coldhearted scientist وداد

I got e-mail from a friend thanking me for having lent moral support to his move out of academia years ago. “I couldn’t have done it without your help,” said he. And now Kiita is holding a festival of resignation, requesting moral support from the entire blogosphere and telling tales of what people are willing to do and say to entice and force you back.

I, of course, was always told by a certain whiteman never to be a professor. The reason I did not take him entirely seriously was that he was so negative about all careers. He does not have a positive outlook about many things. That is why he was also against my not being a professor once I discovered for my own reasons I did not like it.

Professor Zero: In the past 19 years I have had a great deal of difficulty getting people to actually believe me when I said I did not want an academic job, and much less not just any academic job. People appear to believe that they need to encourage me. They believe that the financial sacrifices one makes just to be allowed to teach somewhere should be enough.

WM (sympathetic): Nobody understands you.

PZ: The issue is not that I be “understood” but believed.

WM (more sympathetic): Nobody understands why you are where you are.

But people understand perfectly why I and many others are where we are. If you are looking for an academic job, you cannot be doing other things at the same time, and you come under heavy pressure to take one. That is why we are here.

I am also here because of extra-heavy pressure from academic friends. I am here because I did not get a full scholarship to law school, and because I did not know how I might get to the law school for which I had a partial scholarship. I knew the family would help me with moving expenses to an academic job, but they had said explicitly that they would not contribute to a legal education. I am here because it is not Kansas. I am here because I would have liked a truly research oriented academic job at a truly research oriented place, and because it common knowledge in our profession that if you would have liked that, then you should like to be a teacher at a small, rural school. So there are all sorts of reasons.

But the reason this whiteman’s comments irritated me is that I feel I am here because the lack of support for making a different transition – clear moral support, at least – was not there. I feel that if I am to be here to satisfy certain specific whitemen, then those whitemen should help with it more than they have and do. But the problem with all of this is that by thinking that way I keep giving too much power to those whitemen. I also decided – out of weakness, perhaps, and without enough information, and in a state of fatigue – but I also decided.

And my real problem is that I am still trying to satisfy these whitemen, and I want them to recognize it. That is what I need to get over. If I do as I see fit, then I can take responsibility for it – no more compromises or waffling. And it is more healing for me to look at the fact that these whitemen also did as well as they were able to, at the time. I was not entirely abandoned. Yet what I want from them is to say, we weren’t clear, we are sorry, we see how we have contributed to this. That is what I want. What they want is to abdicate and say I am incompetent / incoherent, and for me to internalize this. That is what I have to work against.

The mantra would be: they do not matter, what they think does not matter, they are merely themselves, you may think what you like of yourself regardless of what they think, and their love has a strange quality to it but it is love.

Axé.