Escape the Ivory Tower

What should you do?

Last night I was on the phone with a friend who’s trying to decide whether she should stay in her relationship. “What do you think I should do?” she asked me.

And I had to admit that I had no idea. Because I’m not her, and I’m not God. And even if I were her or God, I still might not know. Because the answer might not be clear yet.

Go back to bed, Liz

There’s a scene in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love that I return to in moments like this. In this scene, she’s sobbing on the bathroom floor, paralyzed in her own struggle to figure out what to do about her marriage and her happiness. Should she leave her husband? Should she stay? And as she’s sobbing on the floor, she hears the voice of God (her description), and that voice says, “Go back to bed, Liz.”

It was so immediately clear that this was the only thing to do. I would not have accepted any other answer. I would not have accepted a great booming voice that said either: You Must Divorce Your Husband! or You Must Not Divorce Your Husband! Because that’s not true wisdom. True wisdom gives the only possible answer at any given moment, and that night, going back to bed was the only possible answer. Go back to bed, said this omniscient interior voice, because you don’t need to know the final answer right now, at three o’clock in the morning on a Thursday in November. . . . Go back to bed, because the only thing you need to do for now is get some rest and take good care of yourself until you do know the answer.

What does this have to do with the topic at hand?

I have conversations just like this (“What should I do?“) with people struggling with academia, because it’s much the same — a huge, overwhelming, complicated question that calls into question both identity and your everyday everything. Where will you be, who will be around you, what will your daily routine look like, who will you be? It depends. On the answer.

And oh, people want that answer more than anything. They want to know. And of course they do. We do. Because not knowing is really painful.

But it’s entirely possible — likely even — that the answer isn’t here yet.

Maybe some part of you is still hoping against hope that something will be different — that perfect job will come through, or your institution will suddenly recognize that you’re a total research rockstar (because you ARE) instead of patting you on the head and deciding you’re really a teacher, or you’ll find your teaching groove.

Maybe some part of you is convinced that it’s not that bad, or that there’s nothing better out there, or that no one will care if you try to make changes where you are.

Or maybe your choices are equally shiny and equally terrifying.

For whatever reason, the answer may not be coming out to play right now.

And that’s okay

Yes, it’s uncomfortable. Yes, it’s terrifying (“What if I never figure this out and I’m stuck here forever?!).

And it’s still okay.

It won’t be forever, I promise. It can’t be forever, because things are always changing, and whatever is getting in the way of the answer will somehow be changed. We just don’t know how, yet.

But I can tell you this: When the answer comes, when it finally shows up, you will know it by the peace it brings you, even if there’s also grief or frustration or anger or sadness. When the real answer (not our attempts to force an answer) comes, something in you will know it in a deep way that can’t be budged.

If you’re not feeling that sense of peace right now, if you’re at the sobbing-on-the-bathroom-floor stage, I beg you: Go back to bed.

The answer will come, and when it does, there will be plenty of hard work to do, and the best thing you can do right now is to treat yourself with as much kindness and compassion and curiosity as you can while the answer emerges.

So get sleep, and eat well, and let go of any to-do list items that aren’t actually absolutely necessary right now, and spend some time doing something that feeds you, whether it’s hanging out with your kid or going dancing or reading trashy magazines in front of cheesy movies. And know that I’m thinking about you.

Leaving academia behind

It’s probably no surprise, but you could track my progress as an ex-academic by my book collection.

When I left academia “for good,” I trailed behind me in that monster truck dozens of boxes of academic books. I hadn’t had time to winnow through them in the few weeks between getting a job offer and getting the hell out of Dodge, so I just packed them up and resolved to sort through them when we got settled.

It took me three years to open those boxes again. And in the meantime, they sat against the walls of my dining room (not even the basement!) as a visible reminder of all of the time, effort, and money I turned my back on when I turned my back on that career. As you might imagine, I don’t recommend this.

Eventually, though, my desire for a pretty (and useable!) dining room outweighed my resistance to opening up those Pandora’s boxes, and I sat down one rainy Saturday determined to end with Order. At the end of that day, I had a short shelf of books neatly leaning against each other and bag after bag after bag of books to donate to the AAUW booksale.

I had to confront the fact that I hadn’t left academia very far behind. I’d simply stacked it around my dining room. And the thought that kept going through my mind as I opened all of those boxes and scanned all of those spines was this: This isn’t me. Those composition books? Not me. Professional writing books? Not me. Modernist literature? Definitely not me.

It was incredibly freeing. None of those, really, had ever been me, and letting them go — letting go of the me that had them in her collection — meant there was room for the me who loved psychology and personality and Eastern philosophy and non-fiction about crazy things like how paint colors were discovered and developed (dead bugs for red, in fact).

It meant I could love A History of the Modern Fact and Simians, Cyborgs, and Women for themselves, because I enjoyed reading them and because I liked the part of me who liked reading them. It meant I could reclaim my intellectual curiosity instead of my intellectual pose — and the curiosity was much more fun.

And so I purged the collection of all of those disciplines, all of those scholars, who no longer compelled me. It felt like freedom, like I was finally washing my hands of the struggle, of those years when I couldn’t rub the misfitting edges of myself off fast enough.

But that wasn’t the end of it. A few years later, we started winnowing through things again, this time to pare down, have more space, and get rid of anything we didn’t either love or use. And I found myself getting rid of fiction.

Now, your experience in graduate school may well have been different, but I ran with a self-consciously pomo crowd, people who only liked music if no one had heard of it, people who read Jonathan Lethem before watching Space Ghost Coast to Coast. I didn’t really fit in.

It’s not that I didn’t like those things — I did. But I liked them with my head, not with my gut. Left to my own devices, I liked predictable melodies and romantic comedies and novels about people.

As I came across them all again, I realized that I’m unlikely to read those books or watch those movies again. I’m no longer satisfied by things that feed only my mind — I want things that feed my soul. Me, I’d rather read about the experiences of spiritual mystics or good management theory or how to hack SEO or someone’s personal account of mental illness. And so they, too, got packed into bags and boxes and summarily evicted from my shelves.

What I learned from my book collection was this: leaving academia is a process. Because it’s so much a part of our identities, because so many of us experienced graduate school in the impressionable decade of our twenties, because it took so damn long, turning in your office key isn’t the end of it. There will be layers and layers of untying identities, of examining assumptions, of watching yourself bloom. And that’s okay. It’s better than okay, in fact — it’s magical.

So if you’ve got boxes of books stacked around your own dining room — literally or metaphorically — know that it’s okay. Know that you’re on your way, that you’re right where you’re supposed to be, that it will be different one day. You’ll reclaim your dining room and your bookshelf both.

But in the meantime, be right where you are, whether it’s grief or anger or confusion or avoidance. It’s all part of the journey. And it’s all good.

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.

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