I
Freshman year I inhabited a dormitory filled with graduate students largely in scientific and technical fields. In the first semester I became famous there by helping some of them pass their French reading examinations, and translating some letters from the Niels Bohr archive for another. In the second semester I tackled the first part of my science/math requirement by taking the more rigorous of the calculus courses, designed for mathematicians and physicists.
I chose this course because science courses for majors had laboratories, which I had discerned were time consuming and could cut into my study time for humanities courses. The “daughter of an educated man” (Woolf), I was taking these quite seriously. I had also discerned that science/math courses for non-majors were less theoretically oriented. That, I felt, would make it more difficult to grasp the material. I might not pass as easily as I could the courses designed for majors, in which all points were revealed.
The graduate students were fascinated by this choice and kept asking how it was going, and I kept saying people, it is going fine, it is just calculus, it is taught world wide and people pass this course without being science/math geniuses world wide. You passed your language examinations and perhaps – with your help on homework if I need any – I will pass my calculus examination. They were nonplussed and I thought it was just their gender issues speaking, and their prejudice against the intelligence of humanities majors speaking, but does this story actually bespeak greater eccentricity than I believe?
Why I ask: nobody advised me on this choice, I was not yet important enough to receive advice. I just did as I saw fit, and I was right. I have since fallen more prey to standard, even “canned” advice than I did then, and it is becoming clearer and clearer to me that to have done so was an error. I believe this story may be evidence that I ought to revert to (renegade) type.
II
It strikes me as odd that I, who fit in almost everywhere and who fit in very well in graduate school, should be so alienated and feel so out of place in what appears to be mainstream professordom. And my honors thesis student expressed a related sentiment this morning when she said the reason she was considering an academic career was so that there would be a professor like her, for the sake of students like her who cannot always find professors.
Meanwhile on the telephone, my graduate student – that is, the only one I had finish last year, and one of the few in that department who actually got an academic job – is doing well. Part of the reason he is doing well is that he likes the work and has a good work ethic, so he just keeps going. This does tend to bear fruit.
Besides the fact that his job – a decent but not a wonderful one – allows him to continue in the profession and to aspire to still better jobs, how and why is he so happy in it? These questions are worth considering. I have discerned the following:
1. He is in another state, but still in the Southeast, so his culture shock is relatively slight.
2. We are not the best university in the world, so he has already taught poorly prepared undergraduates – he is not disappointed.
3. He has more teaching experience than most new Ph.D.s I know. Having several different courses to manage is not at all new to him.
4. He is very happy working in the field of his dissertation, and is hitting the ground running with articles.
5. He is happily married and his wife moved with him. She is starting a professional training program of her own, and she is also publishing. Thus, both halves of the couple are satisfied and energized.
I always thought of myself as having been more privileged than this student – except, of course, insofar as he is a man – but upon making this list, I realize that there are several factors which make his situation smooth. It is interesting to see what they are.
III
I am old enough to have been taught in childhood that as a woman, one could not have both a career and a family. In graduate school, few women had families and those who had them, were carefully coached to hide these from prospective employers: they will not take you seriously. And it was far better, of course, not to have a family, whom you would have to move across the country with you to your various academic jobs.
Interestingly, a friend of mine from graduate school quit professordom because she had made sure to increase her chances of employability by not having a family. She found in practice that she disliked making all the cross country moves by herself, and that single people were very much out of place in the small towns in which she found herself. This career is for families, said she, and she left.
She was of course right, and I still think it is for family men. In graduate school we had already noticed that it helped a great deal to have a husband who was earning well and whose career would permit him to move. But as one of my own professors said (we pitied her for saying it at the time, but it is true), it helps even more to have a wife. And I have a woman colleague whose husband plays the role of wife, but I am not interested in hierarchical relationships even as beneficiary.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Definitely follow your instincts, but bear in mind that following your instincts is no magical formula for success. Have something to fall back on.
I never meant to become a wife (health insurance was our big incentive); I never meant to become, ahem, a professor (I still don’t think I am, really – really); I am still surprised some mornings to wake up as a mother (another topic, another time).
How’d this happen?
When I put names to what I am and what I do, I still fall back on what I was: community organizer, writer, artist.
Do I fit in where I am, a small community college in So Cal? Yes. No.
i feel lucky – as i got to have both a career and children – however the marriage thing fell apart after 10 yrs…
interesting post
Hi all – and RG, on the identity thing – yes: I’m trying to revise mine, or think I may need to. It was always academic / with hobbies of course, but academic. Writer with academic job is my current theory but first I would have to publish more in the journalistic or writerly, as opposed to the scholarly vein.
It is interesting, I had always only imaged academia as a day job to support one’s intellectual, artistic and activist work. And I think it is in fact possible to do that in really good R1 positions, on the one hand, and in community college positions, on the other.
But at a medium level university in what I consider to be an outpost (it considers itself to be a large city) both connecting to local community and connecting to research networks is much harder, takes more time and more displacement, and one’s existence is more split up, more ghostly in each area, more ‘postmodern’ if you will – which is why, in fact, I integrate and aggregate mine in this ether.
Have you ever stopped being a renegade, really?
🙂 Bingo, good point! And no, I cannot stifle it.
But I’ve tried. It just comes out then in less constructive forms! 😉 Seriously: I have my very traditional side (leftism is, after all, quite traditional and has traditions). The mode I am trying to regain involves being that and being a renegade, both. It works quite well.
Reeducation is another word for middle of the roadism, I think. That sort of moderation is really only useful for food, drink, spending, etc.
yep, no matter how long I have been a professor I never thought of myself primarily as one until I went on an activist interview a few weeks ago to facilitate an area of my sabbatical research. they made me feel very teacherly indeed.
you draw some interesting dichotomies between medium level schools and everywhere else; the demands when I was at Snooty Poo U were very high but also very rewarding and when I moved to Poverty U the former increased exponentially while the latter decreased in quantity but not in quality if that makes sense.
I don’t know. The questions you raise are important ones with sticky answers. I have linked here & pointed the grad readers from my blog here just an FYI
Oooh, if grad students are going to read, they also need “On Becoming a Professor”
https://profacero.wordpress.com/2007/08/30/on-becoming-a-professor/
and “Des mauvais grisgris … “, which is about becoming a graduate student:
https://profacero.wordpress.com/2007/06/10/des-mauvais-grisgris-academiques/
but the post like this I really like is “A Middle Class Story,” about becoming an undergraduate.
https://profacero.wordpress.com/2007/02/10/a-middle-class-story/
It involves my aunt who paid for me to go to college. I might incorporate that into the shame list somehow. I did not discover until later how much her paying for college hurt my parents’ feelings…
there is something I actually have real deep shame about, who paid for my education (besides the massive loans) and what it cost them. In a lot of really significant ways that I cannot go into my parents are still paying for my education and the fact I am on sabbatical with blissful dreams of not returning seems incredibly selfish and demeaning of their sacrifices . . . 😦
On the calculus thing, I don’t think that is eccentric at all. I think many people are good at both language and math. At age 18, it’s a myth that people can only be good at one or the other. I say revert to type!
And. Would you have your students today listen to academic advice from their fellow students? (Even well-meaning advice, if they could establish that.)
Profbw, if you change careers, what will you change to?
Tom – I also think language/math go together, math is like a language or is a language – and in addition to all this I have an abstract mind. I will revert to type! I am reverting right now! 🙂
Academic advice from fellow students: undergraduates, yes, graduate students, no. Graduate students are too paranoid and only partially informed, and they distort things.
What things do they distort?
Oh God, it is endless. Anything possible based on paranoia and partial information … and on refusing to understand how univeristies work … they insist on being extremely innocent and extremely paranoid all at once … they feel inappropriately entitled and at the same time, unrealistically powerless … now, I am talking about people in their twenties and early thirties, mostly …
So could it be that there is something about operating in a constant mode where you are dealing with reality in an indirect way, through a high mode of abstraction (which is what higher level thinking is, in any case), which draws the students away from focussing sufficiently on the material realities of how things work in the practical sense? Being separated from the realm of the practical (through one’s own mental processes) probably accounts for the sense that one is disempowered. And then one makes up for this feeling of disempowerment by acting overentitled, as a kind of psychological self-compensation?
Also there is the aspect that most academics who are already within the system are defined as introverts, so they don’t give the poo’ grad. students enough information about anything to make them relax.
I think it isn’t the psychology, but the politics. It’s the process you describe, more or less, but from a political point of view. They hear snippets of departmental disagreements and exaggerrate them, or embellish them. And are not in the most powerful position, and also exaggerrate *that*. This is most of it.
I do not believe faculty give graduate students enough information. In the case of departmental and university politics this is supposed to be to protect them, but actually it does the opposite. It is scarier not to have full information and many professors in my jaded view are powermongers who like to have scared chickens running around and running to them.
It is also, I claim, the advice manuals which are read and the advice about graduate school which runs through the streets. There is a lot of “professionalizing” advice which assumes you have no good sense so must use “strategy,” and a lot of scary advice on the snakepit of academia.
On this, Lumpenprofessoriat made a great point when she said graduate school was like pregnancy, in that everyone suddenly feels they should tell you the worst horror stories and warn you, they might happen to you.
For assistant professors, who retain many characteristics of graduate students at the beginning, I might make the analogy to Hollywood stars. So many people have a stake in their careers that they get pushed around a lot, and are not allowed a great deal of interiority or independent thought that they can act on without people saying oh, no! Danger ahead!
P.S. Tom – One of my fantasy majors is astrophysics. Check this story out, on measuring dark matter:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6993870.stm
Me too! I almost bought a book about it last year. And I also fantasize about learning Spanish. I completely relate to your post a while back on wanting to have lots more academic careers in unrelated fields.
In fact what I do now for money is totally unrelated to my degree, but I chose it for the chance to have no boss, not out of intrinsic interest.
So many people have a stake in their careers that they get pushed around a lot, and are not allowed a great deal of interiority or independent thought that they can act on without people saying oh, no! Danger ahead!
So how does that work?
They don’t have enough information, and they get terrorized by people who think they do have information, but often have misinformation. The hapless student is not well informed enough to realize this and goes into a tizzy.
Tom – yes. I would like to study so many things. “Had one but world enough, and time” … Marvell’s poem applied to fields of study would imply, I suppose, that we had better get cracking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_His_Coy_Mistress
http://edsitement.neh.gov/view_lesson_plan.asp?id=631
As I’m inclined to disregard even the best advice which counsels me toward my own safety, I don’t find this to be an issue.