My father told me a story once. Many years ago, he was a history professor at the University of Saskatchewan. He would drive his car to work, park it, and go teach his classes. But when it came time to go home, he would often find himself unable to remember where he had parked. The university being one of those complexes with vast parking lots extending in all directions, he would be forced to wander through the lots looking for his car.
Life as a professor turned out to be less than he had hoped it would be. He found himself embroiled in all sorts of acrimonious conflicts with his colleagues. It got so bad that one day he just quit. He turned in his resignation, went out to the parking lot, searched around until he found his car, and drove home, never to return.
Here’s the funny part, though: He swears that this was the last time he ever forgot where he had parked his car.
In other words, “being absent-minded” was somehow tied to “being a professor.” It had nothing to do with his brain; it was a consequence of his social role. The day that he quit being a professor, he also stopped being absent-minded. Not intentionally, mind you — it was only decades later that he realized that he had stopped forgetting things.
I mention this because I work with a lot of stereotypically absent-minded professors. One former colleague, in particular, has spent a career playing the lovable, forgetful fuddy-duddy. He called me up once, on a Friday evening, wondering why I was not yet at his house. It turns out his wife had given him the task of inviting the guests to their dinner party, which he had promptly forgotten to do, and then forgotten that he had forgotten to do it. Luckily, I wasn’t busy, so I hurried over.
It wasn’t always so funny, though. When I was hired, I didn’t have a driver’s license, and some of my classes were on a remote suburban campus. The absent-minded professor, with whom I shared an office downtown, generously offered to give me a ride, since he drove there on the same days. One morning he was late. I sat around, getting increasingly anxious, worried about being late for my lecture. It got later and later, until eventually I had no hope of making it. Finally, I went around asking if anyone knew where he was. “Oh,” I was told, “he’s out of town at a conference. Didn’t he mention that to you?”
That was the end of our little car-pooling arrangement.
Now, promising someone that you will drive him to work, and then just not showing up, is quintessentially insensitive behavior. It shows indifference to other people’s needs and feelings. And yet when a professor does it, it’s seen as cute, possibly even a sign of genius. My colleague was so busy thinking important thoughts that of course he didn’t have time to consider tiny, insignificant things, like how his actions affected other people.
All of this has persuaded me that absent-mindedness in an academic should be viewed in much the same way that the sociologist Talcott Parsons viewed illness. At its root, it is a form of “sanctioned” social deviance. Being absent-minded allows you to skip out on all sorts of social obligations. I have colleagues who miss meetings all the time, or who show up hours late saying, “I could have sworn we agreed to meet at 5 p.m. …" No one ever shows up early because she forgot what time the meeting was at.
Remembering things involves a certain amount of effort, and it’s obviously easier just to be lazy and forget them. The major reason that we don’t all act this way is that most people are penalized for it. Absent-mindedness, after all, is just another form of stupidity, and when ordinary people do things like forget where they parked their cars, they get punished for it. People say things to them like, “What are you, stupid?” A major motivation for keeping track of things, like where you parked your car, is to avoid being seen as stupid or incompetent by others. To avoid being seen that way, the forgetful may feel motivated to make the effort to remember such things.
Becoming a college professor, however, is a pretty good way of exempting oneself from suspicion of outright or base stupidity. When professors do stupid things, people don’t say to them, “Oh, my God, you’re so stupid.” Instead they make excuses, like, “There he goes with his head in the clouds again,” or “He must have more important things on his mind.” Not only can you get away with being stupid, but you wind up with social license to become even more stupid.
Freud taught us to be suspicious of all these “involuntary” or “unconscious” mental acts. Motivated forgetting was one of his prime examples. I think back over all the instances when professors I work with were absent-minded in ways that have affected me. How many times did their oversight work in my favor versus theirs? For instance, how many times did colleagues who owed me money forget that fact, versus the times they forgot when I owed them money? I am tempted to say “always” and “never,” though that would be a slight exaggeration, and in any case, I quickly learned never to spot any money to a university professor. In general, if you start to keep tabs, you’ll find that professors sometimes inconvenience themselves by being absent-minded, but far more often it is others who are being inconvenienced or hung out to dry.
One other thing: Most people will agree that men are far worse than women. Understanding absent-mindedness as social deviance provides a simple hypothesis to explain this — women may simply have a harder time getting away with it than men do. They are more likely to get, or more afraid of getting, the “What are you, stupid?” response, and thus are less bold in their effrontery.
Pierre Bourdieu used to complain about what he called the “ideology of natural taste.” People treat their own “taste” as though it were merely a given, a fact about them, or something dictated by the world. And yet this taste just happens to coincide — miraculously! — with their precise class position and status ambitions.
The same is true with respect to absent-mindedness. People treat it as a feature of their brains that they are powerless to control, and yet those who exhibit the trait just happen to find themselves — miraculously! — in the privileged social position where they suffer no adverse consequences from these lapses of memory.
The more plausible explanation, in both cases, is that people are making “moves” in a game, one that involves status competition and dominance. Their understanding of this game is often implicit, and so there is often no calculation underlying these moves. Nevertheless, a simple analysis of who benefits is enough to lay bare what is going on. Absent-mindedness is essentially a form of male-dominance behavior — the academic equivalent of “manspreading.”
Joseph Heath is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author, most recently, of Enlightenment 2.0: Restoring Sanity to Our Politics, Our Economy, and Our Lives (Harper, 2014).
