Escape the Ivory Tower

Happy New Year!

Hello lovely Escape Artists! I hope you had a lovely winter holiday season, complete with a renewing and rejuvenating turning of the Gregorian calendar.

I took a bit of time away to rejuvenate myself and think about what I wanted to bring to you all this year. In addition to the one-on-one coaching and resume writing (which I suspect will always be a staple of what I do), I’m working on an ebook about tools to help you decide if you should stay in academia or leave and home-study versions of the two classes I teach, Choosing Your Career Consciously and Becoming Post-Academic. (A new round of the latter starts next week!)

My goal this year is to provide practical, useful tools for every stage of the post-academic journey. Thanks for having me along on yours.

 

You deserve everything

Deserve. It’s such a little word for such a big, tangled set of things.

I want to spend a little time untangling it today, because it’s underneath so much of our pain and our grief.

Two, two kinds of deserve (ah ah ah)

Deserve tends to show up in two different ways.

The first has a tinge of self-righteousness to it. “Don’t I deserve a good job after all the hard work I did?” Well yes, you do deserve a good job. But so does everyone else.

The second has a tinge of despair to it. “I don’t deserve a good job / nice colleagues / decent pay because I haven’t worked hard enough / someone else is better / I’m not good at X.” Oh sweetie. You deserve all kinds of good things.

Both versions of deserve are predicated on two assumptions:

1)      That we’re somehow special, different, set apart. (Those other people, they didn’t work as hard as I did, or they aren’t as smart as I am, or they have special privileges I don’t get to have, or they’re all competent and I’m the lone idiot.)

2)      That our inherent worth has anything at all to do with things like jobs, degrees, or self-improvement.

It’s the combination of these two assumptions that leads so many of us to believe that if we didn’t get the job, it’s because we suck as a human being, or to believe that we have no options, or to believe that nothing we’ll do will change our situation.

And both of those assumptions are based in fear. Fear of being different. Fear of being not good enough. Fear of failure.

You deserve everything

You are inherently worthy just as you are right now. And I mean right now, with bedhead and unfinished to-do lists and applications that have gotten no responses and complicated relationships and more pounds than you would like.

Right now. Just as you are. You are worthy. You are a gift of the Universe.

You deserve happiness. You deserve a good job with good pay doing work you love. You deserve amazing relationships that buoy you up and challenge you and help you grow. You deserve a nice home.

And so does everyone else.

Our modern economic systems aren’t set up to support everyone having what they deserve. When we get good things, there’s an element of luck to it, because there’s someone out there who worked just as hard who didn’t get this blessing. And when we don’t get good things, there’s an element of luck to it, because there’s someone else out there, with all of our faults and problems, who did get this good thing.

Sure, qualifications and hard work and being nice, they all matter. But this world we live in is powered largely by luck.

The economic and racial and social situation you were born into is a matter of luck. Being born here instead of someplace else is luck. Fitting a job situation well enough to get an offer is luck – there are lots of applicants who could rock any given position. Being born at a moment in time when there are more jobs than applicants or the reverse is luck.

Sometimes it’s nice to have a good wallow in deserve. It can be cathartic to rage at the universe because you deserved that job that someone else was offered. It can be almost pleasurable to moan about how we don’t deserve the good things because we didn’t eat our carrots.

But when we get stuck there, we stop taking action on our own behalf. And that’s a sure-fire way to not getting those good things you want.

Do this instead

Don’t take it personally that our modern economy isn’t set up to actually take care of actual human beings. That has nothing to do with you. Yes, that’s true differentially, that is, it’s set up to take more care of some people than others, but again – that’s not about you as an individual.

Okay, but how do you do that? (I hate it when I’m told to stop taking something personally with nothing else – exactly how am I supposed to do that?)

When you start noticing yourself using the language or assumptions of deserve, don’t try to stop yourself. What we repress returns even stronger. Instead, take a page from Barbara Sher’s book and ham it up!

If you think you deserve better than you’re getting, then go all diva on the Universe’s ass and tell it so, as dramatically and expressively as possible. Keep pushing yourself to get more dramatic and more demanding, until it’s so ridiculous you can’t help but laugh. (“And you know what, Universe? I deserve a PONY!”)

If you think you don’t deserve goodness, then go all diva on the Universe’s ass and tell it so, as dramatically and expressively as possible. Get more dramatic and more self-pitying until it’s so ridiculous you can’t help but laugh. (“I don’t even deserve to have a nose to breath air through! I should look like Voldemort!)

The feelings you’re having – the feelings of grief, of sadness, of anger, of fear – those are real. Those are what are underneath our language about deserving. When we give voice to them in these over-the-top ways, it’s a way of acknowledging them and giving them some room to breathe.

When they have room to breathe, then they aren’t in charge. And when they aren’t in charge, we can act on our own behalves, knowing that society isn’t fair, that there are roadblocks, that everything isn’t necessarily going to work out just as we had planned.

And that we’re worthy beings, either way.

Academia tends to spin our emotional compasses until we don’t know which way is north. If you’re feeling lost, I offer one-on-one coaching to help you figure it all out.

Value your time, work, and expertise

When the eight months that marked finishing the dissertation, defending the dissertation, and being on the academic job market simultaneously finally ended with an accepted offer, all I could do was exhale. Well, exhale and lay on the couch blearily watching television, sick as a dog.

Once I recovered, I was in touch with the committee who hired me, letting them know when I planned to arrive in town (a month and a half before my contract started) and that I would get started program-planning once I got settled in.

I immediately received an email in return from one particular committee member, castigating me for working ahead of my contract and announcing (with plenty of cc:s), that clearly I wasn’t up on the most recent Marxist theory. (Thank goodness Marxist theory wasn’t my area of expertise.)

The rest of the committee, to their credit, swooped in to blunt the damage of that email and make me feel welcome.

The problem is, he had a point

One of the problems of academia is that it has no boundaries. The vaunted flexibility that means we don’t have to be in an office between 9 and 5 every day also means there’s no container for our work.

Despite media and political claims to the contrary, academics work far more than 40 hours a week. In fact, you could argue that academics work all the damn time. They work evenings. They work weekends. They work holidays. There’s always more work to be done, more tasks that need to be squeezed in between classes and research and advising and all of the other commitments that constitute academic work at every level.

And yet despite working around the clock, on vacations, on holidays, (American) academics are typically paid for the nine months of the year that map onto the fall and spring semesters’ teaching. (Yes, some schools pay the 9 months’ salary out in 12 months, but that’s not the same as a 12 month salary.)

And that’s only if you’ve been lucky enough to get a tenure-track or post-doc position – adjuncts get paid by the course. The logic of the academic wage is made most explicit right there.

Forget overtime. There’s an immense amount of unpaid labor built in to the academic system under the rubric of vocation. You’re supposed to love it so much that you do it even though you aren’t getting paid. One might even argue that you’re structurally forced to do it, because it’s all that unpaid labor that gets you tenure or a promotion or a slim chance at a job that 400 other people are also applying for.

The unpaid labor is what is structurally rewarded. The less-valued labor is paid for.

This is some messed-up shit.

Straight to burnout

The most successful academics I know said no. They said no to committee work that didn’t serve them and wasn’t in line with what their colleagues were doing. They said no to being too flexible with teaching schedules. They said no to working all their waking hours.

And yet, the job market being what it is, graduate students are urged to take on more, do more, publish more, teach more, serve more, all in the name of trying to beat out peers to win that job that has, let’s face it, something like 400:1 odds.

Better departments protect assistant professors so they can achieve tenure, but the downsizing of the faculty means that assistant professors, more and more, are being burdened with too much work to do the work that gets them tenure.

This is unsustainable. It’s unsustainable personally, and its unsustainable institutionally.

I hear story after story of people who are burnt out, who have no enthusiasm or energy left for the work that they love or at least like, because they’ve had no time to recharge.

This does not make for happiness, and it’s unlikely to get better.

There are other options

There are options other than working crazy hours for not enough pay.

Set reasonable time boundaries, and triage your work. You know as well as I do that some work actually matters, and some doesn’t. Spend the bulk of your best time on the work that matters. Do the rest as well as you can given the time remaining.

Benchmark yourself against your colleagues. If you’re doing more than they are, either in teaching or in service, let some things go.

Know that there are non-academic options that really are 9-5, which leaves an unbelievable amount of time free for things that aren’t work. And they pay all year round, too.

Value your own time, work, and expertise. They’re worth a lot.

Know you’re leaving but not sure how to actually make that happen? I offer two things that might help: a resume and cover letter writing service and a class designed to help you create a successful job search system.

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