by Andrés López Román
As he laid down his
fedora and whip he entered a labyrinth much deeper than any archaeological
site. Once Indiana Jones recovered the Cross of Coronado, Academia awaited him
at Marshall College, a quiet institution where routine came to be the norm and
where he transformed himself from Indy the adventurer to Dr. Henry Jones,
Professor of Archaeology. As if the classroom had a filter, change was
inevitable, draining his sense of adventure in exchange for cultural shock.
This sentiment would quickly catch up to him, finding him at the University;
where the journey of learning becomes a red tape process, funding comes to be
as dangerous as a gun and the quest goes as far as the paycheck. Still, Indiana
Jones wasn’t willing to surrender his passion for History, past cultures or
artifacts. The window from his office remained open, and the world wasn’t going
to wait forever.
If one opens a book on
History, or more specifically Archaeology, the encounter with a disclaimer
separating reality from the character of Indiana Jones would not be rare.
Fantasy takes a center role in his movies regarding the way archaeologists work
and how history is perceived. Nevertheless, you’ll see many students, writers
and professors rooting for the main character in the Lucas and Spielberg
franchise. The reason for this is that even though they are able to pinpoint
myth from reality, they get to be entertained by these films as they identify
themselves with certain circumstances surrounding the Indiana Jones world.
Academics are not often chased by giant crushing boulders, Nazis or the occult,
but then again, Indy becomes a metaphor of something lost within academia:
passion for one’s field.
As we become closer to
the activities inside the walls of knowledge institutions, we find
ourselves with a sad reality: The university community has become a drained
place full of frustrations. We’ve become so absorbed by routines and financial
survival that our fields of study are not what they should be, what they could
be. We start pacing through comfortable zones, evading the search for higher
questioning, and avoiding risks. Dullness becomes the norm and the hope of
changes brought by newcomers becomes a scarce expectation since the newer
generations quickly demotivate themselves as they step into an already ill
environment.
Universities were once an
elite within society since they represented a space of intellectual exchange
related to knowledge and information. Lately this reality has come to be the
symptom of a problem that rose quite some time ago: knowledge wasn’t accessible
to the world outside of academia. We kept writing to ourselves, debating and
destroying the work of others as if we were in a campaign for an absolute truth.
In the meantime, society stopped caring about us, preferring the much faster
and more accessible outlets of information: movies, video games and the
Internet.
The uncertainty within
institutions and the frustrations related to the relevance of our work
surrounds us with the sense of calling it quits. “When hysteria reaches
academia, I guess it’s time to call it a career” (see Kingdom of the Crystal
Skull...[its not that bad]). Popular culture has taken care of things while
academics try to survive in a world of “You can but you may not.” However, that
doesn’t mean that Academia doesn’t have a place in society. What it actually
means is that it’s time to escape the claustrophobic and fungus-‐ridden walls
of our offices and go out, through the window, to connect once again with the
world that we, in effect, inhabit.
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