I used to have a recurring dream in which I called my mother from my office at Yale University, holding the phone in my right hand and the hand of my three year old in my left, to say I had been granted tenure and promotion and therefore, now having achieved at last the equivalent of graduating from college (according to what my psyche seems to believe family expectations are), I was leaving the profession and going off to seek my fortune in business, the nonprofit world, or law.
In the dream I chose Yale because it is the rebellious choice in our family, which looks down upon Yale and Oxford and only approves of Harvard and Cambridge. Also, to go off into trade would be more palatable if I were already at a déclassé place like Yale. I imagined my three year old as dark, very much mixed, not the color of great grandchild my grandmothers would have approved of. She was also bilingual, her father’s language being one nobody else in the family knew. This was a dream about having all the trappings I believed I needed to show the family I was a valid person even their cautious selves would authorize to do as I saw fit. It was also about having enough trappings that I did not need authorization.
Yes, Changeseeker, it is a massively “codependent” dream, si tu veux — although I still do not think that terminology is the best description or that it offers the most direct paths out. Because my more positive reading of the dream is that it asks me to place myself in a stronger position, which is not done only by wishful thinking or by deciding one is fatally flawed. It means taking small steps of rebellion against, most specifically, the mental and financial slavery of academia (which I could describe, but whose description lies outside the scope of this post). That is important because the extreme caution I learned from the cautious-for-a-reason family, and the extreme self repression I learned not only from Reeducation but from the actual professor jobs I have had, are not actually attitudes that ferry me to autonomy (which, I will have you know, is safety).
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I came across this blog via Historiann and was amazed at the coincidence, as it is by someone I went to high school with and who is also one of the few people who have been consistently encouraging about my now 15 or 16 year old dream to go to law school. My frisson of envy upon seeing the blog is, she works like a professional. Is a professional. I can or could do that, but I mainly work like a housewife. That is because in most professor jobs I have had, I’ve gotten in serious trouble because of having gotten used to working like a professional in graduate school. Every year I have learned to hold back more, which of course impedes me from doing my best work.
That is of course why, from the first day, I have never liked being a professor. If professordom were really about research, teaching, and administration/service, and if the main fights really were about jobs, grants, publications and tenure, it would be one thing. But the main issues in my experience, and the only keys to survival involve immature social climbing of a type I had previously seen only in junior high. And as I say, I realized this on the first day of my first professor job. I further realized that since I had taken that job, I was no longer destined for more grown up academic jobs. That is why I have wanted another advanced degree and another profession since that day.
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I used to think I needed approval and moral support of others to actually do this. I have in fact always had it in some quarters, just not those from which I felt I needed it. Now, however, I do not think I need any beyond my own.
I also never fully figured out how to finance the legal education I actually want. I have looked at it every possible way and I do not think it is feasible. Had I just gone for it when I first got the idea, and settled for a Louisiana school, it would have been possible financially — in those days. I would have finished a JD back in the 20th century and had I realized this then, I could have made up for the lack of special programs here by going on to the LLM at the kind of school that had the programs I would need for the career I wanted. So now, for example, I would be living in Los Angeles and working on issues related to immigration, racism(s), agriculture, trade, and the international prison industrial complex. That, at least, is the career fantasy I have tried again and again to repress since it first took shape in AY 1992-93.
I think I am beginning to see how to finance it. It involves oilfield work, commuting, and night school, and then an LLM at Austin or UCLA. I am not saying I am doing it now, as there is much more to be worked out. I am only saying I am beginning to see the shape of an actually realistic plan.
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So this is how I am slowly transgressing everything, in accordance with Jennifer’s shamanistic recommendations. Ditch my internalized version of family expectations and fears. Ditch my friends’ and colleagues’ constant chatter that since I did a Ph.D. in literature, I made my bed and must lie in it … since I kept getting tenure track jobs, I had to be grateful and accept them, because many people didn’t get them … since I had done one thing, it had to be the only thing I could do and the only thing I wanted. Ditch the idea, also absorbed from some really twisted things the family believed when it was much younger than I am now, that I cannot make my own money except by staying in school.
But first of all and most importantly, ditch the idea, absorbed from academia, that you cannot work as a professional and survive.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Brilliant and valuable as being from one who has really been there. It’s easy for me as an outsider to say what I do but you really have experienced it all. I did think the profs acted like children but did not identify this as the main problem. But according to you it is, so I take your word for it as you are in the best position to know the score.
You are sending me back to Alice Miller’s *The Drama of the Gifted Child.*
Most of the people who taught me did not act like children or exhibit outrageous sexism.
But I think a lot of professors are on a power trip, finally getting over having been social rejects in junior high or junior college. There are TAs in our English department who actually say this — they are now in a position to get back at Greek types, for instance, by giving them poor grades or making fun of them. I am also blown away by the pronouncements of fatuous men and their absolute inability to believe any women have intellectual or emotional skills above the level of the most limited and raucous of church ladies.
My father always told me not to go into academia because tenure was hard to get. Once I got into it, he said he had also meant to say not to go into it because so many schools were so bad. I wished he had explained this earlier, but I doubt it would have dissuaded me. However, had I been warned about the childishness and the *condescension* involved in the sexism, I would never have done it.
I may have a minority view, though. In fact I am sure I do, since most faculty, if I am right, are not tired of dealing with adult adolescents, they are overjoyed to be in a school situation where they can at last be kings.
Why Alice Miller in particular?
Good that you are beginning to transgress everything. Of course if you were to marry an Australian and come and live here, your education in the field of law would be much cheaper, at least initially.
Alice Miller is tough. Children quite literally cannot survive unless their parents take care of them, especially their mothers. Like many a truth, this one creates hysterical fears in us, that we will literally die. In defense, as adults we flee into various forms of wretchedness such as narcissism and contempt for others and belittling their accomplishments to cover up our vulnerability, or conversely, we choose an agreeable compliance. Or we vacillate between these poles, kissing up to the people above us while trampling on those below us. We don’t know what we feel really. What we express is mostly a holdover from infantile fears of abuse and abandonment.
The loss of a mother’s love = death. Literally. Ever seen a one year old in full panic because his or her mother has just left the room? That’s why we go through life pretending women, especially mothers, are not important.
There is lots more to say. Lots, but that’s central.
This is something Scheper-Hughes talks about a good deal too: the power of women to decide the fates of their children. We’re always talking about how powerful women need to be without looking at that enormous power every one of us has been subjected to as helpless infants. She points out that accepted cultural practices which are routine damage children permanently. I think of the charming German custom of leaving infants and small children alone to go out in the evening. A neighbor of mine said to her little boy, whom she had put into a sack which did not permit him to even roll over:”Don’t cry or complain while we are gone. Nobody will come.” It was how she’d been brought up, so that was how you dealt with the situation. She was a hard woman, if perfect, and her kids were horrid to my kids. She also stole a friend’s husband just for fun, just to assert her superiority over another woman. As soon as she got the guy and wrecked the marriage, she lost interest.
How does the baby survive? And how do survival mechanisms affect us as adults? Is this why we are so childish?
WOW did my last comment sound sour … I am thinking of my first job and of this one, at very different institutions but which have many of the same clannish characteristics. Sorry, professors, many of you are not like this, I KNOW. And I have a fair amount of resentment, it drips from me at times, I should really evaporate it.
Jennifer — yes, in virtually every country it would be a lot cheaper if I had a green card equivalent! But my theory is that I should go to a school that prepares me for the bar examinations here … unless I really want to emigrate or go global.
(Since my law projects are Americas related, maybe I should make a deal like that with a Mexican or a Brazilian, though. The UNAM and USP are two law schools abroad I’d like to go to. The benefit to the husband would be that he could also become legal to work and live here.)
Hattie — now I see the Alice Miller connection. It’s my whole problem although I don’t act it out in those same authoritarian ways. But my whole infantile conflict is between being like my mother so she will still care for me, which I need(ed), and not being because she was so suicidal that if I was like her I would be that way, too. This is why I always feel as though I am in a small boat tacking against heavy wind through the towers of Gibraltar or Scylla and Charybdis, and have to do things just right to make it … or wait back in calm water if I am not sure I am strong enough.
So, I see why PEOPLE are childish, but why PROFESSORS in particular … does it attract this, or just allow somehow for it to be expressed at work, or what?
Professor Z, you are not alone.
I am sure not…. But do you have an opinion on whether professors are *particularly* childish? And if they/we are, do you have a theory on why?
P.S. That’s also fascinating/key, on why we keep saying mothers are not important.
Now you stop apologizing and backing down! Bad!
Hahaha! I really want to know, do you have an opinion on whether professors are *particularly* childish? And if they/we are, do you have a theory on why?
Well, I just got back from a County Council meeting, and it was like being at pre-school, nay at Day Care. I felt like handing out pacifiers and lollypops.
So I guess profs are no more childish than those folks.
So, no hope…? It’s a world of children? I honestly didn’t live in one from 17-30 (college and graduate school) — people seemed quite mature. Then I became a professor and they seemed to have regressed. In this blog I have been saying it was because they were from the whiny and dependent East, but I don’t know — that’s just my impression of the East, subjective and prejudiced to be sure.
One thing Louisiana and Hawaii have in common is the plantation mentality. It’s a system of bosses and subordinates. When serious subordinates try to rise (say, brainy, hard-working competent people), the bosses slap them down. Mediocrities from the lower orders are elevated into positions of authority where they provide comic relief, and politics become a big joke. Sound familiar?
The real leaders try to stay out of sight, and their minions don’t have much to say in public. It all happens on the golf courses and in the hot tubs.
That’s why we work on the Sunshine Laws so much. The local leaders hate these rules and whine and complain about them constantly. But at the Council meeting I observed yesterday some very good people made inroads on these cozy little arrangements. It is a constant battle but a worthwhile one. How else to change the dear old Southland (oops, Hawaii!)?
YES, that is exactly plantation and exactly Louisiana. And many people from that kind of environment do have a propensity to childishness.
But the childishness of professors is something additional. It is a white thing for sure and I also perceive it as Eastern. Primarily New England, but more generally the origin of it seems to be all lands East of the Mississippi River and North of the Mason-Dixon line also to some extent Mid-Atlantic and eastern Midwest. The other group that is really childish are the Western Europeans. They act fine at home but when they get here they are a bit prone to tantrums, I find.
I do not understand it. Perhaps the thing about universities is that they are plantation like PLUS people in general are childish so in universities you get a double whammy?
Can’t say. I can imagine what the politics are like where you are, but the rest of it escapes me. I had a thought: are some of these people annoyed at having to teach at a public university in the south? I had professors when I was at Portland State who would say, “When I was at Yale, When I was at Stanford, etc.” all the time, as if that was the real thing.
Ah that’s complicated. I think some people are doing that. Many others are actually from here and feel entitled or even destined to a piece of it. As one Senate president aptly put it, “they believe they have a friend in the Big House.”
But I first noticed the childishness teaching at a very fancy liberal arts college where everyone had an Ivy degree and had gone to a college like that one as undergraduates and wanted to return to the small atmosphere. They already understood the culture and knew they loved it. I didn’t know it existed and was in culture shock, and it also wasn’t my kind of atmosphere.
I don’t know what it is but there is a certain type who gravitates to places where you can be a big fish in a small pond — whether the pond is fancy or not — and they are the types who want to be big fish, and so they start fighting for it.
In what I would call the real world, and that may sound snobbish, people don’t really care about their authority in the local place so long as things are running well enough that they can function. They’re interested in their work, not their political power where they are except insofar as it gives them authority (or not) over their own functioning.
I think in fact I may have hit on something here, the desire to be a big fish locally and the places people who have this desire go so they can try to be one. This could be a piece of the puzzle.
Saying “when I was at Yale,” etc., I do it too. It isn’t necessarily meant as “I come from better places.” Administrators, if they’re smart, are always looking at how things are done elsewhere. People who say it can just mean “Gosh, they had this policy that worked to solve this problem, could we institute that here?” It can also just be an exclamation about funding. PSU is chronically broke and that will bring out pettiness in people.
OK, so normally I just stay up late but at the moment it is not that, it is insomnia. The cat has it too, and will not shut up or go out, either. No storm coming, either, so I don’t know what’s up.
Anyway I realized the answer and it is something I knew before. The institutions themselves are infantilizing, for one thing. For another, in tight budget situations, people are constantly destabilized and on edge both about how it will be at work and how they will pay bills. So all this energy with no power on most fronts is all locked up in a building together, exactly as in a junior high school, and people start acting as though they were in one.
I think that people act childishly (in any situation) because they can; in other words, put in a situation in which there are no viable sanctions on petty behavior, some people will always act badly. It’s a testing-the-limits kind of thing that in a family dynamic would show that they’re more loved than the rest because they can break the rules (of civility or whatever) with impunity.
That’s true too — but somehow I am more tolerant of that level of things. It’s when petty behavior is required to get ahead that I want to resign.