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lindy---nice that you focused on the important stuff in that post.
let's follow your example. say a professor was to try to work in a butcher shop. would you imagine that the butcher would say nothing about what to do, that the butcher would have so little regard for his or her own skill that there'd be no effort to transmit it? or do you think that the situation would be set up around watching the pointy-head fail? if that were the case, then there'd have to be some Problem between the two. or the butcher could just be an asshole. being an asshole is easy. anyone can do it.
if your scenario was inserted into something like real life, chances are that the academic would be interested in the ways in which butchering worked: these interests may or may not cross with how folk in a particular shop see what they're doing--for example, the interest might be in, say, the interactions between newer technologies (assuming there are some) and modes of sociability in a particular type of socio-economic context--so looking at a specific space in order to learn from it. if you put your scenario into the real world, chances are that there'd be some preliminary conversations about what the idea was, a period of feeling each other out, seeing if they could work together, if they wanted to work together. by the time the shop scenario started, a relationship would in all probability be in place. it'd be more a mutual project.
what you set up is like an episode out of popeye--you know, anything you can do i can do better--but even that involved a relationship between popeye and bluto and so had a context.
so your scenario isn't much of one. all it really says is that given the chance, you'd like to see an academic humiliate themselves, not because of anything to do with that actual person, but because it would gratify some psychological issue that you have. one reason people have such issues is that they enjoy them. so have fun with it.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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