Speaking to Outsiders: Can Our Theory Make a Bigger Bang?

Last updated on: January 8, 2014 at 9:05 am by Guest Contributor

Speaking to Outsiders: Can Our Theory Make a Bigger Bang? 2014-01-08T09:05:00-05:00 Guest Contributor

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Every year during November and December, I find myself confronting a very particular problem—one which I am sure is familiar to all of my colleagues, but one we rarely ever discuss: how to explain what we do to our families.

While on a long visit to my parents in Murrells Inlet, SC this year, their friends and neighbors frequently asked about my studies, and I would inform them that I was on track to graduate from my doctoral program in May 2017. This answer would elicit guffaws; they would slap my father on his back, saying “You are certainly a tolerant man, Perry,” and remind me with apparent glee that one day my father’s patience would wear out, and I would have to get a “real job.” My explanation that finishing my doctoral program in six years, rather than seven, was generally a whole year earlier than most students in University of Virginia’s Tibetan Buddhism program seemed to have no effect; carefully outlining the meticulously constructed plan of comps, field research, and dissertation writing for the next three and a half years fell on deaf ears.

This attitude of ignorance (and our corresponding frustration) held by many non-academics is a product of our own creation—the fault of a university system that doesn’t train its participants in communicating their research effectively and the common disinclination of academics themselves to develop such skills along the way.

I remember once going to dinner with a young woman in a rather erstwhile attempt to meet people in my parents’ retirement neighborhood. I was twenty-one—just finishing my undergraduate degree in religious studies, accepted to a Master’s program, and enamored with the academic enterprise. Before going to dinner, my mother told me that the young woman was very religious and that her family was evangelical. Towards the end of the evening, after discussing briefly what I studied, my dinner partner asked me in a roundabout way about my own religious beliefs (I am sure most readers are familiar with the type of cloaked probing questioning I mean). I remember telling her that I simply knew too much to be religious myself, a response I shudder to consider now.

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