A. I was taught that in academia, you had to do things halfheartedly to survive. You must just walk through teaching, since you will not get credit for it; you must write a great deal, but always acceptably bland things, so as to have a form and type of production conventional enough to pass; you must avoid other work assignments. This way you will be successful.
This is a real trap beccause it turns everything dull, everything to drudgery. I have concluded that the opposite strategy is the correct one – never do anything you are not willing to do for real. Even necessary things in which one is not interested have to be done for real – if you do it for real, then you can do it fast, for one thing, and it becomes more interesting, for another.
I find it much easier to work in a detached and efficient way if I do it full on.
B. I glimpsed the vise I have always been in and it has two parts. It involves following two rules, each of which is internally contradictory. 1. Utter dependency is the only path to survival. To be allowed to stay alive, you cannot exist as a person. That means something like: freeze now, so you may still survive to start growing again after the war. Or: kill yourself now, or play dead, so you can live. This contradiction is untenable. 2. To survive as who you are, you must give up who you are. To keep an academic job, for instance, you must repress your own research interests, avoid enthusiasm for teaching, and evade service, and live where you are not happy. In other words: you must annihilate yourself to be yourself. This is the same untenable contradiction.
The only way to live, really, is full on and this is why I like to live in other countries, in other languages, where I imagine that those in authority over my being cannot see that I have overstepped my bounds. I know how to escape the vise elsewhere and it is really time to bring that knowledge home.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I think it’s “vice”, not “vise”.
Well maybe you have simply outgrown the former adaptive strategy.
Aha – I looked it up and it’s both!
I’d say it’s more like, I need to outgrow it, or get out of the habit of it, or something. It is certainly outmoded and has been for some time, but I notice how it chases me! 😉 I have to outrun it or something, feint it, get a better strategy about it.
Anyway, you do have to be ready to do everything for real. Like I’ve hinted at before on this blog, I was broken of the habit of half-doing things in order to be safe, when it became evident to me that the particular approach was not safe at all but rather very dangerous.
You are generally harder to attack if you come out and say what you mean and take a strong stance (which has resonances with martial arts and boxing). The more you place yourself with a strong stance in the public eye, the less can happen to you generally.
“…the particular approach was not safe at all but rather very dangerous.”
This is *extremely* true, I have found.
Your words about academia, particularly in the US, reminds me why I was so desperately unhappy playing the academic game.
I love to teach but as you say it is not really valued for career purposes.
I had a professor at Howard who used to say in the 90s that universities are corporations who are working on doing away with engaged students so that they can focus on making profits.
It is sad. The US model is influential. Here in SAfrica the emphasis is on writing and grants.
The fallout is that the pass rate is 27% of all students.
When you look closer it becomes apparent that almost all students who enter universities do not graduate.
How can they when faculty are being pressured to write write write and gather more and more money!
At times I wish that I had stayed in law school.
After more than a decade in academia and teaching on four continents I have finally realized I am not an academic.
I just can’t conform to academia.
Peace PZ,
Ridwan
Hi Ridwan, nice to see you – so do you mean you’ve quit? It’s funny, I am writing all of these stark things about it and it is functioning as a way to distance myself so I can stay and write. Last Saturday I made an active decision to quit and it turned out to be a decision to detach. We’ll see.
Your comments are really interesting and assuaging, calming, balming. Let’s see:
“Your words about academia, particularly in the US, reminds me why I was so desperately unhappy playing the academic game.”
OK so it is not irrational to be unhappy with it … OK good.
“I love to teach but as you say it is not really valued for career purposes.”
It is so undervalued that I cannot even see that I like it. But I realized last night what it is: I am seriously committed to radical pedagogy and this is what is not allowed. And at the same time, I am not one of those who will do anything just so I can teach. So it is hard to figure out. But seeing that yes, I like to teach, and/but that what I mean is radical pedagogy (not teaching people to have radical political opinions, just really teaching – I should remember this is the blog that writes in memory of Paulo Freire), seeing or remembering that is already progress.
“I had a professor at Howard who used to say in the 90s that universities are corporations who are working on doing away with engaged students so that they can focus on making profits.”
That is exactly true. And frightening. But must be kept in mind.
“It is sad. The US model is influential. Here in SAfrica the emphasis is on writing and grants.”
And what is weird is that I like writing and grants in themselves. But now in SAfrica, Canada, elsewhere, those have taken over in a sort of context free way. I am all for those things but I just don’t think the students shouldn’t count.
” The fallout is that the pass rate is 27% of all students.
When you look closer it becomes apparent that almost all students who enter universities do not graduate.
How can they when faculty are being pressured to write write write and gather more and more money!”
Yes. This is criminal. And I am a traditionalist and research oriented and I don’t believe in the community college or vo-tech model of university education, with “teachers,” and I don’t like SLACs, with “teachers.” But the way students are utterly discounted now is criminal.
“At times I wish that I had stayed in law school.”
At times I wish I had gone, and think I still should go.
“After more than a decade in academia and teaching on four continents I have finally realized I am not an academic.”
And I have finally realized I am one, just not on the current model.
“I just can’t conform to academia.”
This is my problem – I am an academic but I just can’t conform to academia. This is my horrible conflict. And I imagine that it was not as corporative and so on before as it is now, and my father, a professor, says it was more relaxed when it was just a men’s club, but I notice that he has the same conflicts and problems about it – which intimates to me that it has always been this way, just in other forms … and that I was protected from knowing that as a student … ?
I don’t know. One of my graduate students says it’s partly cultural – U.S. and British academia is this way. I’d say so are others, although less so. Still and all, the less so helps.
What are you doing now?
Hello PZ.
Your words bring comfort and reason to be hopeful too.
I am still in South Africa as you know but have not found a place in academia I can relate to or even trust.
I was recently hired into a permanent position at a University on the east coast (Kwazulu-Natal) and then quit after two days.
It was a senior position in Political Science but I found out that the department wanted me to cover courses in Public Administration.
I was not aware of this at the interview stage (I have no training in that area but it did not seem to matter to them).
It became apparent that the department was severely constrained and that a lot of my time would be filling in holes and covering faculty as they left for greener pastures (usually in government).
So, again, I am in-between 😉 but less inclined to just struggle for the sake of struggle.
I want more than just being tired all the time.
I expect to return to the US unless something more attractive arises (and that includes making more than 2k a month … academic salaries here are a joke).
I envy the folks who seem to have made the ‘right’ career choices … my friends who are lawyers seem less conflicted … I think.
Peace,
Ridwan
“I want more than just being tired all the time.”
YES, YES, and YES – this SO sums it up!
I also think my friends who are lawyers seem less conflicted.
Should we try out the new law school at UC Irvine?
I swear that a great part of the problem has to do with the fact that academia so does not want to let you be an adult.
Right now I am chanelling the writing thing and entertaining myself with a book on race that I am not writing for academic reasons (although it is an academic book I hope will have an impact) but for personal ones – I feel like writing it.
This activity may end up convincing me academia is all right after all, and it may be that I do not need another career in another liberal profession but a writing business of my own. But I am still very attracted to the idea of law school at UCI.
I have to confess that I have looked at returning to law school. I went to law school in the mid 80s in apartheid South Africa.
There were only three folks of color in the entire class (me included). None of us graduated from that law school.
The other two eventually made it through. The stress of studying law under apartheid was too much for me.
Still, I have from time to time looked at ‘returning’. Just recently I looked at a school in San Francisco and then decided to stop after I assessed what it would cost to go.
Now you mention UCI. Mmmmmm … let me get back to you OK?
I am gonna look :0)
Peace (or some semblance thereof),
Ridwan
It’s massively expensive but they claim to be very interdisciplinary and to have a big loan forgiveness program. One would be a member of the California Bar! I am writing my book so as to become a good candidate to get in. My LSAT scores are in the low 80th percentile and I haven’t been able to raise them. It means I need something else to get into a school as competitive as a UC.
Meanwhile, I am thinking your phrase “I just couldn’t conform to academia” is very healthful. I have spent a lot of time beating myself up for not being able to conform, or wondering whether if I had handled the sexism better, things would have been different, or been at the kind of school I really like, etc. And my conflict is that I am so very academically oriented that it is hard to say it isn’t “me.”
That is why going to law school at the kind of university I like, and entering a different learned profession, has always made so much sense to me.
It may take me a while to do it but it is sounding good to me – I feel like signing letters already, UCI Law, Class of 2015!
Also – all of my issues around academia it seems are about forcing myself to be someone I am not.
I do not have this feeling at at schools like where I studied. But elsewhere it is a completely different thing, and we are supposed to think it is the same thing, and that is what is hard – and it is hard for me at least to force things out, things coming from a space that isn’t me and that doesn’t correspond to my nature.
I think it is another of the reasons why I refuse to sleep. I have said before that it is because I am trying to disable myself so that I will not fly away. It also appears to be a “what’s the use?” kind of thing. If I sleep well and feel well, I will still just be here, doing this.
Anyway: I keep saying I need to put more of myself into this, infuse it more with myself, and that will help to a certain extent but more useful is just to note and accept that I don’t relate – despite what everyone else thinks about how well suited I am and so on, or about how scary it would be for THEM (apparently) if I did something else. Accept that I don’t relate and stop feeling guilty about being bored – stop feeling I should or must find a way to feel excited, inspired, and so on.
What my card reader said: the point is that I need to be working at a higher level. I need contexts – I could theoretically work at a higher level right now but I have an unmet need and it is contexts. When above I wrote UCI Class of 2015 I felt so hopeful about life! And then trying to do my academic job I sink down down down although I am not completely uninterested.
And: it seems I am very critical of myself for not being happy with it and I spend a lot of time talking myself into why I should be happier with it and saying that if I just do this and that I will be happier with it.
And yet: what I do in fact – things like stay up all night such that I disable myself from doing those things to be happier – is almost like a cry to myself for help, your strategy isn’t right!
I am really not sure except for the need for contexts … and time for advanced things to be less fragmented … and less basic teaching or more power over what is done there … I don’t think it is arrogant to want to go up a level, and again I have trouble thinking up when there is so much which pulls down … even though there is time.
AARGH I don’t know. Reach for the best in each day.
It also hits me that all the people who kept telling me to stay in academia and giving me advice about it just thought I was in a bad mood.
All of their advice was about how to get through a bad day – it wasn’t advice on how to do academia. That is why the advice seemed to bad.
But the whole thing may have been predicated on the idea that I was just complaining.
I don’t know: I just wouldn’t know if this was the right thing for me to be doing if I were doing it in other circumstances, and if certain things haven’t happened. But given the reality I think it is very possible I should not be.
Hiya – I found this website by mistake. I must say your page is really cool. I have bookmarked it and also signed up for your RSS feed.