Going Slightly Mad
The top news story here in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex is the adjunct professor of astronomy at a Tarrant Community College campus frightening his students on the first day of class by covering his face with a scarf, turning off all the lights, and talking about the connection between astronomy and Islam. I encourage you to go see what he looks like, as he clearly violates all stereotypes of who might be making such a connection.
Tonight on TV it was reported that his students last semester loved him. When he was the math tutor prior to this school year, he was reported to be absolutely brilliant. Nobody thought him to be particularly strange — certainly not strange enough not to hire him to be an adjunct professor. Clearly his behaviors were well within the normal range while working at the college as a math tutor, and he was obviously not notable in this way last semester.
So what happened?
I’m not going to pretend to know what happened. I’m in no position to give him a diagnosis, let alone one from afar, based on a few news reports.
Let me instead tell you another story.
Once upon a time I was a graduate student in molecular biology. I was having trouble coming up with a thesis project because every idea I came up with ended up facing the same problem: we either didn’t have the technology at my school, or the technology hadn’t been invented yet. The project I ended up settling on was something that required a computer programmer with extremely good skills. Keep in mind that I was working on this Master’s in the mid-90s. I didn’t have the programming skills to do the project, but I found someone who said he could do it. The problem is, he never did do it, and I never finished my Master’s thesis.
Faced with the failure to come up with a thesis project that was possible given the technology of the time, faced with the frustration that comes with that, I moved back in with my parents and got a job as a night watchman at a coal mines. This step down from trying to figure out how to develop what would have been a first step in the development of bioinformatics to security guard was a major blow to the ego. I had two panic attacks or nervous breakdowns — I’m not quite sure what they were. There was a huge disconnect between my perceived brilliance (only supported by how I was treated at college by practically everyone, particularly my professors) and my physical reality that caused me to break down. (I wrote a fictionalized version of what happened to me that was published in 2016.)
Twenty years of ego-checks has settled me down quite a bit, even if I still have not really found any employment that reflects my education — which now includes a Master’s in English and a Ph.D. in the Humanities, after I dropped out of that Master’s in molecular biology. But I can understand why someone who everyone thinks is brilliant, who is extremely well-educated, but cannot do any better than teaching as a tutor or an adjunct might, just might, begin to act in ways most others consider bizarre.
Any time that there is a disconnect between one’s perception of oneself (a perception others contribute to creating) and what one perceives one “deserves” in and from the world because of it, there is going to be a danger of there being a nervous breakdown or at least a panic attack of some sort. But we have to ask ourselves why it is that truly brilliant people, people who others consistently say are brilliant, are not able to find a place in this culture, and are all too often relegated to tutoring, adjuncting, or even substitute teaching. It’s all too easy to say, “Well, provide something of value” while ignoring the fact that we are providing something, or trying to provide something, that we think is of value. We may be wrong. But it’s also possible that what’s happening is a disconnect between creative, high-IQ people and the culture. If our culture creates people who do not value true creativity, ability, and intelligence, what else can we expect but to see more and more breakdowns of this kind?
