I once taught in a Classics department where everyone was intelligent, sensible, down-to-earth, and committed to excellence in the field. That constellation of qualities is rare today in most academic departments, where fraudulent theory-freaks and political activists have hijacked the levers of power. But in our small world of Latin and Greek, we had resisted the tide.
Part of this success was due to our Chair’s hiring policies. He had a term that he used whenever we discussed potential additions to the staff. He would say in our private meetings “Remember—we don’t hire eyfwanns.” The acronym eyfwann stood for Energetic Young Fuck With Absurd New Notions. It meant some out-of-control enthusiast, usually fresh out of grad school, who was bursting with unfulfilled dreams about revolutionizing the teaching of the Classics. This is exactly the sort of person you don’t want as a colleague. He will plague you and the entire department with proposals and suggestions and inane plans for reorganization, and when these are resisted, he will insist on running for Chair. When he loses, he turns into an obnoxious malcontent who badmouths the department for being hidebound and reactionary. He eventually leaves of his own accord, and takes a more congenial position—typically that of a curriculum coordinator for some trendy alternative high school. I’ve seen these horrid eyfwanns in English and Classics departments at Fordham, Hunter, NYU, Pace, Nassau Community College, and a dozen other schools.
The trouble is, however, that eyfwanns are becoming harder to avoid. They are proliferating like roaches in a damp cellar. And it’s not just academia—not by a long shot. The rampant amoral capitalism that is now triumphant world-wide loves eyfwanns, and encourages them with bonuses and promotions.
After all, the entire raison d’être of capitalism is profit before anything else. Nothing matters beyond the bottom line. And therefore everything in the world is considered lawful prey if money can be squeezed out of its reorganization, change, or destruction. Eyfwanns have ideas that, regardless of their stupidity, might just generate an extra dollar or a new market. So capitalism nurtures them and puts them into positions where they can wreak havoc with anything established and traditional. Some fat-assed, cigar-chomping businessman will take a perfectly good establishment and say “I want some new blood here!” And he’ll appoint a bright-eyed eyfwann to tear it apart.
In fact, I have always been amazed that leftists are viscerally anti-capitalist. Next to a world war, capitalism is the most potent engine for social, political, and cultural upheaval that the planet has ever known. It is utterly unconcerned with tradition. It is oblivious, in equal measure, to truth and falsehood. It despises religion. It is indifferent to scholarship and the arts. It tears down inherited structures with all the robust enthusiasm of a Vandal horde. It treats the legislature, the courts, and the media as its whores-on-retainer. The slavish devotion of mainstream American conservatism to amoral corporate greed and neocon empire-building is what makes me despise the movement with an even greater vehemence than my hatred for the left. Lenin joked about capitalists selling him the rope with which to hang them. If he had lived a bit longer, he would have come to realize that rampant capitalism was the most effective tool imaginable for bulldozing a society’s traditions. And to the faux conservatives among my readers: please spare me your laudatory e-mails about Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, and the glories of laissez-faire predation. I’m simply not interested.
But let’s get back to eyfwanns. Having experienced the noisome presence of several, I can paint a picture of one that might serve as a useful diagnostic guide. As the ancient Greek writer Theophrastus did with his Ethikoi Charakteres (“Behavioral Types”), I shall depict the typical academic eyfwann. In fact, I’ll follow the Theophrastan model exactly, starting with an abstract definition and proceeding to specific description. Here goes.
The state or condition of being an eyfwann is one of profound dissatisfaction with things as they are, and a concomitant desire to abolish them, or rearrange them in a novel or unheard-of manner.
The eyfwann talks in hurried, impatient, and staccato-driven bursts. He’s always cornering you in the corridor with some “urgent” matter to discuss. He’s tense and anxious, as if he were running late for an appointment. Everything he says is laced with a bogus excitement, as if some disaster were imminent and your attention therefore absolutely necessary. He is never laid back, calm, or at ease. He’s like a rabbit on amphetamines, or as the Sicilians say, he has un zufaloru ntu culu (“a rocket up his ass”). Whenever other faculty hear his voice in the hallway, they discreetly shut their office doors and pretend to be elsewhere.
The eyfwann is into all the fashionable chin-music that has been the background static of academia since the 1960s. Progressive change is his mantra and his religion. He’s appalled that most faculty members think John Dewey is a blended scotch, Peter Elbow an animated cartoon character, and Paulo Freire a Brazilian rock group. He’s mortally offended if you speak of this trinity of gurus with less than profound respect. The quickest way to get him out of your presence is to make a sarcastic crack about any of these frauds.
The eyfwann lives for departmental meetings. They are as vital to him as blood to a vampire. He will never miss such a meeting, and he’ll insist that it run the entire scheduled time. He will demand discussion of things not on the official agenda, and will make tedious speeches about “our responsibilities as educators.” He’ll constantly use the pronoun we, as for example in the sentence “What do we as a department stand for?” or “How do we fulfill our students’ needs?”
It never occurs to him that in a department of twenty highly individualistic scholars, there is no we other than the payroll sheet.
Closely connected with his love for meetings is the eyfwann’s insatiable need to attend academic conferences. He’ll pester the Chair and the Budget Committee endlessly, begging them to bankroll his trips to other cities, where he can present a paper or sit at a roundtable discussion or hear the newest jargon-laced blather that passes for scholarship. He’ll then duly record each of such trips on his résumé, as if these fatuous academic conferences actually meant anything more than an opportunity to get away from one’s spouse for a weekend.
The eyfwann will ostentatiously and noisily hold consultation hours every day, and there will be lines of students outside his office waiting to see him. In fact, he will make regular attendance at these office hours mandatory for all students, even though there really isn’t a goddamned thing you need to tell an undergraduate outside of class. During these sessions he will keep his office door wide open, so that everyone in the department can hear the lengthy and patronizing advice he dispenses to his students.
The eyfwann dresses in a totally inappropriate manner. Despite the fact that he’s working at a major university, he will come to class in Birkenstock sandals and blue jeans, as if he were on an outing to Coney Island. He will wear a cotton T-shirt with the haloed face of Che Guevara on it. This idiosyncrasy in dress is reinforced by the ill-disguised animus he nurtures towards any student, male or female, who wears conservative clothing.
All students, however, are the unfortunate targets of the eyfwann’s obsessions. The students of an eyfwann can’t just attend class, take notes, and pass their exams. They’ll have to confer with each other in study groups, and then produce committee reports on their conclusions. The eyfwann will also insist that they do individual oral presentations, go to museum exhibits, and attend public lectures around the city. He’ll come up with some absurdly complicated “independent study” project for each of them. He’ll expect them to keep a written daily log about their responses to the class and to the assigned readings (which will be prodigious). In short, the eyfwann will do everything in his power to make sure that his students are utterly exhausted by the end of the term, and ready to drop out of college.
Having alienated both his departmental colleagues and his students, the eyfwann will try to make friends with the higher-ups in administration. He’ll brown-nose the deans and provosts. He’ll wheedle himself into luncheon dates with coordinators, vice presidents, and the chairs of other departments. He’ll desperately network with like-minded eyfwanns all over the school. And after a few years he’ll leave in frustration and bitterness, having come to the realization that almost no one in academia gives a limp-dicked fuck about his new notions and his grandiose plans for a pedagogical revolution.
Get the picture? That’s why my Chair refused to hire any. We interviewed them, of course—but that was precisely to find out if they had any eyfwann qualities. As soon as we sensed one, we crossed that candidate off our list, and gave him a polite goodbye. It made for a blissful department.
We may have won that little battle, but the war as a whole is being lost. As the juggernaut of Big Business tears through the planet, intent on destroying every vestige of the unprofitable, eyfwanns are going to proliferate in all fields of endeavor. Our corporate masters like them.
