Special to Badger

Those with a love-hate relationship to academia will love this post by my friend Christine.

The last post-grad presenter in a particularly stuffy and crowded classroom session had that fluorescent-blinded lab-rat look about him, bless his heart, like he only on the rarest occasions emerged from the university basement. He droned and demi-gestured through the myopic reading of his jargon-burdened paper like he hadn't encountered an actual human in so long he'd forgotten that communicating with them might be the purpose of his enterprise, and certainly failed to recognize that there were any with him in the room.

As the hermetic bullshit piled up in the front, in the back row the irrepressable Murphy and I suffered an irresistable fit of the giggles, while the heavily credentialed Madame E., who when provoked can sling theory with the best of them but who reserves a special disgust for the petty traders in academic capital, fanned herself and raised a dangerously impatient brow, then finally fell asleep.