Letting Go Of My Post-Academic Rage

Two weeks ago I had the pleasure to go to Pittsburgh and hang out with two friends who I met while in the contingent faculty trenches.  Like front veterans we traded war stories over beers and remembered some of the more ridiculous indignities we've suffered.  At some point I asked my buddies, who are both regular readers of this blog, which kinds of posts they like best, since I've been unsure of which direction to go in recently.  Both of them told me that while my three foci have been politics, music, and academia, it might be time to give writing about academia a rest.

I've long thought the same thing, except that whenever I write my screeds about academia, they tend to get the most traffic.  They've also been very satisfying, a kind of exorcism of the bitterness and hate left over from my experience in higher ed.  However, I think my friends are right.  I am more than two years removed from that world, and am fast losing touch with it.  My life has gone on, and it has gone on in a much better direction than I could have possibly imagined.

I've known this over the last two years, but it was so hard to let go of the rage.  My absolute blinding anger over what I was put through has faded a bit, but I still feel a knot in the pit of my stomach over my dear friends who are still being wronged by what must be the most hypocritical and exploitative profession in America today.

Those feelings haven't gone away, but there are other people out there still in the trenches who are closer to the action and better suited to sound the alarm about academia's complete and utter moral bankruptcy.  I also know in my heart of hearts that as angry and aggrieved as I have been at my treatment, that I just can't see myself having taken another path in life as a young person.  I met the best people I've ever known along the way, expanded my mind, and rubbed shoulders with some truly fantastic scholars, my advisor included.

Then again, now that I am buying a house I sometimes think about how much easier it would be to pay for it had I not squandered my 20s in the academic monastery.  After bitterly contemplating this fact, I also tell myself that what I experienced was priceless.  My rational mind replies by telling me that thought could just be a load of bullshit, and maybe it is.  But it's what I've had to tell myself so as not to get swamped by regret, and it helps me better appreciate what I have now.  Anger and bitterness weigh down the soul, and if I am going to be a good teacher, husband, and father, it's time to stop rueing the slings and arrows of my academic past, and just let it slide into oblivion.  That chapter of my life is over and done, and I'd prefer to let its pages get a little dusty.

More on Academic Lifeboaters

My recent post on academic lifeboaters has received a lot of traffic, thanks to Pan Kisses Kafka's kind referral and the Twitterverse.  Sadly, it might be yet another example of how my best writing comes out of pain and rage, since the post was prompted by reading the vapid cant of meritocrats and lifeboaters in the comments sections of post-academic bloggers.  Now I am out of academia and much happier, my writing is suffering since there are fewer things to trigger outbursts of my sharper prose.  I guess that's a small price to pay for mental health and spiritual contentment.

I had a very rude reminder of my former anguish a couple of nights ago, when I had a dream that I was still on the academic job market.  It was so utterly convincing that I woke up in an absolute panic, it took me about twenty minutes to settle down and fall back to sleep.  (Normally I go right back to sleep after a bad dream.)  I was on the market for a total of six grueling, painful years when I lived in a constant state of uncertainty about my future.  It took me three shots to get a tenure-track job, and I tried (and failed) three more times to escape the horror show at my tenure-track job before finding happiness as a teacher.

Ever since my earliest youth I have had a mortal fear of rejection and judgement, much of which could be chalked up to my fervently Catholic upbringing.  Still to this day if I screw something up I will sit and think about obsessively for days on end.  The academic job market is one long train of judgement and rejection, with plenty of opportunities for screw-ups and mistakes to beat myself up over.  Dante could not have devised a more effective personal hell for me to live in.  Every year about this time when I was on the job market a knot would develop in my stomach that would get progressively tighter and tighter until spring.  So many weekends and nights were spent assembling applications that cost money and time that I didn't have, and many of them never received a reply in return.  At the point in my career when I had the most qualifications (book contract, three articles in top journals, several courses developed) I started getting the fewest responses.  All of the years of work and sacrifice and playing by the rules of the profession seemed to amount to nothing, and the rejection was just making me insane.  To go back to that would be the worst nightmare of them all.

It's when I think about the job market that my anger towards the lifeboaters gets most intense.  Anyone who's been through the gauntlet of fire ought to know how unfair and random it is, and how much luck plays into it.  To sit back and belch "meritocracy!" when the fairness of the system is challenged requires an immense amount of self-delusion, narcissism, or both.

But I need to let the anger and rage subside.  I now work at a place where I am greatly appreciated and well-rewarded.  The experience has taught me the truth of the post-academic mantras I repeat to myself when the feelings of rejection and anger flare up: I am not a failure, the academic profession is failure.  I was not rejected, I made the right decision to reject it.  The profession doesn't get to judge me, I have judged it, and found it to be wanting.

The lifeboaters can have their miserable shipwreck, I've got better things to do.

On Being Post Post-Academic

With the collapse of the humanities and simultaneous gutting of the academic profession, there are plenty of folks out there who have left the groves of academe for greener pastures.  Many identify themselves explicitly as "post-academic," a term which I guess could maybe be applied to me as well.  Post-academics are both outside academia, but also engaged in a critical critique of it.  The more militant types take a John Brown approach, hoping to free those entrapped in a system that has failed them.

These days I don't really think I'm post-academic, I'm more post post-academic.  Why?  Because I no longer give a flying fuck about the academic profession.  I. Do. Not. Care.  I do not see its fate in any way to be connected to my own.  Post-academics are still invested in reforming the system or at least trying to change it.  I have withdrawn my investment, except for the fervent hope that my friends still immeshed in it will be protected, advance up the ladder, or find a better life.

For the longest time I wondered how I could leave something I had devoted my entire adult life to.  Turns out, it was pretty damn easy.  What I discovered was that for once in my life, my gut instincts were actually correct.  When I started graduate school, many things I saw really bugged me about the academic profession.  Many scholars wrote indecipherable prose intended to prove a didactic political point, and yet were deemed successful, even demigods.  Others professed a support for the toiling masses, but were more than happy to reap the benefits of cheap grad student labor.  Uninspiring scholarship on "trendy" topics got rewarded much more than much more impressive research on non-trendy topics.  Some profs at my grad school, whose salaries were taxpayer supported, disdained teaching undergraduates as beneath them, and thought any professor who did care to be suspect and inadequate as a scholar.  The whole enterprise stank of bourgeois snobbery, hypocrisy, and privilege, even though I had and still retain a great deal of respect and admiration for many of the professors in my graduate department.  When I started going to big conferences, I had a hard time seeing myself as a member of the professors' club.

Worse, once I left grad school and became a "visiting" professor and later an assistant prof, I noticed the most damning thing of all: nobody was satisfied.  I found the place where I "visited" to be a wonderfully livable city and the school to be comfortable enough, but the tenured and tenure-track professors were often miserable, thinking they ought to be in a trendier location, or employed at a more prestigious university.  At conferences I often heard much the same from people I knew who actually had R-1 jobs in major cities.  They still weren't satisfied with their positions, and I began to wonder if anyone in this self-hating club ever reached a stage of contentment.

Over the years I found ways to ignore my nagging doubts and socialized myself into academic culture.  While a student enjoying my immersion in the study of history, I did not give much thought to what came after.  I was lucky enough to be surrounded by a bunch of fantastic people, and was happier than I had ever been in my life, despite the poverty, anxiety, and labor demanded by grad school life.  Once I was out and trying to claw my way out of contingent labor into a tenure-track gig, and then to fight my way out of my tenure-track job to be closer to my wife, the immense effort of six years on the job market blinded me to the fact that I was sacrificing myself for a profession I wasn't suited for, and which had rewarded my years of toil with rejection and anguish.    

Leaving academia initially made me feel like a failure and a reject, but the tables have turned.  I reject academia, because it has failed.  It's fucked up and wrong, not me.  Rather than define myself as "post-academic" and tilt my lance at the windmills of higher ed, I'd rather just forget about the whole tawdry, overrated, hypocritical, awful mess of a profession that it is, even if my posts on academia tend to get the most hits.  That chapter of my life is over, and good riddance to it.