Escape the Ivory Tower » Myths of Academia

The problem of smartness

We have this idea that smart people belong in school. It’s as though we think that somehow school is the very best use of their talents, their ideas, their innovation. We think smartness is rarified, special, different, and so it must be kept in a place that is rarified, special, different.

If the last twenty years have taught us anything, however, it’s the power of smart people outside of school.

Steve Jobs? While I wouldn’t want to sit next to him at a cocktail party, I’m not sure anyone can deny that he’s really fucking smart. Atul Gawande? Really fucking smart. Joan Didion? Really fucking smart. Thich Naht Hahn? Really fucking smart.

All of these people — and countless others — have changed the world by bringing their smartness to bear on questions, contemplations, and innovations outside the classroom, outside the lecture hall, outside the lab, outside the venerated halls of thinkers. And we are better for it.

So why are we holding on to the idea that the place for smart people is school? And why are we telling ourselves that if we’re smart, we must necessarily go for the highest degree possible?

So often, that degree is supposed to reassure us that we’re smart. It’s supposed to be the unassailable proof that we’re smart, so that if we screw something up, if we make a mistake, if we try something and fall flat on our face, we can still point to the degree to prove that we’re really smart, underneath whatever just happened. And we’re mostly convincing ourselves.

What if we were able to sit in ourselves and have confidence in our own smartness, enough to follow our hearts to what we really want to do instead of what we’re expected to do? What if we were able to trust that screwing up while we experiment is, in fact, part of our smartness? What if we would could bring our smartness to bear on whatever it is that makes us passionately, excitedly happy?

For some people, yes, that will be academia. But not everyone. And if you’re in academia or contemplating academia because you’re smart and people think that, therefore, you belong in academia, please, consider what you want and where you fit into the world.

Because we need your smartness. It just may be even smarter to put it to use elsewhere.

Thanks to Jo VanEvery and Sam Ladner for the Twitter conversation that sparked this!

The myth of merit

One of academia’s very favorite myths is that everything within it is based on merit. Only the best students are accepted to the graduate program. The best students get fellowships and scholarships. The best students get the best jobs. The best work gets published. The best candidates get tenure.

And then there’s the flip side: If you didn’t get in to the program of your choice, it’s because you weren’t good enough. If you didn’t get the assistance that would have enabled you to actually get through the program, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough or you weren’t smart enough. If you didn’t get a job, it’s because you weren’t savvy enough, weren’t skilled enough, didn’t publish enough or strategically, didn’t have the right people behind you. If you didn’t get published, it’s because either your work was crap or you weren’t persistent enough. If you didn’t get tenure, you’re clearly not cut out for this system.

Even when we choose to walk away, these stories of failure dog us. (In our own minds, if nowhere else.) Leave before tenure? It’s because you couldn’t hack it. Decided not to go on the job market because you didn’t want to stay in academia? You wouldn’t have gotten a job anyway. Decided not to finish graduate school because it’s making you hate the universe? You weren’t smart enough to finish.

Excuse my language, but this is all a fucking load of steaming crap.

Even a cursory look around the academic landscape will reveal dozens of people you know personally who are brilliant, savvy, hard-working, and persistent and who have not “succeeded” in all of the ways academia suggests they will, what with all of those meritorious traits.

Brilliant and well-published graduate students who can’t find a job to save their lives because the job market sucks.

Smart, interesting researchers who don’t get published because their work doesn’t quite fit the neat little boxes of disciplines and journals or because they aren’t in the middle of the latest hot topic or trend.

Fabulous researchers and teachers who didn’t get tenure because they got caught in the gender politics of service.

I’m not saying that merit has no place in academia. But I am saying that, by the time we’re even as far as graduate school, absent true outliers, the differences between the “best” and the “worst” are, in some ways, often too small to be meaningful. Academia has been winnowing the pool since kindergarten, after all.

I am saying that the myth of merit doesn’t do us any favors. It doesn’t make most of us feel expansive and energized — it makes us feel small and scared and clenched. It doesn’t motivate most of us — it makes us avoidant and procrastinating and miserable. It doesn’t build us up — it makes us live in fear that, any day now, someone is going to figure out that we aren’t as smart as they think we are, and then they’ll kick us out.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t see a lot of merit to that situation.

We need to be suspicious of the myth of merit. We need to pay attention to how much outright luck contributes to “success” and “failure” in academia. We need to cut ourselves some fucking slack and begin to imagine that we are, in fact, smart, capable, wonderful people who, for various reasons, had a certain set of experiences with academia, some of which we had something to do with and some of which we didn’t.

Do you need a job or a calling?

One of the many ways people get stuck in the varied halls of academe is by confusing what is essentially a job with a calling.

Professoring? It’s a job. It has a regular paycheck, clear (if also somewhat tortured) expectations, regular reviews, and the possibility of getting fired, at least until tenure, and even then, if the economy goes far enough south.

But academia has long thrown the mantle of calling over the realities of the job. There’s a particular academic myth that suggests that the Life of the Mind is a sacred path, and as such we who trod it should accept all manner of challenges, forks in the road, sleepless nights, and witches disguised as beautiful women. We are the elite priests who have been chosen to carry on the tradition, and our glory is in the upholding of the tradition.

For some people, that myth works. For them, research and teaching is a sacred path, one they would follow even if they weren’t paid. For them, academia is a calling, one that swells their hearts and whispers celestial songs even in the darkest hours of indexing footnotes. The difficulties of the job get subsumed into the story. For these fortunate people, calling and job have intersected seamlessly.

For many of us, though, there is no grail here. There’s no holy path; there’s only trying to figure out how the hell we’re going to pay the mortgage and do research this summer, since we’re only paid for nine months and summer teaching, however lucrative, really puts a crimp in the “write four chapters” plan. Teaching doesn’t feel like victory or exaltation.

If you take on academia as a job, with all of the boundary issues and challenges to negotiate as any other job, that can be fine. Sure, it has its special hells, but what job doesn’t? They’re problems to be solved and moved on from.

But when we confuse the two, things tend to go extra-badly. When we confuse the two, setting time-boundaries around our work looks like lack of commitment. When we confuse the two, taking time to nurture an infant looks like a like of discipline. When we confuse the two, we become the failed Knight, instead of an everyday person in an everyday job making everyday choices for our everyday lives.

Now, far be it from me to denigrate callings. Callings are amazing things, impulses that can sustain us through many a dark night and difficult time. Callings, when our lives are aligned with them, can give meaning to even the most annoying day.

But callings are vague things. You can’t write them neatly in the census form explaining what you do and thus who you are. And because they’re so vague, callings can manifest in many different jobs.

Maybe you’re called to help impoverished children graduate from college. Sure, that may involve being a professor. But could also involve raising money for a small school, writing innovative curricula, creating after-school programs, or creating outreach programs. There’s no telling how that one calling could exist in the world.

So I want to ask you this: Right now, do you need a calling or a job?

The answer might be both. Right now, you might be craving both meaning and a stable paycheck, and that’s important to know. But your answer might be one or the other. Maybe, right now, you’ve got meaning out the wazoo, and all you want is consistent work. Maybe you’ve got a job you’re okay with, but you’re craving meaning and a sense of your work connecting with something bigger.

Whatever your answer is will help determine what needs to happen next, because figuring out your calling and finding a job are distinct tasks. Getting a job won’t necessarily illuminate your calling, and figuring out your calling doesn’t usually come with medical.

But as you’re thinking about it, remember this. There’s no job outside (maybe) “minister” that is inherently both calling and job. Any job can be part of a calling, and any calling can have lots of different jobs over time. If you want both, you’ve got to figure both out.

So tell me — how have you experienced this job / calling conflation in academia? And what are you needing right now in your life?

Would anything have kept you out of graduate school?

Thomas Benton has published another one of his thought-provoking columns in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. This time it’s about “The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind.’”

He’s writing, as he often does, about the cruel bait-and-switch that happens when professors encourage people to go to graduate school because it’s the embodiment of a fabled dream.

[Professors who still bleat on about "the life of mind"] absolve themselves of responsibility for what happens to graduate students by saying, distantly, “there are no guarantees.” But that phrase suggests there’s only a chance you won’t get a tenure-track job, not an overwhelming improbability that you will.

Some professors tell students to go to graduate school “only if you can’t imagine doing anything else.” But they usually are saying that to students who have been inside an educational institution for their entire lives. They simply do not know what else is out there. They know how to navigate school, and they think they know what it is like to be a professor. …

Graduate school may be about the “disinterested pursuit of learning” for some privileged people. But for most of us, graduate school in the humanities is about the implicit promise of the life of a middle-class professional, about being respected, about not hating your job and wasting your life. That dream is long gone in academe for almost everyone entering it now.

I think he’s right that the myth of the life of the mind is held up as a Good to which the best and brightest are called, while they stand little real chance of gaining entry to the profession as, well, professionals.

I don’t agree, however, that professors and departments and disciplines are, as a whole, being duplicitous and self-serving. I think many professors and departments and disciplines are, in fact, trying to communicate clearly with their students about their very real chances. But it’s not working. Why? Here are just a few reasons

Location, location, location

Benton makes the point that professors are talking to people who have spent their whole lives in school, so asking them to imagine something else is pretty difficult. But, by and large, professors and administrators have spent their whole lives, their whole careers, and their whole identities in school and academia. They’ve got very little experience, if any, outside the confines of academe, so asking them to give students a real, balanced, contextual sense of their chances is kind of crazy. How would they know how it compares? Why should we expect them to?

It really was different in their day.

In his review of Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas, DeanDad highlights some salient facts:

From 1945 to 1975, the number of undergraduate students in the US went up 500 percent, but the number of graduate students went up 900 percent. Since then, growth of undergrads has slowed dramatically, but graduate students just keep increasing. Menand pointed out that from 1989 to 1996, the number of graduate students in most liberal arts disciplines increased steadily, even as the number of undergrads nationally declined every year. As he correctly put it, by the 90′s “the supply curve had completely lost touch with the demand curve in American academic life.”

They’ve largely been inside this phenomenon, and their perspective is focused on a very small handful of students, maybe one or two of whom defend in any given year and go out on the job market. They’re wrapped up in these students as individuals — as they should be — and that means any explanations they have of why people do or don’t get jobs is going to be wrapped up in their students as individuals — not as individuals confronting a system.

Personal appeals to logic don’t work.

When there’s something you really want to do, when it’s held up as a Good, and when the person telling you not to do it is in fact embodying the thing itself, how likely are you to heed the “do as I say not as I do?”

My graduate director spent half of our PhD acceptance letters telling us in no uncertain terms what the reality of the job market was — and not a one of us listened. Because we would be different. Because she was just being mean and raining on our parade. Because we were special. We’d gotten this far, hadn’t we?

There’s a fundamental mismatch.

Whether or not it’s encouraged as such, people go to graduate school because they believe in the life of the mind — it was what they encountered in undergrad, it’s what they fell in love with, all that reading and thinking and talking and talking and talking. Graduate school largely continues that fable — and then we spit people out onto the cold shores of The Profession, only the very edges of which they would have — could have — seen from graduate school. (And let’s leave the professionalization discussion for another day.)

Telling young people applying to graduate school how bad the profession is — how hard to get into, how different from their dreams — is the equivalent of suddenly talking about purple pigeons. It’s just not the same conversation, because the reality of that is the better part of a decade away for people for whom five years is a full quarter of their lives.

Higher ed is not just torturing people for the sake of torturing people.

We can argue the merits of any individual member of the academy until the cows come home, but I continue to believe that most people are good-hearted and doing their best. I don’t think anyone is trying to exploit anyone.

However, the financial realities of higher education have changed, and those financial realities have meant it needs lots of cheap teachers in order to get butts in seats and therefore income into the school. Yes, that means adjuncts, but it also means graduate students, who are both cheap teachers AND butts in seats. Two birds, one stone.

It’s not that universities are trying to exploit people (although they are, in fact, exploiting people). They’re trying to survive. Badly, yes. With a lot of whistling past the graveyard. But trying.

My point, and I do have one

In short, I don’t think individual professors talking to individual students is the answer. The problem is structural, and the answer, too, needs to be structural — but the structures are in crisis, and the solutions only make them more so.

I don’t have an answer, but I don’t think it’s as simple as “just tell them it sucks!” So let me ask you: What would have dissuaded you? What would have changed your mind about going to graduate school — not “knowing then what you know now,” but then, in all of your youth and hunger?

The problem of careers

There’s this myth we have about the importance of careers. We have this idea that our working life is supposed to be coherent and progressive, that it should continually rise towards a pinnacle (full professorship, an X- or C-level corporate job, directorship of a non-profit) that indicates that We Have Made It, that We Are Good And Worthy People. A career indicates expertise and gravitas, “settling down” and “growing up,” all at the same time.

In short, we should have one. But only one.

Now, I’ve got nothing but respect for people who’ve known since they were small what they want to do and who have experienced fulfillment and joy and all of that from that very same career. Power to them! But that’s not what happened in my life. And it’s not what happened in the lives of many people I know.

Many of us fell into careers instead of choosing them. I, for example, went to graduate school because I loved learning, not because I had the faintest idea what being a professor actually entailed. A dear friend of mine got an entry-level job after college in a mailroom to pay the rent and later became VP of that same organization, without necessarily ever having an ambition for international development. An acquaintance got a part-time job telemarketing in college and now runs a division of that company.

But once you have a career, however it came about, it’s not just a job — it’s part of who you are. After all, “what do you do?” is one of the first things we ask new adult aquaintances, and we often conflate the answer with the person. We say, “She’s a lawyer,” or “He runs a non-profit,” instead of “She’s a rock-climber” or “He’s an amazing wildlife photographer.”

In my experience it’s even worse in places like academia, where there’s the combination of a long training period and an explicit working identity at the end of it. When everyone around you is an academic — when your friends, picked up through the slog of graduate school, are academics; when your social life in College Town is all other academics — and when you have put in years of explaining to family just what it means to be an academic (no, we don’t get summers off!), well, it can be really, really hard to realize that this career you have, this identity you’ve taken on, does not make you happy.

And because it’s not just a job, but a career, an identity, it’s easy to move from “I’m unhappy” to “WTF is wrong with me?”

The answer is: nothing. If the career you’re in right now is making you unhappy, nothing is wrong with you. This just isn’t the career for you.

But the myth of The One Career helps keep us stuck exactly where we are, because the very idea of “becoming an accountant” or “becoming a professional photographer” or “becoming a radio talk-show host” all seem so very daunting, so very large. “It’s years of training!” “Do you know how long it would take to get to this level in that career?” And so we suck it up and continue being miserable in this career we have, because examining and changing our identity around work is hard, scary, and frankly, not modeled very many places.

If you’re in that position, if you’re miserable in the career you’re in, instead of thinking in terms of a career, try thinking in terms of the kind of tasks and work environment that make you deeply happy — “doing” instead of “becoming.” Do you love working with people? Do you like involving your whole body in your work? Do you need to be outside? Do you enjoy regular hours, or do you want to work at 11pm? Do you want a mission-based job, or do you like to go home and put work away?

The bottom line is this: You don’t need a career. Think about that. You don’t need a career, which is, after all, an external story about success that has nothing to do with you and your experience. You need a job you enjoy and that pays the bills so you can be your whole self. That’s all.

And then, when people ask you “what do you do?” you can tell them you’re a rock-climbing, book-reading, trivia-loving movie buff — and mean it.

Structures, Myths, and Fit, Oh My!

Although every story of academic struggle and leaving is intensely personal, in my experience those stories fall into three categories: structural reasons to leave, myth-related reasons to live, and leaving because of a lack of fit.

In other words, people don’t leave because they can’t hack it — they leave because somewhere there is a mismatch between the reality of academia and their lives as they have lived them and as they want to live them.

I know I hammer this point all the time, but I think it’s an important one: when you struggle with academia, it’s not because there’s something wrong with you. One way or another, it’s a mismatch. So let’s talk about the most common ones.

Structure

Some structural mismatches are really obvious: You graduate in the teeth of the worst job market in history, and there are no jobs to be had. The jobs that are available want a different theoretical grounding than you have. Your partner has a good job right here (paying better than yours likely ever will), but the only jobs available for you are 1,500 miles away and you don’t want a long-distance relationship.

But structural mismatches go beyond the problems of getting a job. Women who are overloaded with service as assistant professors — which is not uncommon, if not necessarily ever consciously intended — and then who don’t get tenure because they didn’t have enough time to write — that’s a structural problem. A system that requires the most intensive career focus during the prime child-bearing years for professionals — that’s a structural problem too, and one that falls disproportionately on women. Higher education in the humanities doesn’t pay particularly well, leading many academics to take on extra teaching or advising work in the summers, reducing time for research in the quest to pay the bills, raise a family, and start building the retirement savings that are already a decade or more behind. And that, too, is a structural problem.

Whenever the institution is at cross-purposes with our life goals, with common and expected life goals, that’s a structural problem. And although structural problems are common reasons people struggle with academia, they’re also something we don’t talk about — because we’re supposed to just be so fucking grateful we got a job in the first place.

Myths

They’re more difficult to see, but myths are one of the more pervasive reasons people struggle and leave. Myths are all of those stories we tell about academia and that the larger culture tells about academia — and even when we consciously know they aren’t true, at some level we think they should be true or they once were true or we wish they were true. And then we spend our energy trying to reconcile these myths with the reality we’re experiencing.

So, for example, there’s the myth of the “life of the mind,” the assumption that once we “make it” in academia, that we get to spend our time thinking deep thoughts and talking about important ideas. That, of course, is immediately belied by the endless rounds of committee meetings, advising, teaching, grading, planning, and administration that routinely take up large swaths of academic time — and even how much space there is for research at all is determined largely by the kind of institution you work for. But many of us were drawn to academia through our enjoyment of the reading and talking and thinking we experienced as undergraduates, and that myth dies hard, no matter how clear-eyed we are about the reality.

If myths like this one are part and parcel of how we get to academia, other myths help keep us there. Despite the spotty intellectual engagement many academics experience with their colleagues, there’s a myth that only in academia is intellectual engagement even possible — that the rest of the world is an intellectual wasteland concerned only with capitalist rapaciousness. Myths like this inhibit our ability to imagine a satisfying life elsewhere, no matter how conflicted and difficult our lives inside the academy are.

Fit

And finally, there are simple problems with fit: People who don’t, in the end, enjoy teaching. People who don’t, in the end, enjoy advising, or committee meetings, or the repetitiveness of getting one group of students to an understanding of critical theory or communication or why history matters only to start again with another resistant group.

Problems of fit are hard to talk about because of course this is the greatest job in the world — doesn’t everybody kind of wish they were us?

Structure, myths, and fit aren’t neat categories, of course — they have a tendency to overlap and meld into one another and create unique blends of difficulty we throw ourselves against. But it’s important to identify why we struggle, what it is that we’re experiencing as problematic, because only then can we untangle the stories we’re telling ourselves — that this is the perfect job, despite the fact that we’re miserable, or that there aren’t any other options — and start imagining other ways of being.

The job search is not about you

Yesterday the MLA job list went up, detailing what I’m assuming will be a severely pared-down list of jobs for the 2010-2011 school year. The stories from last year’s job searches, especially for newly degree-ed folks, mostly ended with “they canceled the search,” “the job got pulled at the last minute,” and “I never heard anything after the request for more information,” and this year’s is shaping up to be no less depressing — and no less damaging to bright and sensitive scholars.

The hand-wringing about the overproduction of PhDs is, as always, making the rounds of academic publications, but this year may make the gap between the number of PhDs and the number of tenure-track positions — the holy grail for the humanities, at least — even more stark than usual.

According to MLA numbers, only about half of newly minted PhDs in English got tenure-track jobs during the 1990s, and the percentages went steadily down during that decade, with only 35% getting tenure-track jobs in 1996-1997. And honey, how we would all love this year to look anything like 1996-1997.

It’s really bad out there.

But what upsets me the most is not that people won’t get tenure-track jobs. It’s not necessarily tragic for us to take our passions and our engagement into the world beyond academe. No, what upsets me most is how difficult, defeating, and yes, damaging the job search process is on the people who go through it.

If your department was anything like mine, you’ve been hearing about the crappy job market since, oh, the letter accepting you into the program. (If I remember correctly, and I’m pretty sure I do, my friends and I pouted and wondered why they couldn’t even let us be happy about this accomplishment for a minute; we’d worry jobs down the line. Reality and 20-year-0lds are not generally close bedfellows.)

But we all did it anyway. And we did it anyway because we were, in the immortal pride of late adolescents, sure that it would be different for us. We would be so smart, so prepared, so shining, that we would prevail over difficult circumstances. We would work hard, harder than any graduate student had ever worked, and it would all work out.

Go ahead, laugh. But I’m going to bet that every single person on the job market this year is crossing their fingers and throwing salt over their shoulders and also, at the very same time, telling themselves that it’ll work out for them because they’re smart, they’re personable, they’re great and dedicated teachers, they’ve published, they’ve done service — they’re practically an assistant professor as it is!

It’s only natural to try to find ways to keep up our spirits in the face of dispiriting odds, but the problem with this story is that it inevitably turns into its opposite: If I don’t get a tenure-track job, or if I only get one that my department and colleagues don’t “respect,” then it’s because I am stupid and a terrible scholar and my advisor hates me and oh my god, did they see the evaluation of me on RateMyProfessor.com that criticized my pants?

And I don’t know about you, but I’m relatively non-functional as a human being when I’m telling myself stories like that. When I’m telling myself stories like that, I’m not connected to what I love about my work. I’m hiding in bed with the pound of chocolate I bought at midnight and three trashy mags.

Because I suspect you have your very own version of shutting down when you’re telling yourself stories like that, I want to, very gently, challenge you to try to not take the job search process personally.

Because it isn’t about you. Really.

Look, if you’ve gotten all the way to a PhD, you’re clearly smart and capable and dedicated and all of those most admirable qualities of scholars. If you’ve gotten all the way to a PhD, you are plenty good enough to rock an assistant professorship and rock it hard.

But fortunately or unfortunately, nearly all of the reasons people don’t get jobs are structural, not personal.

Let’s just take a look at the evidence. For a department to run a search at all, its institution has to have the funds to hire that year. A university’s budget? Not about you.

What they search for is going to be determined by the needs of the institution as well as the needs of the department, and a new college-wide composition requirement or the retirement of the Victorianist is not about you.

Who ends up on the committee, how the politics of the department structure what they’re looking for (explicit or not), the personalities of the department as a whole — none of these are about you, but they have everything to do with the elusive “fit,” which, after all, is what it all comes down to once you have a pile of awesome and accomplished scholars in front of you.

So I implore you — whatever happens, however difficult and disappointing it turns out to be, resist taking it personally. You are a wonderful and amazing scholar, and whether or not you get a tenure-track job is largely not about you.

Yes, if you wrote your cover letters in crayon, I might allow that it had something to do with you, but barring complete unprofessionalism, it is not your fault and it is most certainly not a comment on your value.

So as you wade into the piles of CVs and envelopes and stamps and lists of who wants a teaching dossier and who wants recommendations now versus later, know that you’re awesome. You’re fabulous. Send those packets out with joy and pride and with every hope of getting your dream job, but once you drop them into the mailbox, let go. Loosen your grip. Know that whatever happens, you will be okay.