coldhearted scientist وداد

Before saying anything truly grave I want to say there is one thing I definitely did not give up for academia and it is that I did not get fat. Seriously: there is this famous colleague I have who gained dozens of pounds eating chocolate during their tenure year, and who says it was worth it and has turned it into a trademark, but I can walk into any store and buy clothes in regular sizes off the rack. There are quite a few things like that I did not renounce and never will.

Squadromatico’s original post, importantly, was about pieces of one’s identity that one had renounced for academia. I have renounced no pieces of identity. Some of them have been imperiled — my research identity for instance, and I resent the characterization of “Spanish teacher” (not my identity!) and the emphasis I have had to give SLA in most of my jobs (not my interest or identity!) — but I have renounced none. There are some I do not get to practice enough — my Alpine identity, for instance — but I still have the equipment in good order and I have not ceded a single inch.

I already have three posts on this issue, with various links, but now Clarissa has an answer to Mayhew’s answer so I will make one, too. The putative question is what one did not give up by becoming an academic. I have difficulty making these lists since I did not have a career before the academic one. Having already practiced by working off other peoples’ posts I can perhaps say more independently what I gave up progressively, in terms of things I once had as an academic, in order to remain one at least nominally:

– working at a research institution
– spending serious time in bookstores, archives, libraries
– living in a city
– being able to spend serious time in the places I love
– being able to see family
– hanging out with intellectually interesting people on a regular basis
– financial solvency (what do I mean by this: my institution has effectively abolished tenure, I make about half what I would make had I done decently in a less broke state, I do not now have and have never had a two income household, Louisiana does not pay into social security, we do not have travel funding, our library has not bought books since 2006, TIAA-CREF says I will have money to live 10 years after retirement, this means I must work well into my 80s, I do not make enough to both self-fund teaching and research AND save, not having savings causes me more concern than it would were I looking forward to keeping pace with inflation)
– the opportunity to spend extended time abroad
– more, I am sure, that is not occurring to me now.

I do not like making such lists, though, because it is a sad exercise — a self-torturing one, even — and it does not account for all the amusing adventures I have had because of becoming an academic like learning to speak Louisiana Creole, hearing animated descriptions of what it is like to go undersea in a diving bell for Chevron, living in New Orleans as it was before Katrina, engaging in some activist work that revealed to me my true vocation, and much more. So the interesting list, to me, would be about what I got from going into academia after graduate school, not what I renounced. We all know already that I did not know what life was like outside R1 world, that I do not like it, and that I would rather work outside academia or out of field for the sake of doing high level research rather than low level teaching. It is more interesting to talk about the adventures one had: not the apologies, like “at least I live in a town with free parking,” but the fascinating adventures.

In addition, the making of such lists is problematic to me because much of what I “lost” is not what I “gave up” but what I threw away because of having allowed myself to become so oppressed by “Reeducation.” Reeducation, namely the renunciation of academia, which is what I mourn while others mourn the sacrifices they made for academia, is comprised of my first job + my incompetent Acadian analyst + those who then spouted standard academic advice as though it were revealed truth I must never have heard before + excessive obedience + those who insisted I stay in this over considering other professions, for reasons having to do with guilt: I was able to finish the degree, so I owed it to them to be a professor, I had gotten tenure track jobs, so I owed it to them to be a professor, I had interesting ideas, so I owed it to the field and the profession to be a professor, and so on. Once again, my grief is not about what I renounced in order to be an academic, but what I renounced for bad reasons.

It is true that I always wanted a research job and I never really got one, and that I am much less interested in foreign language teaching than most faculty appear to be; if I absolutely must teach a foreign language to the language requirement as the bulk of my teaching assignment, I greatly prefer that it be a lesser taught language, not English or  Spanish. (I do not appreciate, to this, the answer that “It is your bread and butter, dear” — I abhor every phrase in that sentence and I will have very violent feelings toward anyone who says it.) Still, my grief is about what I had in my hands and did not hold; I renounced nothing for academia, really, but I renounced entirely too much for Reeducation.

So I will speak to Clarissa’s list of things she did not give up, and then to a comment from MusterYou which bears discussion.

1. Time alone: in academia in my experience, you only get this at an R1. Other jobs are extremely social, far too social for me, and that is one of my great disappointments. I get very depleted from so much required social interaction and from having so little anonymity, and this makes it hard for me to concentrate on work and to enjoy life. Actually, the cause of my meltdown this week was having been on stage almost 24-7 for too many weeks on end.

2. Joy, being with like-minded people, reading. Clarissa feels this way about our field, but I only give our field a B. I would not notice this if I had always worked at high level research institutions since my priority is not the field but to do some kind, any kind of high level related research with an activist component. A job as a professor at a true research institution is a great fit for me and the possible error I made in choice of field would not even be perceptible if I were not working at such a low level, which is where things show. Still, I do give our field a B and not a C or less, and despite the fact that Spanish was not my major and I do not like teaching Spanish grammar to the language requirement, Spanish is the best major because it has the most interesting students.

3. Prestige, ability to cause a foreign national to be allowed to stay here, money, security: almost anything I could have gone into would have given me about as much of these things as I have now or more, to the extent that I needed them or would have them as priorities in life. My friends in business, who do get laid off occasionally, are paid enough to have savings and can get other jobs without having to move. If I were concerned about prestige I would look toward business or medicine, and if I wanted social acceptance where I am I would go into the oilfield.

4. Flexible time: yes, it is great, although there are other professions that have it, too. Profession is the key word here. Still, the flexible and “vacation” time we have in the academic world is wonderful. I am about to give it up because due to low salary I can no longer afford not to teach all summer, and I have not always been able to use this time well for financial reasons; it is still truly wonderful.

5. Self-worth: this is the real problem. Where I work, academics are looked down upon. I am in a non-prestigious field, and I do not do particularly well in it. I also have self-worth issues from way back, and my family has “issues” with the fact that I did the Ph.D. If I had done really, really well this would all be counterbalanced and would either not have had to be faced or would have cured itself organically. But it is also for reasons of self-worth that I want to do something else. I would say, “Do you see? I can do something else!” Then I would sit down and write my very best odes.

6. However, and this is a big however: I want to be in a liberal profession, like academia or law, and not in business. I want to be a specialist, not a generalist. I want to aim high. When I see people I know from the old days, some of whom stayed home in our beautiful landscape and some of whom went away as I did, I envy the access to our beautiful landscape had by those who have it. But I am so clearly in the other group, and I am glad: each person has a faraway look, each one is so different, each has developed in such a strong direction, each one is so well defined. We lost beauty and contentment and participation in our culture, but we gained so much else in the end. And we come from a place that is so strong, it can never be really lost.

And if I had gotten what I wanted, I would be contented, and I would have achievements I do not now, but there are so many things I have seen that I would not have seen, and so many things I would not have known that I know now. And what is lost in the formula of renunciation, in the framing of the question “What did you give up?” is that it is not in fact late now, as there is so much life ahead.

7. I would like to end by linking to this comment on the placidity of academia, which is the only real criticism I also have; the conformity that reigns is the reason I do not fit in. I do not mean I am not traditional — I am, actually, even to the point of conservatism in some ways. But it is the placidity that makes me uncomfortable and this is something to be discussed in another post, when I develop it to include this point; I want to be involved in high level research and its application at the same time and this is why my law school scheme, if I could work it out in the way I designed it, would in an ideal world be ideal for me.

In the meantime, what is missing for me in life is a connection between my research and the place I actually live. This is not something one is taught to think of requiring, but I require it and some people in fact have it. I mean to acquire it as well and this is feasible where I am. If one considers that, one can remember some of the positive reasons why I returned to our Godforsaken bayou, reasons I knew I had.

Axé.