I’m still undecided about whether Kal should teach at Penn or not, but I’m not too sure about the above statement. It paints a pretty stereotypical picture of academics and advanced degree holders. I mean, I know a woman who came to America as one of those infamous “boat people” from Vietnam. She went from eating rats on the boat and living in grinding poverty to earning an MBA from Harvard. You could argue that that is way more difficult than a middle-class Indian kid from NJ who went to drama school and theater school at UCLA. I’m not denying that Kal had to struggle to get to where he is today, but Hollywood is also famous for bestowing a certain amount of luck upon those who happen to be at the right place at the right time.

Some doctoral students are indeed privileged children of the arts, but others have been through extraordinary struggles to get to where they are (I can tell you about the physics PhD I know whose family suffered through Chernobyl, etc.). The line between academia and the “real world” is thinner than you think when you consider these stories.

Rekha this is only to start a debate ….why should a ‘professionalization process”, “be respected..” from the POV of a PENN student? I don’t much care for Kal’s work to date..but I respect his HUSTLE big time. Making it to any degree in Hollywood is one of the hardest tasks imaginable….harder than earning an advanced degree from Harvard (trust me I know 3 A.R.T. grads who are waiting tables). Kal has done something in the real world…even if he is not organizationally up to par, It would seem that his anecdotal insights would be gold for an AAS student…or at least silver

that a PhD–at least in the so-called social sciences and humanities– is neither necessary nor sufficient for gaining a tolerable understanding of human affairs. The same qualities and propensities (intellectual independence, willingness to challenge “authoritative” wisdom, and rational thinking) that allows one to learn from books also allows one to learn from life experiences.

I would merely add that a PhD program does on the other hand provides an infrastructure, an organization, if you will, where some people can come together and discuss issues they are interested in. This I think is essential to honing one’s analytical skills. I try to do the same thing with my students; I do not generally teach them the material so much as I try to get them to think rationally and analytically about it. For what its worth, I guess that a PhD program, especially the infrastructure it provides, has enabled me to realize this. I also thought that the statistics classes I took were very useful.
By the way, philosophy departments in the U.S generally do not teach postmodernism; literature departments do. That is why I had to sit on on classes outside my department (wanted to find out what all the popular hype was about, and the philosophy profs were of no help; it was blasphemy to even utter the “po” word in the philosophy dept).

it would’ve been nice if kal penn had come as a guest lecturer for 1-2 days integrated into some course already on the penn books..but again, i think this is for media, getting the course and the school out into the media forefront, etc..

is it just me, or do the other ivy league schools always feel they are stepchildren of harvard (god, i know i’m going to get lashed out for this statemet) and have to do things that will get them noticed?

anyways, dr. miner is awesome, and hopefully you got to study with her or take part in the fantastic s.asian studies department that penn does have..

maybe i’m a bit biased, good friends of mine new kal pretty well when he was an undergrad at ucla… i don’t know what he can teach… i don’t know… but we can’t jump the gun… until the bullet is shot..