To
me it seems that we often ignore solutions to institutional
indifference or hostility that involve breaking away rather than moving
in.
If I am already a playing member of some institution--deacon
in a church, shareholder in a business, official in a government,
tenured faculty in a university--then it makes sense to push for reform,
as an insider, where I see it as useful or helpful ("the right thing to
do"). I can campaign from a position of relative strength as an
insider, using social and political capital that I already have to fix
problems I see. As an outsider, I don't have that capital, the capital
for reform. I cannot make a meaningful dent on insider culture, really,
except insofar as I avoid participating in it where I find it
obnoxious.
If
I am a shareholder in a business, then I have a meaningful voice when
it comes to decisions that business makes. If I am not, if I am merely
one of several million faceless consumers (passive beneficiaries of
business I don't make), then my most meaningful decision is often simply
to take my investment elsewhere. If I were tenured faculty, then my
outlook on academic culture would be different than it is. I would
advocate more for political solutions involving existing powers. As matters stand, my advice is that nobody should bet too much on the success of an
academic career (with "too much" loosely defined as "debt sufficient to
procure a middle-class life like that of my parents, who owned homes and
had pensions and vacations and whatnot"). I am open to publishing work
in alternative venues (e.g. using Amazon to self-publish rather than
submitting to journals or academic presses). I am open to distance
learning, with or without the umbrella of institutional support. I am
open to the reality that many of us do many different things over the
course of variegated lives: there is no such thing, not even in my
relatively small coterie of academic friends, as "the academic
lifestyle" or even "the academic career" that moves predictably from
grad school to tenure. If a student asks me about making a career in
academia, you had better believe I will mention all of this stuff. I
will mention that it is wise to have back-up plans, and a working
partner, and reasonable expectations of the rewards available. It does
not make sense to care more for institutions than they can care for you.
Feel free to make professional inroads into business outside the
tenure track, for strait is that gate, and narrow the way, and few
there be that find it.
My own situation is not wholly without hope, though I appear to be headed down an employment rabbit-hole that swallows some people whole (adjuncting as a career). I
am hoping that having really low expectations and being frugal will
help us as we come closer to death of natural causes. I really like the
tiny house movement, myself, and will never have a mortgage if I can
help it. Maybe we can move into a shed or an RV (or a yurt!) when the
kids grow up and move out. We definitely won't be paying their college
tuition, if they go to college (which I am not going to push as a
necessity, not least because there is no way in hell we could afford
it).
Healthcare
is a problem that persists, thanks in large part to the really stupid
system we Americans have jerry-rigged in which the only way to see a
doctor is to pay some bureaucrat (with a private or public company of
dubious value to anybody except career bureaucrats). But for now my
wife has benefits, even if I don't, and we are young enough to aim for
good health as a long-term option. I suppose I may have to invoke
sudden death if I get a really nasty disease that nobody can pay to
cure--but honestly, those diseases are often death sentences even with
the best care that money can buy. My great-grandfather fell on a
pitchfork (the blunt end, not the tines) while working in a barn-loft.
He spent a few weeks in agony, and then was dead. He was not even 30
years old. Life happens. Sometimes all we get to do is clean up the
mess, bury the dead, mourn, and move on. It isn't Obama's fault (or
Boehner's).
Cars
are an expensive nuisance, as are computers, but so far we have been
fortunate with used machines and good deals. I think there is hope that
we may make it all the way to death without needing more than a
serviceable jalopy and a few relatively cheap machines that are not
phones that can handle word-processing and other activities our
employers require. Beyond that, all we need are clothes and food--and
time to spend together.
At
some point, which I seem to reach sooner than many, I would rather
forgo extra income and spend another hour with my family. I know that
my academic employers do not value me as a human being: I don't expect
them to do so. They have a need for services that I happen to be able
to provide, for the moment--impersonal services that they can afford to
hire for a relatively small sum. I know that they care more about the
services than about me. That is the way of institutions, which
necessarily value data over anecdotes, process over people. Seeing this
truth as I do, I make a point of limiting my exposure to the
institution. I want a relatively low ceiling on the amount of distress
that the university is capable of causing in my life. When the dean
hauls me into her office, swears at me, and tells me that I am a loser
who should go fuck himself and die, I would prefer to smile, tear up my
performance review, and walk out--rather than sweat and weep and wail
and gnash my teeth. It is easier to be impervious to ill fortune that
we expect, I think--so I make a point of expecting indifference and
occasional hostility from the university, seeing that it often rewards
my colleagues with such things (and I am not magically different or
special or superhuman).
My
family care about me as the university does not and cannot, even if it
were to offer me tenure. I would be willing to care more about its
future, and so its institutional decisions in the present, if I had a
real stake in them (such as the prospect of tenure would raise), but
even then I would not love it as my family. And I would not expect it
to love me this way. As an adjunct, my principal loyalty is to
students, and to the integrity of my work (as a teacher and a really
independent scholar, free to read and write and publish what I want on
my own schedule, without giving a damn for whatever intellectual fad is
currently hot with tenured faculty whose collective attitude towards me
is largely one of indifference or disgust). I value those professional
people I know personally--the friends I have made at work--and I
endeavor to be worth something to them as another human being, no matter
where they may be professionally. I like many academics, including
some with tenure, and naturally I hope that they like me back. But this
is hardly the same thing as liking the university. I like teaching, if
you want to know the truth, and thinking and writing, so for the
present I put up with the university. I don't really like it, and I
know better than to expect it to like me.
In
brief, when buying something really expensive (a house, professional
training that lasts a decade or costs decades of work to pay off),
consider the worst-case scenario rather than the best. If the worst is
more than you can bear, then don't buy it
(no matter how nice the best looks). I would advise the aspiring grad
student to look elsewhere if she cannot bear vows of material poverty
and intellectual humiliation--for such is the lot of many academics
(probably all of them, at one time or another).
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