on monday evening, the college brought in a professor from the university of pittsburgh named peter simonson to give a presentation titled “Robert K. Merton’s ‘Self-Fulfilling Prophecy’: An Episode in (Jewish) American Intellectual History.” as a member of the communications honors program, i was asked to attend the lecture. i remained for the duration, i tried to pay attention…but i was not very impressed.
tuesday night at my honors seminar (which meets weekly at a professor’s house and is basically a round-table discussion of different “seminal” studies in communications science) simonson was invited to join us. we were all asked to introduce ourselves and talk about a communications article we enjoyed reading this year. mine went something like, “i’m evan from new jersey. i’m a senior comm. major and english minor, and i enjoyed reading andrejivic because i have a great disdain for reality television…except for the ashlee simpson show, which i only watch because i have an unreasonably intense hatred for it.”
the meeting lasted for 90 minutes but things didn’t get interesting until it concluded. as i was packing up my bag to leave, i walked over to shake simonson’s hand and thank him for coming. he looked at me and said, “evan. you know, i wanted to thank you, because i noticed you last night at the lecture. you’re the type of audience member that a speaker loves to see during a presentation. last night i watched you give me great non-verbal feedback. did you have anything you wanted to talk about?”
initially i thought maybe he was being facetious. sometimes i have a tendency to make “priceless” facial expressions when bored (that’s a classmate’s quote, I found out recently that no one in the seminar will look at me because i make them laugh with my eye-rolling and other “non-verbal feedback” techniques), but i cast this aside for the moment to focus on his question. as a matter of fact, i did have something to talk about. i wanted to ask, “why did you find it so fascinating that merton didn’t tell people he was a jew? who gives a shit?”
in reality it came out more like, “well. there was one question in particular I had during your lecture. i was a bit baffled at why you chose to highlight merton’s choice to publicize his religion. i mean, i don’t walk around making my beliefs known…so i guess i was wondering is, what was the impetus for focusing on that topic?”
we got into a semi-scholarly discussion that lasted for several minutes about religion and modern america and how we’ve been socialized into not wearing religion on our sleeves. i don’t really remember his answer because i was more impressed by my ability to assertively question the very basis of his research. he inevitably asked whether or not i was offended by anything he had said, and i replied that religion isn’t important to me and i’m open to the entire spectrum of thought on any particular topic. i’m not really sure what that means and i’m not quite sure if he even believed me. i just thought it was fascinating that i had a surge of energy and called out a professor on why his research matters.
