I was really quite deluded. And like all deluded people I was also deluded about being deluded.
I I’d seen other journalists go back to university and become credentialed chin strokers who got to contribute to “The Conversation”. Their life looked so virtuous. Useful. And cosy. I wanted a bit of that! A kind of buttered toast fireside respite from horrid late-capitalism hustling.
Was it possible to have an academic do-over, now, aged in my fifties? I didn’t have reality I would have been breezy and made money in the property market. Instead I was still a sucker for what the socialist blogger Fredrik deBoer calls “the cult of smart”: the pervasive modern idea that intelligence is the defining human quality and that academic performance is a shorthand for total human value. Like two bald men arguing over a comb, possibly only thwarted academics like me still subscribe to this view. Regardless, I wanted to have another go.
