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Academic

: The Faculty Lounge

Empiricists Or Intuitionists?

By Dan Filler

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The Chicago Tribune is reporting, or should I say crowing, that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley will be increasing the number of elevator inspectors. This move comes in response to a Trib exposé. This reminds me of a great sci-fi book from the late 1990's, The Intuitionist. It's a book about elevator inspectors and their preferred inspection methodologies. For Colson Whitehead, the inspection world is divided between empiricists and intuitionists. Doesn't this sound vaguely like the legal academy?

This from Laura Miller's Salon review back in 1999:

Lila Mae Watson would prefer to be as useful and unnoticed as the elevators she inspects, and often, as a "colored" woman in a city something like 1960 New York, she is. But as the second black, and the only woman, in the Elevator Guild, an organization as powerful and as laced with corruption as the big unions of the real New York, she just doesn't fit in. To make matters worse, she's an Intuitionist -- an elevator inspector who locates the defects in a machine not by examining its workings, but by closing her eyes and "communicating with the elevator on a non-material basis."

In the alternate New York of Colson Whitehead's gritty, brainy first novel, "The Intuitionist," the elevator inspectors union is split into two factions. The upstart Intuitionists have their own candidate for Guild chair, and are intent on ousting the current chair, leader of the nuts-and-bolts Empiricists. When a brand-new elevator on Lila Mae's beat suddenly and inexplicably plummets 40 floors -- suffering a supposedly impossible "total freefall" -- Lila Mae gets dragged into the election year battle, and soon she's chasing after the lost notebooks of Intuitionism's founder, James Fulton. Rumor has it that Fulton, author of the classic text "Theoretical Elevators," had designed the perfect elevator, then hid his blueprints just before his death. Such a device would remake the topography of the city as radically as Otis' first lift, bringing on "the second elevation" and upsetting the Guild's delicate balance of powers.

I can't wait for the law school version of this story. Dare I dream?

It was a dark and stormy night at Miskatonic University School of Law. Professor McCormick Rubloff headed down the hall to his lab where a computer was spewing out the newest numbers. "Judges decide cases based on party affiliation", he said, to nobody in particular. "And I finally have the proof."

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on May 08, 2009 (boomark / email).