Escape the Ivory Tower

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?

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