Thoughts On A Reunion Of Grad School Friends

I just spent the last three days in East Tennessee in a house with a bunch of my grad school friends (some of whom make up the tens of people who read this blog on the regular!) It was a great experience, and actually got me thinking a lot about the changes in higher education.

We earned our PhDs or left grad school in the period roughly between 2004 and 2008. Some of us are tenured and tenure-track faculty at various universities. Just as many of us are working at universities in another capacity or teaching at the high school level (like yours truly.) Back in say, 2006, when I graduated, I doubt any of us would have predicted any of this. A lot of this had to do with the infamous academic job market, but not in the ways you might think. A lot of the folks who are no longer university faculty were once tenure track professors (like me), or were offered but turned down tenure track jobs. (I am glad to say that while many of us worked for a time as contingent faculty, none of us tried to make a life out of adjuncting.)

It wasn't so much that getting a job was impossible, it was that those jobs were often incompatible with our lives. I am not the only person in my circle who opted out of being faculty to either solve the "two body problem" or (relatedly) live in a place I actually wanted to live in. I had long agreed with the wisdom that academia requires its adherents to be a kind of clergy, whose work is to be a calling demanding great personal sacrifice, rather than just another professional career. Seeing us all gathered together this weekend was a very visceral reminder that so many in my generation of PhDs have not followed the path they worked so hard to forge in grad school.

Until I fell in love with my wife, I was willing to accept the calling and try to make myself happy with the consolation that I was a scholar, even if it meant living in places far from friends and family where I did not truly want to be. Once my life had different priorities, it was inevitable that my academic career was going to end. That's the case for a lot of other people, too, both in and outside of my circle of friends.

While I and my non-professor friends are contributing a lot in our current jobs and get personal fulfillment from them, I can't help but to think of how much scholarly potential was and is wasted by a system completely inadequate to human needs. Of course, as far as the department we graduated from is concerned, those of us who are no longer professors might as well not even exist. And so for those just emerging from my alma mater with their doctoral diplomas fresh in their hands, the cycle continues.

On Seeing My Grad School Campus Again

Today I finally returned from my 16 day road trip with my wife and two daughters.  It has been a long, strange, tiring trip.  The sound of the Frozen soundtrack (played to placate my toddlers) is still ringing in my ears, and I feel like I have a bit of the white line fever.  We took a meandering path on the way to and from my Nebraska homeland, stopping to see all kinds of friends and family along the way.  On Friday we happened to pass through Champaign-Urbana, where I did my doctoral studies.

We had already taken an extended stop in Springfield to see various Lincoln sites and to have lunch with some friends from my grad school days who are living there.  I was hoping to stop in Chambana and take my daughters out of the car and walk them around the quad while my spouse took a well-deserved rest.  (I drove, she tried to keep them entertained.  Not sure which was harder.)  Toddlers being who they are, they had just fallen asleep in the back seat after a morning of being less than easy to deal with.  (That was the exact point at which I think they hit the wall, poor kids.)

I was not going to mess with nap time, so instead I drove through downtown Champaign, campustown, and the campus itself.  Earlier that morning I harbored ideas of going back into Gregory Hall and seeing if any of the profs were about.  Once I gazed upon campus again, I knew that such actions would be totally out of the question, and not just because my daughters were sleeping.

Unlike a lot of other people, I had a very pleasant grad school experience.  Until recent years, it was the happiest that I've ever been in my life.  I was living the life of the mind, young, and surrounded by great people in a town that was affordable and had a lot going on.  I knew that the job market was going to be difficult, but I had always put that in the back of my mind.  After leaving the nest I ended up in a dead-end, temporary "visitor" job for two years, then three increasingly unhappy years on the tenure track.  (I'll spare you the details, but my interpersonal relations at work were setting off panic attacks on a daily basis by the end.)  I gave up on my grad school dream and left academia at that point.  Gazing upon that golden campus, I felt an intense wave of sorrow.

Looking back, I was a completely different person in those days.  A vast gulf of painful experience has estranged me from that person.  While I am happy these days with my personal life and my job, my five years in the cauldron have made me distrustful, cynical, and even a little bitter.  My sorrow was the sorrow for losing the hope, belief, and optimism that I once had that I know will never really come back.  Of course, I am a whole lot wiser, pragmatic, and driven than I was back then, too.

I've come to see my decision to go to grad school to be, in the words of Elvis Costello, a "brilliant mistake." I had no clue what I was getting into back then, and from a financial standpoint, I fucked my life over pretty good.  I also developed my mind and gained friends who I wouldn't trade for anything.  I've met plenty of good people since I left the academic world, but none have shared the bonds of friendship that I wove back then.  I was lucky enough to see many of these friends on this trip, and today I was hit with the realization that it is not Champaign-Urbana or my old campus that means something, but the people I met there.  I'll continue to keep going great distances to see them, and will likely not bother to revisit my grad school campus anytime soon.

Old Academe Stanley's Harsh Truths

I find several internet memes amusing, but I never had the chance to construct my own until Old Academe Stanley showed up, inspired by Old Economy Steve.  I was even there at Old Academe Stanley's creation and wrote some of the first quickmemes.  William Pannapacker (aka Thomas H Benton of the all-time classic "Grad School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go" fame) mentioned the idea on Twitter, constructed the template, and I very quickly jumped in.  Yes folks, this will likely be my one and only moment of internet near fame.

Like Old Economy Steve, Old Academe Stanley exposes the feelings of betrayal and anger in the younger scholarly generation over their elders' lack of empathy for, and even complicity in, their economic struggles.  In my many years in the academy, I met a lot of real Old Academe Stanley types who now provide plenty of meme ideas. I still remember the faculty meeting I attended when I was an assistant prof where a man who had been there since 1971 expressed puzzlement at how the number of classes taught by adjuncts had risen over the years, as if he hadn't been there the whole time!  Despite being clueless to the new realities of academia happening on his watch, he at least kept up on new scholarship and was well-known for teaching rigorous yet enlightening classes.  Two other elders in the department attained full prof without ever publishing a solitary thing.  In their day, they didn't even have to apply for tenure, it was just given to them!  One of the elders was such an awful teacher that his enrollments even in required surveys that students HAD to take were almost below the cut-off.  Another was known to give her ancient Egypt lecture to her modern Europe class and show up to class twenty minutes late and halfway in the bag on a consistent basis.  These folks were paid significantly more than me, and would be sitting on my tenure committee and judging my accomplishments, but would not be able to get a job in academia if they went on the market today.

I also recall a full prof with similar credentials with a campus radical twist at the school where I VAPed.  In response to a curriculum change mandated by the administration, he sent out a mass email to the whole department of Mario Savio's famous "throw yourselves on the gears" speech.  Fed up with being treated like an indentured servant by my department, I emailed him back to tell him that as an exploited visitor, I agreed with his viewpoint of the university as a capitalist machine.  His response?  He blew me off with a dismissive reply email.  That was confirmation of something I'd already seen in grad school: the "radical" politics of many professors stop at the university gates, or when it makes a dent in their pocketbooks.

A great many of these folks were actually nice people, but completely oblivious to their privilege and totally uninterested in doing anything about the horrible inequalities they benefitted from.  One exception was a guy where I VAPed who had been there since the late 1960s and actually treated us "visitors" as equals (which few did).  He even openly fought for our interests in department meetings, pushing to get us better pay and longer-term contracts.  At the same time, he was an unpublished full prof who gave his lectures without powerpoints or notes, claiming his style was "like jazz."  The students didn't seem to agree, or at least found it to be a kind of jazz as pleasing as the Albert Ayler variety.  As a VAP, my teaching evaluations were heavily scrutinized, so I did not have the luxury of being a scholarly jazz artist; I had to placate the little consumers as much as possible.  At least he was a stand-up guy and not a blatant hypocrite like the Neiman Marxists I so commonly encountered in academia.

My love of Old Academe Stanley is not necessarily indicative of hatred towards the people I've been discussing, but more anger and frustration at a system that refuses to listen to the grievances of those being destroyed by it while an older, oblivious generation glides into a retirement that people my age will never have.  It's an anger and frustration whose existence can be felt in the several quickmemes that have already been constructed.  I only hope that somehow this rage and resentment can be channeled into positive change and a better life for my academic generation.