The Advantage of the Deranged

One might have thought that a derangement of the mental faculties would be of some disadvantage to an intellectual career, had one not time and again met with the most absurd and idiotic pronouncements in spittle and ink by our most celebrated academicians.

.....But a derangement of the mental faculties has one advantage in the academy which elsewhere would be seen as a liability and a danger: it allows that one might proclaim without necessity and with effulgent whim the boldest connections between things, which thitherto would have been deemed absurd, and thus it yields a never ending supply of what the academy esteems most: originality.
.....We are so used to thinking of originality as a good thing, that it is all too easy for us to accept originality per se as a good thing. But only a little thought is required to understand that originality by itself is a sorry and silly thing. An estimation of orginality per se would have us esteem a computer made of custard that doesn’t work above an old and conventional computer that does. Of course, when it’s put this way, no one would countenance originality for its own sake.
.....But as I say, in the paper-mill of the academy, where consequences are barely perceived and where, presumably, matters are thought to be epiphenominal, originality in all its unfettered and insane glory reigns. There is good reason for this. A never-ending supply of originality means a never-ending supply of work. If academicians restricted themselves tomorrow to saying what is both original and sensible, or just sensible, academicians would find themselves a week next Tuesday circling the classifieds. But with a working ethos that esteems orginality above all, there is no end to what can be said, and thus no end to academic work.
.....The modern academician finds himself stuck for something to say only for a short while; for with orginality trumping reason and evidence, there is nothing to stop him forging ahead with that ground-breaking work on the hitherto unsuspected link between paper clips and hegemonic systems of power.
.....For him there is no lifetime of barren struggle looking for the causal connection between x and y, only to find there isn’t one, because to him x and y can be picked at random and made to stick with the glue of some esoteric and hermeneutic theory. Indeed, the more disassociated x and y are, the more bold, shocking and original is the forging of a link between them.
.....In the atmosphere of untrammled orginality, the befuddled and irrational half-wit suffers no disadvantage; on the contrary, he blazes a trail.

If you have a favourite academic loon, please recommend him or her at The Hatemonger’s Quarterly, whose “crack young staff” are running an Academic of the Month competition.