Spring 2000
Volume 26, Number 3

The man looked at the proposal and scribbled a few quick comments. The friend revised and returned with the proposal on Thursday. The deadline was the following Monday. On Monday, she again returned, whereupon her director-to-be opened a drawer and corrected the proposal in front of her.

He called her into his office a few days later and proceeded to berate her. Her English was no good. Another South American who had preceded her was a drunk and caused a lot of trouble to the department. My wife's friend was so shocked she began to sob. She had just had an operation for a tumor on her thyroid and had not yet fully regained her voice. It's not clear if the man knew of this operation.

The friend cried all weekend until she finally resolved to do something. She called the director-to-be on Monday and made what she emphatically termed a "formal request" for a meeting. The man complied. Furthermore, it seems he was subsequently apologetic when she reminded him that he had indirectly accused her of being a drunk as well as a troublemaker. He had been "stressed out." He assured her that he was "just concerned for you."

Is this "concern" what Gallop means when she declares that dissertators are now her "pedagogical preference?" If not, what sort of concern for her students are we to presume Gallop now has--beyond their inescapable erotic provocation, that is? Is she concerned about the effect she has on them on those days when she doesn't want to be bothered? Is she concerned about the every day consequences for her students of her own professional distinction?

Perhaps she is. But in the framework of Gallop's latest discourse, it would appear that all we are to attend to in my above narrative is its potential erotic content. Perhaps the professor was attracted to my wife's friend. Or perhaps she was attracted to him. Best and most fashionable of all, what if the professor was attracted to the earlier South American student, a male? Indeed, as Gallop would have it, "the dissertator-supervisor relation is already in itself an exorbitant relation" (p. 604). But what might be gained by emphasizing its exorbitance could well be lost if its commonplace occasions--not to mention disciplinary protocols or professional imperatives--are ignored.

Let me put this more strenuously. It's simply outrageous to read of "the dissertator-supervisor relation" characterized so breezily and from such a lofty position that the relation becomes almost piquant. In order to argue for a fuller pedagogical comprehension whereby each person in the relation can theoretically fuck the other, Gallop must dismiss a more routine understanding whereby in actual practice one gets fucked by the other--every day, hundreds of times, all across the country and around the world. As I have recently argued, the dissertation director "constitutes the most prominent vanishing point of an individual figure in the organization of higher education."1 What we have in "Resisting Reasonableness" is the latest form of this vanishing, whereby the dissertator is reborn under the powerful gaze of the dissertation director, who doesn't have to be herself or himself examined. In fact, given the enduring organization of professional life, in which any director's authority is crucial to the professional future of a dissertator, this gaze cannot easily be turned upon itself by anybody else; at most, dissertators appear in public in the director's acknowledgements, where we find two of Gallop's. Who among these two or the rest is going to write a story of how Gallop dismissed or berated them? Even if one did, who would publish it? So all we can do is ask, Why is Critical Inquiry publishing Gallop, so luxuriantly secure in her own vanishing?

1. Terry Caesar, Writing in Disguise: Academic Life in Subordination (Athens, Ohio, 1998), p. 47.

Terry Caesar is senior professor of American literature at Mukogawa Women's University, Japan, and professor of English at Clarion University. He is the author of two books on academic life--Conspiring with Forms (1992) and Writing in Disguise (1998)--as well as a study of American travel writing, Forgiving the Boundaries (1995).