coldhearted scientist وداد

I keep wanting to answer, for me, the question posed at the end of this post, so I will start making a list of the factors without insisting I finish the post all at once.

1. My dissertation was in beautiful prose but I did not have enough background on the topic to be writing about it. That is, I had not worked deeply enough on it to call it “my work.” I knew how to grow it and grow into it, and this would have protected me in the storms that followed. But they followed too soon.

2. I had a job where being research oriented was lethal. This terrorized me since it went against everything else I had ever been told. I had been so urgently warned about the dangers of showing interest in teaching and service that when I learned research was dangerous as well I had difficulty keeping a sense of orientation.

3. At an important point where things were going well and needed to continue doing so, I had three terrible things happen at once:

– that psychotherapist who did everything he could to attack my research and destroy the person who was doing it by saying it and my specific project were a signs of disturbance;
– the realization that I was modeling myself on someone with whom I did not actually agree and who might not actually have my best interests at heart;
– a book contract with which I disagreed and about which I lacked a person with whom to discuss my doubts and be advised on negotiating with presses.

On this last, I did try to find people but all I got to hear was sit down and write whatever they say, or you will not survive. That is why I am so opposed to academic advice. The model of chaining yourself to a desk and writing what will satisfy, on pain of death, reminds me too much of writing forced confessions in prison cells.

Between having been told research was lethally dangerous, and that it must be done but could not be my own, AND ALSO that doing it was proof of severe mental disturbance, I froze.

*

The topics to continue with are the question of field, the law school affair, and the situation here at Vichy State. The point to be made is that I did not think I could do academia after having been destroyed by Reeducation, but I was told I must continue. All I have to say on this is that every step the Little Mermaid took on land was like walking on knives, and she never achieved her objective.

There is another way in which I was always-already estranged, though. The feeling of being a ghost, the feeling of not having the right to exist, of being in the world as a courtesy, was always faint but Reeducation, especially with all of its aspects taken together, utterly destroyed my sense of validity as a person and said I had no right to authority in my life.

This means that how I got estranged from work is the wrong question. I got estranged from myself and my work went with that.

*

So, how do college professors become estranged from their scholarly identities? By being told they should not have one and must hide it if they wish to survive; by being told the one they have is not the one desired; by being told that because of who they are they do not deserve the authority to have the identity they think they have.

By having things projected into them — the assumption of incompetence, of conspiracy to procrastinate, and so on, or the assumption of arrogance if incompetence or procrastination cannot be imputed to them.  By having it repeated that their success hurts people or that it is not real.

I also suppose identities can atrophy. But in my case it has never been an identity I was estranged from but a project, or the right to work on a particular project. More than that, I have been estranged from my authority and I have also had the impression that, among people I interacted with daily, it was unwelcome that I should be a researcher and writer no matter what they said officially.

I have no idea whether anyone else has any experience even remotely like mine. I will say that what I, at least, always needed as faculty is what I got as a student: the message that one is trusted to deserve to be where one is and to be capable of doing what one is doing, and that good results are projected and expected, and will be appreciated.

This has not always been forthcoming.

Axé.