As he tells it, when my good friend David Schoffman was a small child, his father would reward him with a silver dollar each time he completed reading a book forever creating the defective connection between intellectual achievement and financial well-being.
This would prove to be a critical misunderstanding later in life when he sought a tenured position at one of the many highly bureaucratized universities that dot the American pedagogical landscape.
An exhibition record as long as a whale's back was of little use as were two highly acclaimed University Press studies on Hölderlin's influence on the Abstract Expressionists. Equally ineffectual was David's short stint at the State Department as cultural liaison with Islamabad in the late 1980's. Ironically, even his fluency in French and Hebrew was held against him as it was seen as skills associated with privilege and class.
So after nearly ten years as an adjunct and associate professor David was summarily let go into the academic wilderness as an unemployed and unemployable over-educated elitist.
But there is a happy ending.
At the urging of some of his tech savvy former students Schoffman has embarked on a new and potentially more stable career as a podcaster, a profession, he wryly points out, that is omitted from the official American Association of University Career Counselors Internship and Jobs Handbook.
He currently has a following of over 600,000 regular listeners and a Twitter account equally bloated with devoted fans.
Though he has yet to fully monetize this incredible turn of events, for the time being he is fully enjoying his new found fame. As he said in a recent podcast, "to think I used to feel gratified when my graduate seminar Structuralism, Surrealism and the Hollywood Blockbuster was fully enrolled."
An exhibition record as long as a whale's back was of little use as were two highly acclaimed University Press studies on Hölderlin's influence on the Abstract Expressionists. Equally ineffectual was David's short stint at the State Department as cultural liaison with Islamabad in the late 1980's. Ironically, even his fluency in French and Hebrew was held against him as it was seen as skills associated with privilege and class.
So after nearly ten years as an adjunct and associate professor David was summarily let go into the academic wilderness as an unemployed and unemployable over-educated elitist.
But there is a happy ending.
He currently has a following of over 600,000 regular listeners and a Twitter account equally bloated with devoted fans.
Though he has yet to fully monetize this incredible turn of events, for the time being he is fully enjoying his new found fame. As he said in a recent podcast, "to think I used to feel gratified when my graduate seminar Structuralism, Surrealism and the Hollywood Blockbuster was fully enrolled."
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