I knew the first week of my first job that I did not want to be a professor, at least not in the kind of institution – and there is an archipelago of them, rather like a gulag – to which I was now bound. I looked about me and was horrified: all the other professors, including the new professors, were DEAD! “Help, help, have mercy,” I shouted to the saints, “I am well under thirty-three yeas of age, I am too young to die!” I could have decided to quit effective the end of the year and did not, partly because I thought I should “give it a chance,” partly because I had no savings, and partly because I was still curious about what would happen next.
Three of my friends did actually quit after their first year – one because she was not ambitious enough for the sacrifices one makes to be a professor to be worthwhile, another because she was ambitious enough that when she saw this was all there was, she instantly knew she wanted more, and the third because she did not like her job and was married to a man based in the East. I remember my reactions. About the first, I was amazed that anyone would actually finish a Ph.D. and then choose a secretarial job. About the second and third I thought, nice work if you can get it, but I do not have an annuity to supplement my income as did the second, or a spouse paying the mortgage, as did the third. In reality and in retrospect, I think I stayed on because was secretly the one most interested in being an academic.
So I stayed on, but I have not done particularly well. After the eighth year I decided to quit and laid my plans, but was talked back. That was when I decided to give up ambivalence and commit to being a professor, but in practice it merely meant that I felt enslaved. I have gone back and forth about what the problem could be – was I not interested, or unsuited, or what? Now Hattie has diagnosed the problem – it is the unfreedom. Do not neglect to read her brilliant comments thread.
Now I have taken up ambivalence about academia once again and I am liberated. It makes me much more efficient because the meaning of doing work has changed. It is only for now, is my current thought, whereas before I was looking at 25 or 30 immutable years. Now everything is lighter and more interesting and more efficient. Everything is as it was before tenure and before committing, when what one was doing had to do with one’s future and with the things one liked and was curious about, and when things still might change any day, when life was not over, but lay ahead.
For years I felt I was lying in a grave. It was still open but if one tried to climb out, the tombstone slammed shut and stayed on tight for several months. Now I feel as though I were walking along, up hill, down dale.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
How wonderful this is. We’ll all feel better after the election, when the political oppression will lift.
I did some research and got some books, but my experiences and yours are the basis of what I’ll write about.
I was wondering how I was able to figure out what I did, and then it hit me that mostly I was an observer but at the same time in very intense academic situations. Unbelievable things happened, but I’m sure they would not surprise you.
The most intense was a German Summer School where everyone lived on site. I did that number three times. What an education! The guys could do anything they wanted. Wives and girlfriends were like little servants. The very few women who actually got teaching jobs in this program exercised extreme caution.
A few of us grad students got a way with a lot, though.
I had a blast!
Every word is true. Every word is sad. I look around at the walking dead in my workplace and wonder daily how I got there; feel my passion drying up like that ‘raisin.’ The gatekeepers of academia, I call them the ‘daylight robbers,’ pulverize creative thought. Our schools are feeding troughs for small minded sycophants…. with online degrees. The most I hope for these days is to escape into retirement with enough life in me to do what I want to do with the mind the good lord gave me. Keep slinging the silver bullet of truth baby…barbie
I stayed out for the longest, so disillusioned after being pushed out of school in the middle of my dissertation that I swore I didn’t want to be in that millieu. But now, here I am, having found a department with enough life (not much, but enough) that I can bear it; a place that I can follow my own agenda; a place I can see my effect on the young — graphically and with great energy. I’m glad you’re feeling freer. Let us be free inside until we can make freedom outside a reality!!