So this one made the rounds today.
I want to respond to it, mostly because two times this week I talked about academic bullying in varied contexts, and it’s not a new topic at all for me on this blog. I think the response here on IHE, while in many ways useful, ignores a few important things:
-
- Over-investment in an academic job doesn’t manifest in a singular set of problems. Yes, most people who over-invest in academic work are exhausted, but that’s because the expectations of an academic job are unrealistic. We teach, we grade, and we also research and we do service and we serve as mentors and advisors to numerous students. It’s not a job you can take and expect a 40 hour work week. People who tell you that you can work in academia that way just haven’t seen the reality on the ground. It’s worse still if you are someone who wants to innovate, because being a part of a cutting-edge or hybrid program will result in less people to do more work, so you either get to do it badly or you have to work harder than others.
But this can have three results with lots of gray areas: a) the person who is burnt out and disappointed, as described in the article, but who is also highly productive and who finds their own sense of reward from the work, b) the person who shouldn’t be an academic because all they do is complain about the work, often while not actually doing the work, or the worst yet, c) people who define their identity by their work but aren’t actually good at what they do, resulting in other faculty having to walk on eggshells so as to not crush the person’s illusion of high performance and self-sacrifice.
That last type of person is, as you might guess if you are a regular reader here, the sort who causes problems for others. They are the people who assert their expertise, then when you attempt to talk to them about what they do, if you disagree or offer a different interpretation you are “insulting” and “uninformed.” Not to be rude, but hey, dipshits, you work in a field that creates experts in what we do (that’s what PhD is supposed to mean). Your peers know roughly as much as you, and the things they know that you don’t, just like the things you know that they don’t, are what make all of us better. And there are going to be days, if you work at a college as good as you think you do, that you will have more than one student who is smarter than you in a class. You don’t get to browbeat them with your degree. Learn from them and teach them with what you have, experience and perspective. Put the Warhammer to the side, though. Your job isn’t to bludgeon those who want to engage you in intellectual conversation. There’s a Fox News job waiting for the people who just want to be right. - This sort of burnout is doubled-down on the two-body academic family (such a messed up wording “the two body problem,” as if married couples in other fields are a single physical form, those weird Voltrons of the working world). What has to be accounted for here is that if the burn is uneven– if one member of the couple is burning out faster than the other– there’s a weird thing that happens. The support structure SHOULD by all measures be weaker, but in truth it’s like two soldiers in a fox hole; the support structure is reinforced and works better because the other person “gets” it.But neither of these are the major problem that *I* see. As someone who has been part of the current job market in some way or another for six years, I’ve talked to many, many young academics. I’ve shared war stories and shared conversations in lobbies and Ubers, in airports and on message boards. The problem we all face is endemic. Its that:
- WE ARE TAUGHT TO BE THIS PERSON. Academia eats its young. We are all told — at least in the humanities and in digital media– to go out and try to bring about social change. We’re told to go make departments better with all the expertise we’ve gained. We’re told to champion the underdog. We’re told to innovate. We’re told to aspire to lead. We’re basically taught to give our lives over to being professors. And we’re told there will be a reward.
- Over-investment in an academic job doesn’t manifest in a singular set of problems. Yes, most people who over-invest in academic work are exhausted, but that’s because the expectations of an academic job are unrealistic. We teach, we grade, and we also research and we do service and we serve as mentors and advisors to numerous students. It’s not a job you can take and expect a 40 hour work week. People who tell you that you can work in academia that way just haven’t seen the reality on the ground. It’s worse still if you are someone who wants to innovate, because being a part of a cutting-edge or hybrid program will result in less people to do more work, so you either get to do it badly or you have to work harder than others.
For some, this isn’t so bad. I would love more free time and less stress, but this is the life I wanted, more or less. I like helping people. I like thinking. I like making things better. And as a minority on a grand scale (we’re the ones America tried to erase), I like knowing that all the work I do is either a moment for someone else like me to see “Wait, there’s a place for us here,” or is a thumb in the eye of those who think my kind go in a history book.
But I also chose not to have children so I can devote my parental-instinct energy to students. I chose not to follow through on creating all of the things I might have wanted to make so I could help others to learn to make things. It’s something I wanted. This was the career I picked.
For others, I think academia is the actual fallback position, people who buy into “those who can, do/those who can’t teach.” And for those people, I think the lack of happiness and all the burnout comes from the fact that they thought they’d run Dupont or that they’d own the next Google. They thought they’d be the one rising up the corporate ladder or making the next Hollywood blockbuster. If that was your goal in life and you landed in the academy, do the rest of us a favor and go fail at your dream until you get better and actually make it. Taking your disappointment that you couldn’t hit a home run in your first at-bat out on other faculty and on your students is disgraceful. Of course you’re not happy here. It’s not how things are here. It’s that you’re miserable because you wanted something else. If you feel like shit, you’re going to feel like as much shit here as you would somewhere else. The academy is the opposite of a healing potion; it’ll watch you die if you’re bleeding out.
It’s not fair to anyone for people with broken dreams to be working on the frontline of supporting the people who are just starting to chase their dreams. The failed author shouldn’t be teaching the aspiring novelist. The failed inventor can’t really run an innovative engineering program. That is the type of scholar who burns our fast, and once they burn out, they spread their ill will like a disease across a faculty.
I know I don’t want us to hire the failed game designer who couldn’t make his game work so he gave up and now he has to be a teacher. I don’t want to work with that guy. I want to work with the person who wants to keep making games on the side but who is energized by the chance to help young people make their games work and put their ideas out in the world. That’s what we hired last time we searched, due at least in part, I like to think, to the fact that I was leading the search and tried to sniff out the talented, productive, awesome game maker who wanted to teach, too.
I tell anyone who asks me that when I was a creative writing major, back in the day, I stopped writing my novel when I got my final class credits. It’s not because I couldn’t finish it (I actually did finish the plot, and I’m good with dialogue, so it would have gotten done if that was my concern). I stopped writing it because the academic creative writing world is a brutal wasteland full of fake people who do whatever they have to do to get published with the big press of the moment. I know that looks absolute– I don’t mean for it to. I have some great friends in creative writing still, and some of our very best teachers at Miami are creative writers (like my friend cris who just celebrated a birthday; I’d team teach with him in a second if he asked me to because that guy is awesome). But if you want to be a STAR as an academic creative writer, you either have to be the rare talent who gets published easily, or you have to machine yourself into what the field wants you to be. I was the latter type. I’m actually good at storytelling (it’s in my blood). But I like super hero and fantasy stories and character development. You know, the sort of writing that would never catch on. *blink* I don’t care for the current crop of “big name” fiction writers. If asked what writers I’d aspire to be like, I’d talk about people like Joss Whedon and Stephen King, Neil Gaiman and Brian Michael Bendis. Ursula Le Guin is the most academy beloved writer I could see myself emulating, and I don’t think I have her flair. I don’t want to be Toni Morrison. I don’t even want to be Charles Baxter, though his short story “Gryphon” is one of my very favorite pieces. If you asked me to be Melville I might Cobain. Or to be artsy, I might Surat.
I also don’t teach straight-up creative writing. Because I’d be a fool to think I could push people in the right direction to do that since I walked away from it in disgust. What I teach is storytelling in games, a different field where there aren’t Hemmingways and Faulkners to use as a measuring stick. The video game classics are mostly made by teams. I guess I could pull Gygax out and use him to crush dreams, but really, it’s a different space calling for a different thing. I also could easily teach creative non-fiction, but there’s not a big call for that in the games world, so I will leave that to the people who trained specifically for it.
So instead of devoting my life to changing my writing style enough to get published by Dickluster Press or whoever the hot imprint is right now, I devote my life to teaching students to make games and to understand issues of culture and race.
I think I made the right choice. For the right reasons.
And yeah, I’m scared to death of burnout. And I’m scared to death that I will eventually be expected to be a certain kind of person and that I’ll rebel against that (because, as I’ve said here before, “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me”), but assuming that I truly am good at what I do, I think I’ll be okay. It makes me happy, and assuming it all goes right it pays my bills. And I won’t neglect the things that really matter (family, WWE pay-per-views, midnight releases and exclusive Pops) to be a better academic. My students succeed. I offer value-per-dollar to my employer. My research is cutting edge (so much so that it pisses people off at me sometimes). I’m not what the academy wants to be seen as, but I’m what an academic should be. I’m a student-centered teacher scholar. I make thought, and I teach people to make things. Thinking and doing are my trade.
But honesty is the best policy. And had we all been honest about what the academy is and should be, I think we’d all be better off. People are trying to climb to the top of an academic mountain as if it’s the corporate ladder. The glory up at the top isn’t the same in the academy. It’s more work and more stress. We need good people up there. But we don’t need someone up there who needs the win to feel better. That never goes well. We don’t need someone pulling down hundreds of thousands of dollars shaking their fist at Wall Street.
Look what it did to our government.
Not that there’s any parallel between an institution that is meant to foster thought and prepare our citizens to be productive and an institution that is meant to serve our citizens and preserve society.
Apples to oranges.
Wait… why can’t fruits be compared again?
Apples.
Oranges.