♦ I just got e-mail from one of our newer instructors. Ze wants to copy 2 CDs for me and make 3 other CDs, and so requests 5 CDs and will pay me for them. I said, buy them yourself or ask the department to buy them.
♦ I have perfect hair now and it turns heads. Even at this late date I still look markedly better than the assistant professors did at my undergraduate institution, who considered it important to look bad in order to write.
Whom does it benefit to say writing is hard? asks Dame Eleanor Hull. I have asked before, and she has done, and none will answer, so I shall answer in challenging fashion, to wit:
It serves those peers who wish to discourage you, so that you will not advance to degree or tenure or promotion faster than they.
Every minute you spend in solidarity or empathy with their not really suffering selves is a minute you would serve every animal, vegetable and mineral better by engaging in these activities and more (listed in no particular order):
♦ sleeping and repairing yourself
♦ home maintenance
♦ dog walking, cat petting, bird feeding, babysitting, visits to the actual aged and infirm
♦ doing your own work
♦ service to the profession, e.g. on editorial and other review boards, administration in professional organizations, and so on
♦ volunteering at the local soup kitchen or at your region’s adult literacy program
♦ running for academic senate and doing good committee work toward the protection of academic freedom, research and teaching resources, salaries and benefits for all faculty, staff, students, and retirees
♦ resisting the privatization of janitorial and maintenance services at your institution
♦ running for public office – you could do good work on school board, city council, and so on, and it would benefit many if you wanted to take the time for this
♦ going out and doing whatever it is you like to do for fun.
I have been being nice to assistant professors and others who alleged that writing was hard since I was an undergraduate. They were yelping in pain then and they are still yelping from their elite posts.
For a long time I was sorry for them. I have had advantages, whose benefits I still reap. I used to accept it when people said I owed some of my skills and ease to them. After serious consideration of this I am convinced all they wanted to do was discourage others, and deplete confidence and energy.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I’ve been thinking about this question a long time, because it doesn’t seem obvious to me, though it’s an excellent question. It seems to me that “writing is hard” may be a form of self-aggrandizement: I am doing this thing that is so hard, so I am a hero. Maybe for some people it is part of their writing metaphor (Jonathan Mayhew has written about writing metaphors several times): I am hacking my way through this undergrowth with a machete, and this is hard, but I am doing it. If this is your own private story/metaphor (I am writing, this is hard, so I am a hero!), I don’t see the harm in it. But saying it to other people is potentially problematic. Not necessarily so: sometimes my writing buddy and I say it to each other when we hit snags that are frustrating, and then we are compadres engaged in the same lucha que vincaremos. But we are both people who like to write, and we feel like allies; it’s not a comparative statement that implies “it should be harder for you” or “I am better than you because I can see that this is hard (I am a hero).”
So far I am thinking about professors/writers saying this to each other. Teaching is another question. What about students who say this? Are they just trying not to do a task? What about teachers who say this to students? Are they sympathizing in order to lure students on to try “tricks” that will make writing seem easier, or are they setting a bad example?
Yes – I really don’t know. Saying there’s a trick to this, or saying don’t feel inadequate if you find this hard, it’s hard for everyone, is one thing and having a writing metaphor is of course fine.
But I didn’t start getting these lectures about how it should be hard until much later, when it was a guilt trip meaning I was supposed (according to the speaker) to be doing something else, or shouldn’t be showing others up.
Before “Reeducation” I was very high functioning and would work every day, even when mildly ill. I didn’t overwork because I knew I could always work, didn’t have to wait to feel right or anything like that. That was because I had decent levels of confidence and autonomy, so work wasn’t scary. In Reeducation it was “dysfunctional” to be that rational and that powerful; it meant one was “in denial” and “grandiose” and so on.
Teaching is the other weird thing. When people talk about it they *have* to say they love it and are great at it, just as when they talk about writing they *have* to say it is hard. It’s almost as though these were the sentences one had to say to prove one is really a professor.
Also, my graduate program was so hard that people who finished it were really ready for tenure, not assistant professorships. It was why it was so hard for the faculty to hire — you couldn’t find an asst prof more educated than a mid level PhD student of ours, so the candidates were often considered “embryonic” [sic] or something like that. This is partly why I don’t relate to a lot of standard advice … it’s true advice, but I’ve been knowing it for a long time, and want some new insights.
But I think the “it’s so hard” thing has to do with the dissertation and assistant professor syndrome, which you don’t escape until you either publish your dissertation or burn it and do something else with it fully burned. They start to say, we’ve got you in our clutches now! Here’s a test you really won’t be able to pass! You’re going to have to work, work, work!
At some point I went into complete rebellion at the puritanical nature of it all and the punitive tone. I’ve tried striking against it, and now my strategy is to pour it on as though I were studying for the bar or something, while insisting it is all easy.
More on me: 9 years of graduate school following 4 years of college that were sort of like graduate school, which followed 17 years of life as child of R1 faculty (dissertation defense and my birth were simultaneous; tenure track was the first 7 years of my life). Then after graduate school, *15* years to tenure, and I wasn’t promoted at the same time. So, I have spent my life, essentially, among graduate students and the untenured, and I was ready to move into the grownup world of the tenured around the time I took my PhD exam … let’s see … I was 27.5 years old then, plenty old enough to start a non infantilized life. But because my peers were a few generations of complaining graduate students and junior faculty, I got really really sick of them, even though I nominally was one. And sick of going to the meetings they go to where advice I started getting in social venues around the time of my birth was meted out as new.
…That having been said, the excessive amount of time I have spent as a peon (age 0 to 30, PhD program, 30 years; age 30 to 45 assistant professor untenured) and listening to the things which are said to peons, does not explain it all, because people who have not had this experience still complain about all the complaining there is. Meaning: the complaining that is kvetching, not the serious complaining that would lead to organizing.
That is my other issue: show me a kvetching graduate student or professor, and I will show you someone who won’t sign a union card — I know this from personal experience. Perhaps their aversion to being defined as labor really is aversion to work itself! Ha!