The Academics of Good Beer

This past week I sat in the Lamb and Flag pub, where Lewis and Tolkien once sat, and I translated Old Norse with a bunch of graduate students. I can’t say I’ve had the honor in the Eagle and Child, but that may be in my future: who knows? You’ve probably just had one of two reactions: either you think I’m a weirdo whose interests betray a complete lack of touch with reality or you said “that’s awesome.” In both cases, you’d be right.

But either way, this meeting became a cause for meditation on why education works for some and not for others. Is it the beer: the idea that some kind of friendly drinking culture can be combined with a lively love for a dead, inflected language? Is it the students themselves: are some people just more “academic” than others? Am I just a nerd?

I’d say the answer to all three is yes, at least in part. Academics are generally looked at as something removed from everyday life, from the nitty-gritty of practical experience. Cultural readings of literary texts have tried to remedy this, but the reality is that professors and their students are looked down on in our day and age. Either you get a business degree or you’re a curmudgeon by the age of 25, grasping your yellowing piece of stamped paper, screaming something about Toni Morrison or the Wilmot Proviso.
But then I come back to the beer. I come back to the idea that academia does lack that down-home element: the meeting in the forum or the drink at the pub. Perhaps the informal atmosphere leads students to take the material more seriously. Admittedly, the people who came to the meeting in question all loved the subject beforehand. But I can’t help but wonder: could the entire academy benefit from taking itself a tad less seriously? Might there be something to be said for the academics of a few good beers?