Why Life in the Academy (Especially the Humanities) Sucks

I don't want to be writing this post; no matter what I write is going to feel inadequate. But I feel like I should say something about that xtranormal video "So you want to get a PhD in the Humanities?" that everyone is talking about. I've only watched it once and don't feel like reliving that particular experience again, so bitter and (horrible to have to admit) true-to-life did it feel the first time that I watched it. As, it seems from the comments on the video itself, many of my colleagues in academia concurred. But why? Why are we all so convinced that the life we have taken on is so utterly bankrupt that all we can do is roll around on the floor laughing our asses off because a (we all say) justifiably-bitter graduate student has parodied the death of our dreams so well?

The dismal job market, we say. The low pay, we say. The lack of respect in the general culture, we say. But why then do so many of us who have gotten not only tenure-track jobs but (mirabile dictu) tenure feel nearly as bitter as all of the graduate students whom we have lured into our profession with only 50-50 expectations of long-term employment? Because we feel guilty? Because we worry that we don't deserve our good fortune in making it through the funnel, no matter how hard we know that we've worked? Possibly, but I'm not sure that even that can be all. Because we feel cheated of the (financially-remunerative) careers that we might have had, being the good students that we all, by definition, once were? Again, possibly, but then, again, I am myself not at all certain that I would have been any good at any of the other careers someone with my academic credentials might have gone into.

Law? You've got to be kidding. Medicine? I'd be terrible after only one night on call. Business? Don't make me laugh. I don't know anything about making money. No, the sad truth of the matter is that this--being an academic--is the only thing that I could have conceivably done. Which may, in part, be some explanation of why, having become an academic, I feel so bitter at times. But it still isn't all. Yes, I wish that I had had some choice about what I became, but the only thing I was ever good at was school. What else was there for me to do? If only I had had some real talent in writing, I might have made a career as a "real" author, not just an academic. If only I had been better looking/smarter/less of an introvert, think of all of the careers that I might have had. But, alas, I am a scholar. Great.

See, being a scholar is supposed to be this wonderful gift--or so it feels when you are a student and that's what you are being rewarded for. But out in the real world after age 40? Being a life-long student doesn't sound quite so rewarding anymore. Because guess what? Being a scholar means, yes, not only do you spend your life grading other people's work, but you get to spend your whole life being graded yourself. Tenure? Don't make me laugh. It's just another hoop. First there was graduating top in your class in high school--that felt like an accomplishment, right? Ha. Then there was graduating with honors from college--again, felt good, didn't it? Then there was passing your orals, proposing your dissertation, writing your thesis and getting your Ph.D. As my dad always used to say, that and a dollar (now, more like three-fifty) will get you a cup of coffee.

And that is only the beginning. Never mind the job applications, even if you get a job, there are still the fellowships to apply for in order to get the funding that you need in order to do your research. You will be applying for these for the rest of your life--if, that is, you ever hope to get a promotion. Oh, yes, and promotion: renewal (if you're lucky), tenure (if you're even luckier), promotion to full professor (oh, the ecstasy!), maybe even to a named chair (nirvana!)--every stage marked by, you guessed it, more grading (a.k.a. peer review). You want to get something published? More grading. You get something published--guess what? You get reviewed. And on, and on, and on. And when you aren't getting graded, you're grading somebody else. Never do you get to say, "I've accomplished something," because there is always The Grade.

But, okay, people in other professions have to go through peer review. And it's a good thing, right? We wouldn't want shoddy scholarship out there, misleading our readers, making false claims about the truth. Except, of course, that there are plenty of writers and thinkers out there who don't have to go through peer review in order to get something published. They just have to convince an editor that they are on to a good thing. This is probably harder than I am imagining it to be at the moment, but the truth of the matter is, you don't need a Ph.D. in order to publish, even in history. Even in most of the fields that we consider the humanities. Indeed, given the way the job market sometimes works, you might actually do better simply spending your 20s and 30s writing brilliant prose (like, I don't know, David Foster Wallace), thus guaranteeing that some university will come after you in your 40s and promote you above all those tortoises who slogged their 20s away as grad students.

But even this (the constant assessment, the capricious criteria for promotion) doesn't get to the heart of why academia sucks. There's more. For starters, there's the awful, perpetual juggernaut of the academic calendar. Sure, you get those "long" holidays during which, oh, right, you can catch up on your research. Because, of course, teaching doesn't count except that it's what you are (ostensibly) being paid for. Except, of course, it won't earn you promotion because it doesn't count, not really. Not when you could be publishing more. Except you can't because you are spending all of your time teaching, which doesn't count, except if you don't do it because it is, after all, what the students are paying tuition for. And, oh, you didn't get that article finished this summer? Well, you won't have time to work on it again until next summer, but don't worry, by that time you will have lost the thread of what you were saying and have to start all over again because all of the thinking that you've done over the past year will have changed your mind about what it was that you wanted to say.

I'm whining. I know I'm whining. Here I get to spend my life reading and thinking and having great conversations with some of the smartest students in the world. What could I possibly have to complain about? Nothing. Everything. Because, you see, somewhere along the way I lost my soul and I'm trying to figure out where. My colleague Lisa Ruddick thinks she knows where: contemporary training in the humanities, she has argued, is soul-destroying because it requires students to dissociate themselves from their own aesthetic and moral responses to what they read. I think she's onto something. I know she's onto something. But I am still not entirely sure how it applies to what has happened to me. All I know is, I went into academia believing that there was something I needed to learn and now, having learned it, I feel empty. Cheated. Sucked dry.

Perhaps it is simply the nature of learning. "Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring." I have drunk deeply and now I am sobered, no longer intoxicated as I was in my youth, when the mountain rose before me in all its majesty and I wanted nothing more than to be able to climb it. But you know something about that mountain that no one ever tells you? It's damned lonely at the top when you're the only one who's ever climbed it. So what if I pushed the frontiers of knowledge out that little bit further? There are, like, three people in the world who can fully appreciate what I did. Nor does it seem that there are ever likely to be all that many more because, you know, the cutting edge cuts both ways: it cuts you off from conversation even as (purportedly) it creates it. And guess what? It still doesn't really count because the whole point of scholarship is to show how one's predecessors as scholars got everything wrong. Which means, once you've published, yourself.

I wish I could figure out where, as a culture, we went wrong. Because I don't think that this is only myself speaking. There is something rotten at the core of our very profession. And it is this rottenness, I think, that we sense when we complain about the exteriors of our work--the pay, the hours, the thanklessness of it. If only the work itself were its own reward. If only we actually believed in our work. This is where I think my colleague Lisa has hit upon something extremely important: we have lost our selves, our souls, our joy, but we aren't entirely clear where. And so we acquiesce when our departments are closed down and our funding cut. We don't actually believe we deserve to be funded in the first place. Because if we did, we would be out on the streets--or, at least, in our classrooms--fighting for ourselves, not whining on our blogs about how hard our lives have become.