Customer Reviews

ACADEMIC SELF: AN OWNER'S MANUAL

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Despite the generality of the title, Hall's book is heavily bent towards an audience of humanities professors and graduate students whose careers are in - or will be in - teaching rather than research institutions. Although there is much that is accessible and relevant to a wider audience of academic professionals, Hall's heavy use of terminology from his own discipline (I still have no idea what a problematization is,) as well as his assumption that the reader is familiar with one particular school of self-help books, makes much of the book useless to someone who hasn't read and studied what he has.

The introduction is the worst part in this respect. If I wasn't given this book by someone who expected me to read it, I would have stopped right there. However, "The Academic Self" does oscillate between addressing Hall's fairly limited core audience and providing useful advice to a broader range of scholars, both at an abstract level and in terms of nuts-and-bolts, plan-out-your-day suggestions.

This is an excellent and brief investigation of the psychology of the academic self. It is a self-help book designed for those who set the bar very high and try to be all things to all people. Most helpful is the first chapter on "self" wherein the author calls academics to examine their own insecurities.

Hall makes the fascinating observation that it is our very competency as critical scholars that makes us quite incompetent at making positive, creative connections with other people, across specialties and collaborating between faculty, administrators and students. As he posits, we are always already scripting ourselves just as we write narratives. But we can practice close readerly self-criticism with a more forgiving, positive, and community-oriented approach than "criticism" usually implies, writing, "In order to be a good colleague, we have to admit and remember our own limitations. Furthermore, we also have to forgive ourselves for them, for not meeting some impossible ideal of perfect professional mastery" (73).
He asks broadly, "Why are we drawn to this profession and what do we expect from it?" are questions too infrequently asked of ourselves, students, and each other. Furthermore, he comes from the cultural studies tradition, where scholars refer to "reflexivity"--our "reflection upon the nature of reflection itself." Hall says "a `meta'-reflective move... has enormous transformative potential, if we recognize our own limitations and our need for the perspectives and commentary of others." Further, "self-aware reflexivity" requires that we "reflect critically upon self-reflexivity" itself. Doing so, we do not simply criticize problems from outside but question our own complicity in creating problems in the first place. Then we actively suggest solutions and alternatives, all the more responsibly.
Acknowledging the tension we're in, Hall observes, "We academics are fully subject to broad social and paradigmatic changes, even as we act often as very adept commentators upon those changes." To illustrate, he points out, "discrete theories--queer, feminist, materialist, post-structuralist--are useful tools, but only partial truths." Every disciplinary shift in knowledge framework helps us acknowledge the prominence of the observer in creating aspects of reality. In all, while the book's writing style was a little excessively polysyllabic, its ideas help with a similar message (see Be The Hero for a more direct guide): We make ourselves all the time by how we tell ourselves our stories. Grade: B.

This book is an excellent primer for junior university faculty in institutions with a teaching focus. Chapter 4 is especially helpful in understanding a young professor's place in the institution and among colleagues and how this relates to advancing one's career. ACADEMIC SELF: AN OWNER'S MANUAL