Freedom of Choice

Tim Burke has written a response to Erin O'Connor's principled decision to leave academia and the related recent discussions about (post)academic bloggers' exodus from academia.

What struck me most about his piece was this section:

...There is also one aspect of this that I do not take to be particular to academia, but instead is true of all institutions, that some jobs are better than other jobs, some institutions are run better than other institutions. It is better to work for a top law firm than to work for a miserable firm of ambulance-chasers. It is better to work for Google than it is to work for Enron.

What is a bit different, however, is that academics mostly cannot pursue market-rational strategies that respond to those differences intelligently and predictably, and the distribution of talent in faculties cannot meaningfully be said to meritocratically map against the good jobs and bad jobs. I do not imagine that I am here because I am so much better than many of the people in jobs where they teach 5/5 loads, have alienated students, get no sabbaticals, have poor benefits and low wages, and indifferent or even hostile administrations. I think I am good at what I do, but so are many of the people who seek jobs in academia, and who ends up where is a much more capricious thing in the end than in many other fields of work. And once you're established enough wherever you land, if you're tenured, you're there as long as you want to remain--or trapped if you want to move elsewhere.

It struck me because one of the stranger things about working outside academia is that I can, within reason, work anywhere I want. While personal factors do and will influence my deciding what a "good" place to live and work would be, there are far fewer structural ones. Indeed, since I still don't know what my new career will be, there are theoretically no limits on potential work environments. It's an amazing thing -- when it is not terrifying!

Comments

[dale]

Another nice thing about the ordinary working world is -- it's just taken for granted that you'll get as good a deal as you can, and your employers will get as good a deal as they can. & that's just fine. Nobody in the situation thinks that anyone else is despicable or unprincipled because of it. Refreshing after academia, where all these things are considered (somehow) moral questions. Or immoral questions. I may not be a big fan of Capitalism, but I like it better than the crypto-Capitalism of academia.

[wolfangel]

I keep using places to live as a reason why I'm leaving, and getting a lot of odd responses. And certainly some comments at IA about choosing where to live were . . . pointed.

I still feel I'm being reasonable. I want to live in Montreal. I don't think that it is absurd.

[LiL]

Even half-way out of academia I feel that sense of freedom. And the freedom Academy Girl talked about, to write what I want and nobody owns me.

Wolfangel, I think you are reasonable. It is reasonable to live where you want to live. So many people do it too. It's academia and corporate management above a certain level that try to inculcate you to think places to live don't count. Notice the bitter parallel there... Which is, of course over-simplified. I'm leaving academia because I don't want to leave the home I built myself in the town I live in now. Most unreasonable, according to some.

[Rana]

I think part of the pressure to be unchoosy in one's location is a larger culture in which place either doesn't matter, or places are interchangable. You know, the notion that, hey, there are McDonald's and WalMarts everywhere, so why's it matter where you live?

Sometimes the desire to be in a certain place gets reduced to an "it's the weather" explanation, which most consider a trivial reason compared to other life-shaping forces (I don't), because, I suspect, we don't have a convenient shorthand for expressing a love of place, or a desire to become (or remain) rooted in a place.

In a society that prizes mobility, speed, conformity, etc., wanting to become an entwined part of a local community is suspect. If nothing else, it reminds people what they've given up, and that discomfort may make them snappish.

I will admit that I myself have a fascination with the new and different -- I love traveling! -- but my multi-locational childhood has given me an appreciation for a more rooted existence. It's also fun learning to discover the new within the framework of the familiar -- and a good life skill, I think.

[Academy Girl]

I agree with points here about moving, and I'd like to add to what Rana just said about ubiquity -- the culture of academia sees human relationships as interchangeable too, perhaps because people are so ubiquitous. In assuming faculty can move around, academia ignores the importance of established family and personal relationships, as well as the value of people having a say over their choice of habitat. As I've harped on before, many schools won't hire "local grads" or "local talent" unless it's for adjunct work when, really, if schools hired locals, I'm sure they'd do just fine -- and be just as creative as if they'd moved somewhere else. Instead, schools act like moving is no big deal ("everybody does it -- just fly home for holidays") and like relationships (i.e., people) can be "swapped."

[wolfangel]

I like the different, but I want to live at *home*; for me, home is eastern Canada. My grandparents are all in their 80s (well, my grandmothers are each turning 80 within 12 months, but that's close enough) -- I want to be sure to have time with them while I can. I don't want to fly home for the holidays, I want to be home for the day to day. I want to be able to see my parents, my sisters, my cousins. I want to watch my little sister grow up. All this *has* to be more important than a job -- any job.

It might be because I grew up fairly settled (when I was 11, we moved across the street), where my family had all been fairly settled -- but a friend who grew up moving from place to place continued to follow her family around for years and decided to settle where they did.

This was one of the comments on the IA thread I was thinking of:

"Many scholars are happy just to get by and could do productive work if their desk was in the middle of a freeway. This obsession with 'environments' is infantile. Maybe a stint in the army or the factory floor would have helped some of you. What you really lack is hope, creativity and stamina."

http://www.invisibleadjunct.com/archives/000298.html

I still have trouble defending this decision in person -- but only to (most) other academics.

[Rana]

If nothing else, academia certainly seems a fertile breeding ground for rationalizations about why some "fail" and others "succeed," doesn't it?

So far we've seen lack of ability, lack of determination, lack of flexibility, lack of courage, lack of willingness to abandon family and home, etc. etc. all given as reasons why someone isn't finding success in academia.

Aside from flattering the person who did succeed (or protecting them from the realization that fate may have played a larger hand than they'd like to believe) it all distracts from the larger lack:

Lack of good jobs.

A bit ironic, given that most humanities PhDs presumably have a firm grounding in the idea of structural inequality and have been trained to be sceptical of the rhetoric of individual merit in an even playing field (at least in history they should).

[Rana]

You know, that last sentence makes me wonder if the heart of post-academics' pain regarding their departure is this:

We -- meaning scholars and intellectuals -- and academia in general, were supposed to be better than this.

Instead, in too many cases, creativity and critical abilities and interpretive skills have been turned from a larger enterprise of furthering knowledge and human progress to a parochial one of defending one's turf in a hostile world.

The question is, as is the one for the world at large, what can be done about it? And by whom?

[wolfangel]

We do, sometimes, see people mention lack of luck. Not often enough by people who succeeded -- even Timothy Burke's recent post didn't quite say that -- but sometimes.

In the end, lack of good jobs does it. I might well have been willing to keep trying, if I believed I had a reasonable chance at a tenure-track job within a few years of graduation. Even given I wouldn't choose where I live, I would be able to settle down somewhere. Yes, other things played a factor in precipitating this decision, but I think that was the main reason.

You and IA left because neither of you could get good jobs.

I'm considering how even the playing field is. Looking only at people who are in PhD programs -- well, there are better schools and lesser ones, and that plays some role in how you get a job. So let's look at the people who are in top 10 or 20 schools . . .

Is the lpaying field even for them? In a sense, I suppose it is. It's not based on merit (except for some extremes), it's based on serendipity. But it's like that for everyone.

I'm overstating it.

I think -- hope? -- that this dialogue, even by mostly anonymous people, even by mostly only people in the field, is a start. I think a book of people's stories -- IA's, Dorothea's, yours, many other people's -- would be good. (Especially if it included non-humanities.)

People read books about what law school is like from someone who was there, or medical school, or other things you always wondered about.

Because they don't know what the job market is like, what the realities are like. I knew the first, but not the second. My parents and extended family knew neither. They're not unusual in this.

But stories like this get no play in the larger news. Perhaps the recent stories about IA will help.

I think that's what it would take, though. The reality of academia has to get out to the rest of the world.

[Rana]

(I do want to add, preemptively, that I do not think that the majority of academics are self-serving or corrupt -- I was one, my partner is one, my father was and has become one again, and many of my friends are or were academics too. The problems _I_ saw were structural and the problem people I personally encountered number less than a handful. Yes, there are arrogant bad eggs, and the callously clueless, but there are also a lot of good people who do work hard and care about their fellow human beings. Baby, bathwater; forest, trees.)

[Rana]

Whoops, jumped your post, wolfangel.

A book would be good. On the other hand, I don't know that I myself would have read it. I went into grad school with only the vaguest thoughts about future employment (I was 22) beyond not wanting to teach history at a high school level and not thinking that there was any other avenue for a history B.A. I also wanted a doctorate for fairly amorphous reasons, so I wasn't someone likely to look for books about the grad school experience.

I hear you on the difficulty of explaining things to family and non-academic friends. My dad did get his doctorate, but the process was somewhat different (his is in an applied field) and the job prospects were not the same as for humanities folks. The number of conversations I had with my parents in which we ended up talking past each other regarding appropriate expectations and behavior regarding jobs is large. It's only now that I've left academia that their advice is relevant.

I suspect the reason that this gets little play in the media is (a) academics are a relatively small group compared to the larger population, (b) nonacademics automatically assume that academic job-seekers are part of a privileged elite, even when unemployed, and (c) that with a PhD anyone should be able to get a job. Ergo, the academic job crunch is an example of over-privileged, over-educated folks scrambling for cushy jobs that the rest of the population envies -- rather like how we view would-be starlets and kids dreaming of life in the NFL. Movies like that recent one with Julia Roberts (Mona Lisa Smile?) are very good at promulgating the ivied campus and tweedy professor; they have yet to give us a Falling Down or Office Space version of the adjunct life.

[Timothy Burke]

In a way, this takes me back to a discussion that spawned at Invisible Adjunct quite some time ago, and that's about whether critics of contemporary academia want it to be more or less like the "normal" marketplace for professional jobs. I can make either case--that freeing academia from tenure, from its closed-shop cronyism, would align professional academics with the wider norms of professional labor, free to move where they like, live where they like, and also held responsible to the need to do their work well every year rather than for an intense eight years of their life. OR I could make the case that academia needs to be even more monastic, less marketized. The worst situation is what we're in now, where rhetorics of the market cover over and justify guild mechanisms for controlling the reproduction of the profession.

But I think in a way all critics need to decide which way they'd jump, or even if they'd be happy with a jump in either direction. Because very different things happen in either direction--either a much more fluid, much less predictable, much less "sacred" academy, or a much more controlled guild of artisans with no adjuncting, etc., and no rhetoric of "market" about why one person got hired over another, just a strict master-and-apprentice system of placement. (German academia is much more like this, notably.)

[Rana]

Tim, yes.

And I'd argue further that we need to figure out ways for the current populations of adjuncts and tenured to talk with each other about this issue. I'd imagine that there'd be different perceptions on the issue (as AG's posts suggest -- there's a deep vein of anger there -- misdirected in your case, to my mind) but presumably everyone who came to the table would/should agree that academia is worth saving in one form or another.

I have to say I don't know which option -- guild or corporation -- is preferable.

I personally have an inchoate preference for the model of the guild, in that it would then serve to offer an example of how to live a noncorporate life that is still part of the larger world (sort of like an activist religious order), but I think such an institution would by necessity be small.

The corporate model, meanwhile, has the benefit of larger scope and reach, while also failing to offer a clear alternative to the corporate mode. (Academia could, though, model a form of corporatism that takes the whole individual into account instead of one where CEO salaries and shareholder profits are the raison d'etre. Perhaps a nonprofit corporation would be a parallel to look at.)

I wonder if the split reflects the tensions inherent in (a) a college degree becoming the credential needed for entry-level work rather than a high school diploma -- in essence, this forces college to become like high school, with its emphasis on preparing students to become good employees (b) calls for scholarship to be "relevant" while using a definition of relevancy that holds wider society up as the norm rather than academia as the ideal. In other words, it feels like the academy has been struggling to re-cast itself in the image of corporatism in order to defend its existence, when what it should be doing is challenging corporatism and offering a viable alternative.

Scholars and intellectuals have too often in the last couple of decades ceded the table to pundits and popular media in determining how to direct culture in this country; rather than cringing away from the accusation of "elitism" it might be a stronger point to demonstrate -- with walk as well as talk -- why the dumbing down of society to its lowest common denominator is not a good idea.

And, yes, I fully realize the potentials for abuse inherent in this position. Call me an idealist (some no doubt will consider me a naive fool), who wishes I had more company.

[Dorothea Salo]

Now, see, I *told* you there was a big world out there. :) It's so great to see people just learning that. I can't begin to describe it.

On the academia-model question: I have an instinctive, violent, thoroughly negative reaction to guilds. I wish I didn't, because it makes me a poor participant in discussions like this. But I do. I've never personally experienced a guildlike structure -- and I've been involved with a few -- that didn't turn out to be a lot of turf-protecting and chest-beating at the top and varying degrees of misery, brownnosing, and unacknowledged and unrewarded talent beneath.

I don't like corporations either.

Maybe there's a third option?

[wolfangel]

I also think most academics are good people. They care about people, they want to do well, and they're also trapped in the system in a different way.

I actually do not think the book would discourage more than the barest handful of people not to go to grad school. I can't imagine what would have discouraged *me*, either. I see the book as having to appeal to non-academic intellectuals, the people who read popular science and history. I admit this would be hard, but a good cross-section of people might make it happen.

I think this might help the media issue, too.

My father and I had arguments about whether I should apply to Harvard (no) and whether I should go to the Ivy that accepted me instead of where I went to (still probably not). But my parents heard me tell them many stories about other people's job searches, and they believe me. They also see a bit more the reality of life as an academic.

[Timothy Burke]

That's the problem, Wolfangel. Are people persuadable about experiences they haven't yet had? Mostly, no. The students I've had the easiest time persuading have been those with unshakeable self-confidence about their competencies in other possible professions. I haven't even had to persuade them to think twice about graduate school. The ones I couldn't persuade are either those who have no other ideas about what to do with their lives (very bad that I can't persuade them: they're in for an even worse than normal time) and those who are deeply intelligent, thoughtful and can't see a place for themselves other than academia. They see what we do and they like it. They're the kids who were always good in school and they figure, why not keep doing it? They see the idea of the university and believe in it. Nothing you tell them will dissuade them: they'll have to live it to know it, and then it'll be too late, and they'll be rolling their lives on the wheel of fortune, destined either for a lucky good job, a not-so-lucky bad one, or really bad adjuncting positions, without much control over which.

I've especially concluded this about Swarthmore students, who actually find the idea of something really hard vaguely enticing. They don't yet believe that they can't overcome the system by pure force of meritocratic will. The odd thing is, I believe in meritocracy in general because I know it *does* exist in other professions. A lawyer who is both bright and massively determined often ends up being able to force a good situation. An academic can't. Can't even dream of it. It's almost all good fortune, once you get past the things you can yourself actually screw up.

I'm with Dorothea that reverting to a guild situation is not at all desirable, or justifiable. They're tyrannical and unpleasant. I don't envy my colleagues in the German academic system for that reason. But being open to a pure market logic, a no-tenure logic, while making many more halfway decent academic jobs, would probably make far fewer really good academic jobs--and none of them would be a lifetime thing. It means something much more transformative--it means, for example, that the exquisite and sometimes lovely un-usefulness of some of the academic humanities would have to come to an end, because you'd always have to have your eyes on the exit.

[wolfangel]

Instead of posting in the comments here, I've posted about the persuasion question on my blog, because it's (even) long(er than my other long comments).

I also feel that neither a corporation nor a guild is the right image for academia. I like Rana's vision, though I think it's idealistic, I think it's the right image.

[Rana]

I don't have the vision fully formed yet, but what is slowly building up in my mind is a network of scholarly cooperative communities working across the boundaries of disciplines, teaching and research, and intellectuals and the wider society.

(I'm too young for it, but in some ways there's a hippy soul inside this froggy raven.)

[LiL]

I have to concur that neither the guild nor the corporate model seems right. I find corporations dehumanizing and guilds feudal. Neither model seems conducive to true growth, and intellectual work should be about growth, both on a personal and a much larger scale. I may never get away from my early socialist upbringing (makes it rather ironic that I ended up here in America - although, like Rana, I probably would have been a hippy had I been alive in time to be one...) So I feel that thinking about working in education in general and within that, in academia as civil service may be the closest to a viable route. I can't put too much of a chasm between pre- and post-secondary education: one cannot exist without the other. The difference in level and quality need not be as big between the two as it is in much of the U.S. today - it isn't in a number places in the world.

Academics and their influence on society: in Hungary (and I think many other European countries) academics are still looked to for opinions before pundits. No, that's imprecise. There is no translation for the term 'academic' in Hungarian, there is only 'intellectual' - that's the only word I can think of that comes close. An intellectual can have a variety of jobs, among them: university professor (well, in Hungarian it's university teacher,) journalist, writer, lawyer etc. I'm not trying to suggest Hungary has the perfect system, or that Hungarian universities are so great right now - they lack the money to be anything other than barely getting by. But this way of defining the way of thinking first (intellectual) and the job second (university teacher, writer, journalist, lawyer) has always appealed to me.

[Rana]

It appeals to me too, Lil, especially now! :)

I very much like the idea that I can be intellectually active and contributing while "unchurched" -- thank heavens for blogs, is all I can say.