Julie posted this today on ye ol’ Facebook. If you read here regularly, you won’t be surprised to see that I chose to use it as a springboard today. I’ve talked at length about my own academic career trajectory, the odd lies that went into training for a job in the academy, and the often conflicting ideas offered about what the job actually is. I’ve also been transparent like a windshield covered in dead bugs about how salaries aren’t high enough, job security is somewhat mythical, corporate thought and speak is infiltrating, and generally things aren’t as billed.
One paragraph of the piece I linked is particularly relevant to my observations about academia:
The core self-worth of the typical American academic is deeply invested in the notion that we’ve spent most of our lives rising to the top through determination and intelligence. And as a reactionary and masochistic correlate to that faith, we harshly link each other’s professional failures and our own to some presumed lack of such qualities. We feel like it would diminish our life’s work to admit in public that, actually, the system is rigged, that many of our successes are due more to luck than anything else, that most of the “best work” is not being produced at all because the collective, variable talents of our community of thinkers and teachers and partners are being wasted in the competitive pursuit of individualistic success that our livelihoods depend on.
Let me expand and break it down all at once by turning this into a list:
- People don’t get what they earn in academia
- In fact hiring decisions are influenced by things so trivial, so strange, and so flat-out “wrong” that you wouldn’t believe (stories in a minute)
- Academia is a place where being “good” at what you do and having “worth” to your employer are measured on radically different metrics
- Academia has forgotten what it is actually for (more on this in a minute)
- If you aren’t white, and aren’t a dude, and aren’t from at the very least a college educated middle-class family, you’re never going to be granted respect by a large segment of the academic world
- And if you’re not white, get ready to represent everyone like you to a large number of your peers
- And god help you if you’re fat, because fat people are rarely considered in academia
- Almost everyone knows the seven things I just said– at least within the academy– but you will be considered the biggest of assholes if you point even one of these things out
- Academia should be a safe place that is about trust, but if you work there, it’s a minefield and you shouldn’t trust anyone (sad to say)
- In spite of all of that, when it’s working right and going well, academia can be what we thought it was, and that’s why most of us stay. We aren’t brainwashed. We aren’t “stuck.” Yeah, we got here thinking it’d be different, but it’s not hell on earth.
So let’s start with the first point and offer some details. The first point I made is something that anyone who has gone to graduate school knows. If you’re going to build a career in academia, you have to research something (or give up on the shining gold ring that makes the brass ring look tarnished– you’ll never be a full professor without publishing research). The second you begin researching, you enter into a pissing contest with everyone else who needs to publish their research. This will result in a number of things happening to you, in any given order: you will meet people who don’t “get” your research, you will meet people who do not LIKE your research, you will meet people who realize your research might bump their research out of a publication or presentation someday and hence see you as threatening, you will meet people who don’t want the field you are in to grow and so you become a symbol to them of something they must crush, you will meet people who don’t think the subject you are researching is worthy of their methods, you will meet people who expect you to link your research to theirs and to every person who ever did research, you will meet people who just don’t think young scholars should get to do anything without pain because that’s how it was for “them” and you’re not special.
You’ll also meet kind people, and people who find your work fascinating. You’ll meet supportive people, and people who want to see your research blossom. But sadly, when you’re starting out, there are more of the critical people and the harsh people and the people who don’t want to actually see you succeed. It isn’t literally that they don’t want to see you succeed; it’s that THEY want all the success, and for some reason we’ve allowed academia to take on a sense of scarcity, as if my publishing a book means that someone else cannot publish a book, or like my article in a journal means the next person cannot be published in a journal. And editors have taken on the personalities of the previous generations, so now editorial comments sometimes come back from publishers with the defensive wounds of the reviewer clearly visible. I received back a piece a few months ago that was recommended for revise-resubmit, and 90% of the comments were a female reviewer talking about how sexist gamers are (which is a valid point, but not in response to an article that isn’t about gender issues, that clearly spells out the involvement of female gamers, and which accounts in exhaustive ways for the fact that the sample cannot say anything definitive about race and isn’t meant to be about that).
The reason for all of this is that many academics feel the need to stake claims to spaces and to then defend them. At the same time, if YOU do that, you will be called out on the carpet. This happens to me frequently because I’m sort of a rare bird. I’m a mixed blood Cherokee who follows Cherokee traditions and beliefs but doesn’t pretend, even for a second, that I didn’t grow up in a decidedly non-Cherokee world. I grew up in the projects of a mid-sized midwestern town, then I grew to adulthood living in the basement of my mother’s adoptive parent’s post-war in a quaint conservative neighborhood going to an all-white high school. I’m probably the only Cherokee games scholar you know. But when I point that out, people get extremely defensive about my belief that I have something interesting and unique to say. Let me point out very clearly here– I have never, and will never, claimed that I am BETTER than anyone or that my unique perspective means I am more important or more relevant than anyone. That’s not a part of my belief system or my academics. But you can bet that people take me that way and react to me as such. And that’s just sad.
Okay, my second point was about hiring. I’m not going to tell MY story, because my story is not something I feel like sharing in this post. But I do want to share three tidbits from my time working as an academic:
- I sat in a committee where someone suggested we not hire a person because while he was extremely qualified, a great teacher, did great research and was kind and engaging with students, he called his female students “girls” and not “women” when uttering the sentence “we had a fair number of girls for tech classes.”
- I was told by a friend who was on a committee that considered hiring me that I was ranked first in their pool by four members of the committee and dead last (out of hundreds– when I was applying to English jobs the pools were massive) by one. The reason the one person ranked me dead last was that this person felt that their university had “talked to enough people from that graduate school.”
- I sat on a committee– as the student rep– where an African-American Candidate was tossed out of consideration because his job talk was considered “too aggressive.” This young man spoke like his father, who was a pastor, in an oratory style that anyone who had ever hard Jesse Jackson, MLK, Malcolm X, Barack Obama, or just about any other African American speaker would have recognized not as aggressive but as indicative of his community.
I also applied for jobs myself where, when I emailed to check on my status, I found out that someone stuck my paperwork in the wrong folder. I got a callback once that the university couldn’t figure out how to get me to their campus in time for a visit so they chose to just not do it.
That’s just stuff I’ve experienced as a relatively young scholar. If you talk to a full professor or two, the things you’ll hear are nuts. One prof used to tell me over and over stories about how a person would be knocked out of a pool to spite another member of the hiring committee, out of some feud between two faculty members. It’s almost never actually about the candidate.
To my third point above: professors are teachers. Sorry star researchers if I just hurt your feelings, but that’s what we’re for. It’s awesome if you’re in a discipline where you can create things or cure things or build new tech things and make lots of patent money for your university, but the majority of us are teachers who have to do research and presentations and seek grant money because that’s part of how we’re evaluated. It’s not what we are. A good professor is a good teacher and a good mentor to students. That’s what the academy is meant to be made of. People who teach other people to achieve their potential. But when we’re hired and as we’re promoted, that’s given the least merit in considering us. The important numbers are money we bring in and how much we’ve published, knowing that the people who award that money and the people who accept those publications are part of this system and award their merits in ways that are at best biased and at worst completely subjective. So it’s hard to know how to be “good” at this job, because being good at this job and being rewarded as a star at this job come from different things.
And that’s my fourth point. I have had this argument with so many administrators that it’s sort of a miracle I have a career (I’ve been arguing it since I was an undergrad): colleges aren’t profit centers. We went corporate, and we worry about making money, generating revenue. But that’s completely and utterly idiotic. We’re classified as non-profit. If we are generating money we aren’t spending, we’re bad at what we do and we’re violating the whole understanding of what we do. The idea of the university is to teach, and if we aren’t spending all our resources on that, we’re doing it wrong. End of discussion. There’s no argument where generating money is the right plan. Now if we were generating money to hire more faculty or give the existing faculty and staff better wages, or to buy better materials, that’d be awesome. But apparently we’re making money to pay the highest level employees and to say we made money. That’s not the academic model. If that’s the goal, go do it somewhere like Wal-Mart or Amazon where the whole idea is to make money.
My fifth point is the sad truth no one wants to admit. Many academics pride themselves on being champions of diversity, proud liberals, workers in a world where gender, race class and sexuality aren’t important. Only one look at how the whole thing works and you see that from the people who tell you what you have to do in order to rise up the structure to the people you’re expected to cite in your research to the people who decide if your research gets grant money, published, or approved for study are either white men or are bleached in the legacy of white men. Academia is a rich white guy’s game. It doesn’t try hard enough not to be. It’s sad for me to say that because I work every day to break that. I try to exist as a representation of so many things: the mixed-blood Cherokee, first generation, overweight, poor, hybrid scholar who can show students as a symbol that anyone can survive and thrive in this world. But I’m one guy.
And that leads to my next point, which is that if you aren’t a white guy (and I think white women get a bit of this now), if you’re, like me, Cherokee and a game scholar and overweight and from a poor neighborhood, you become THE representation of all people like you. I often am asked to speak for all indigenous people. And all fat people. And if someone brings up community colleges or poverty, heads turn to me. Because of course that’s what I exist to do; I am meant to represent everyone like me. Just like I can turn to any white person and ask them to stand in for all white people. You’re all Donald Trump, right? You’re all David Duke? You’re all Dr. Phill McGraw? You’re all Toby Keith?
I’ve mentioned weight a few times in this post. Being overweight might be the worst thing to suffer in academia, because there are huge structural problems and while many people are very, very kind, a shockingly large number of people think that being overweight is a sign of gluttony and something you should be able to easily fix (it’s not, for example, that you have a genetic issue). So there’s a stigma. But there’s also the fact that furniture is never purchased thinking of you (also, I’m a lefty– no one thinks about that either). Clothing that is ordered for events is always ordered without considering large people. In addition to not thinking through desks and chairs and provided ladders and such, any time there’s an assembly of any sort no one thinks about chair space. It’s just… unfair.
And as many of you who read here have probably noted, there isn’t the sense of safety there should be. Partly because of all the things I’ve said above, but mostly because if the academy is what we think it is, I should be allowed to say all the things I’ve said here fearlessly, because they’re valid and I know what I’m talking about and I have academic and intellectual freedom. But the truth is this post is dangerous. Someone could– and probably one day will– hurt me with this. Because safety is a farce. This is not to say that I don’t feel safe and supported by my program, because I do. I just know that academia is not a place where anyone who isn’t at the top gets to feel safe. Ever.
But I want to finish this on a positive note, because I know a number of people complain about how academia is and how the cake is a lie and all of that, but in truth, the academy is still what it is meant to be under all the warts and rust and battle scars. I get to work with amazing people and to teach eager students. I get to think all the time. I get to try projects that I could never try if I had a regular 9-5 job. And I get to be this symbolic thing. I get to be the poor kid, who’s father got a GED after joining the Marines, who grew up in the projects, the ancestors of people who fled relocation. I get to stand in a room and teach some of the smartest people in the country.
It’s not a bad gig. We just need to fix some problems and be honest with ourselves about how this all works.