Nervous

I'm interested in nervousness as a rhetorical category.

In the past five years I've worked on two hiring committees at two (not at all distinguished) universities, and "nervousness" was an immediate disqualifier on both. When, on the more recent committee, I asked why nervousness or the lack thereof was a primary criterion, I got puzzled looks.

Nervousness is interesting because there's no real definition of it. If you want to define "nervousness" as "suffering mild to severe symptoms of anxiety," you've just set aside 65 million Americans. If you define it as "diagnosed with clinical anxiety disorders, including panic disorders, phobias, and post-traumatic stress disorders," you still got 30 million. These numbers raise the question of the ethics of those places that still believe inducing stress is a necessary part of the educational/"character building" process: boot camps, graduate schools, etc. Theoretically, these places are discriminating against 22% of the American population.

On the whole question of whether, in a sort of R.D. Laing way, we can consider mild-to-moderate anxiety to be a logical and justifiable reaction to the contemporary human condition: don't get me started.