Work of little or no value done merely to look busy.
I had an uneasy relationship with a college advisor who sponsored an Independent Reading for me. An Independent Reading is a form of coursework (done for credit) that covers material not included in any of the school’s courses.
I don’t know if my interest in Independent Readings was unusual or how many other people did them, but I ended up with two of them on my final transcript after making several attempts to find unique subjects for study and professors to sponsor.
The focus of my first Reading was the history of the recording industry and the way it influenced the development and history of music — with particular focus on Thomas Edison. That was a great subject, one worthy of a full class I would think, and I seem to remember getting a good grade for that project. The freeform nature of the Reading suited me, and I looked for subject matter for another one.
I tried for a wide-ranging topic of the Phenomenology of Music, hoping to draw together disparate musicological resources — everything from artwork on sheet music covers to subtleties of Rachmaninoff’s orchestral scores — into a coherent focus that accounted for human’s interest in music.
I may have been reading too much Carl Dahlhaus at the time, as in retrospect I see that my vision for this Reading presumed obscurity right from the start, relying on the obtuseness of impenetrably allusive rhetoric.
Because of this seeming lack of direction the professor who sponsored the Reading became increasingly skeptical of it as the semester progressed. At one point he asked me, using a word I’d never heard until then, if this was “just a big boondoggle.” I don’t remember my reply but it seemed like a harsh question from one whose ardor for the project seemed limitless when he agreed to sponsor it. He was a new professor at the school and I came to think that he agreed to sponsor the Reading in a bit of newbie enthusiasm, going against what would have been better judgment had he thought about it more.
Nevertheless, by the end of the semester we were on the same page again, his enthusiasm renewed even as his time available to evaluate my work lessened. He never showed up to most of the scheduled meetings in the latter part of the year, but his evaluation of my final paper was glowing and I believe I got an A.
I don’t know if the “boondoggle” comment had any influence over things or if I genuinely managed to convince the guy that my motives were sincere. My approach of taking seemingly disparate elements of study and reining them in under a broadly contoured theme must have come from my love of the television show “The Paper Chase,” which aired on the Showtime cable network during my college years.
I may have imagined myself as the character of Hart, whose tenure as the editor of his law school’s “Law Review” journal was embattled over Hart’s desire to ask his writers to take the articles they had written (and assumed to be finished) and “turn it around” to see the stories from a point of view that none would expect.
Hart’s heavy-lifting approach to the “Law Review” left his writers begging for mercy but ultimately earned him and the staff an unprecedented congratulatory visit from the mighty Professor Kingsfield, the imperious professor whose every word and tic seemed to speak volumes. In the history of the journal there was no memory of Kingsfield openly expressing admiration for any individual issue or article, but Hart’s far-reaching approach to his first issue impressed Kingsfield and prompted his un-announced visit.
I never had my Kingsfield. I had good professors but none whose reputation and influence within their field of specialty even vaguely resembled the authority of Professor Kingsfield in “The Paper Chase.” I think the closest I ever came to the Kingsfield form of tough-love education was the day I got the boondoggle question, and somehow I don’t feel it challenged me much.
