasive lack of wit, TAs responded with straightforward indignation, straightforward refutation and straightforward insult. It was as if we collectively wished to verify Katie's sentiment by example, showing how technically accurate yet dull we can be.
For example, Katie referred to us as "bitter low grade giving pretentious TA," going two for three on the truth (we inflate our grades as much as professors). One TA responded with "bitter, sarcastic, low grade-receiving Katie Hughes." Now, copying your opponent's phrase and changing one word is not very clever. This would have been a good opportunity to invent a new, witty phrase, perhaps retaining the meter, something such as "grade-grubbing, pre-yuppie, anti-intellectual undergrad."
Or, one might have graded the column, complimenting the wickedly rendered sarcasm but noting the grammatical mistakes: "theorum" (misspelled), "Nietche" (misspelled), "bitter low grade giving pretentious TA" (need commas and hyphens).
In the summary comments, one could have proposed avenues for improvement, perhaps suggesting that Katie put down her skim-milk-frappa-whatever, remove the sideways or backward baseball cap from her boyfriend's head, and realize that the world is bigger than her conservative, Catholic, obscenely pampered, (almost certainly) homogeneously white, pre-med/business/law, alcohol-obsessed life.
But, now, this is impossible. If I were to grade Katie's column, I would have to also grade the responses to it, and Katie would win the highest mark.
Instead of refuting her, we simply proved her most incisive point: Notre Dame graduate students are just no fun.
Brandon Fogel
Graduate student
history and philosophy of science
April 22, 2002
All Viewpoint Stories for Tuesday, April 23, 2002
