So, it’s been a while. It is customary, when a blogger returns from a long absence, to explain one’s absence and give an accounting of one’s whereabouts. I am not sure I have a good one to offer, except that, around the time when I stopped posting, a lot of really good things started to happen in my life, and blogging–which began as a therapeutic exercise–got boxed out. At some point, last Spring, I fell in love with my dissertation and was writing so much that I had little energy left for blogging. In addition, I had two articles accepted by excellent refereed journals. I won a fellowship that allowed me to spend the summer at an archive finishing my dissertation. I also got funding that relieves me of my teaching responsibilities this semester, and as of three days ago, my defense was scheduled for mid-November. I am putting the finishing touches on the final draft and poring over a list of 60ish job openings and postdocs in my field.
In short, I am in a very good place right now, and that, frankly, is a little terrifying. I have always, frankly, had a modest estimation of my own abilities as a researcher, writer, and academic in general. I realize now that, in a way, that modest estimation has been a form of psychological protection. It’s going to sound really obvious, but if I don’t expect much of myself, then I can’t be disappointed. Success, therefore, is more than a little scary. Though I don’t think of myself as superstitious, I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. It hasn’t yet, but there’s a long, bleak job hunting season ahead of me and plenty of time for the universe to take its revenge.
Does this little bout of navel-gazing presage a return to blogging? I am not sure. I am, however, impressed that this site continues to get a few hundred hits a day. You people have patience.
I get that there are bad teachers out there. I get that there are people teaching English classes who really shouldn’t be. I get that some of these people hold advanced degrees and are currently in charge of undergraduate composition classes. I get that plenty of people have been traumatized by bad teacher.
Here is the thing though: English teachers are not a hive mind. We disagree with one another, sometimes quite vehemently, about what constitutes good teaching. Both English and pedagogy are dynamic fields of theory and practice that are constantly adjusting and changing as new knowledge is produced and old assumptions are challenged.
This is why I get chapped when, if my job comes up in casual conversation, I am suddenly called upon to answer for the transgressions of everyone’s 9th grade English teacher or freshman comp instructor. This happens with acquaintances, with total strangers, with my father-in-law, with my grandfather. These last two pass up no opportunity to tell me–again–about the English prof who failed to recognize their latent genius back in college. That teacher had the idiocy to give them C’s and made them feel like crap by using red ink to mark their comma errors, and now they hate English forevers. And my role in the conversation is, I suppose, to confirm that I and all members of my profession traffic in bullshit. Keep in mind that I get this from people who last took English classes during the Eisenhower administration.
In addition to reflecting the speaker’s insecurity and butthurtitude, these demands that I speak for all literature scholars and English teachers since Matthew Arnold also often takes the form of regressive attitudes about academic labor and the nature of tenure, which many individuals in my immediate circle seem to think is just handed out like candy to Trick or Treaters to any idiot who puts letters next to their name. Also: resentment about ever being asked to consider the experiences of women or minorities.
Samples from the past month or two:
Passing Acquaintance 1: “Is there something about getting a PhD that makes a person’s head immediately go up their own ass?”
Me: “Well, that will be me in about a year, so I guess you can let me know then.”
—
Passing Acquaintance 2: “Are you like that teacher who tried to make me like Jane Austen back in college?”
Me: :…..:
Passing Acquaintance 2: “I mean really, why is Jane Austen considered to be a good writer? I only read half of Sense and Sensibility and didn’t think it was so special.”
Me: “……”
—
Passing Acquaintance 1 (in a tone conveying disgust): “My English prof is worthless. She talks about feminism and how women are stereotyped all the time. Just saying”
—
Grandfather: “Blah blah blah. Tenure is a betrayal of the free market…protects bad teachers. Blah blah blah.”
Me: [Something about intellectual freedom, the difficulty of attaining tenure, and the problems with applying free market principles to education].
Friend: “You must cringe when you read my emails. My grammar is so bad…”
Me: “Actually, I don’t care. I find you to be perfectly understandable, and I don’t expect texts or informal emails to be perfectly edited.”
Friend: “…because I had this English teacher who used to jump all over me for not putting commas in the right place, and I’m a pretty bad speller, and…”
Me: “Well, that was part of her job, and what I do in my job and in my personal life is different, and I make typos all the time because I’m human and and and…” [Dying a little bit inside].
Today in “Duh:” A study of graduate students at a major Western U.S. university discovered that over half of the graduate students surveyed had experienced major emotional stress. Over half also reported knowing a colleague who had experienced major emotional stress.
Today in “DUUUUUHHHH!!:” experiencing emotional stress was correlated with have a dysfunctional relationship with one’s advisor (also, precarious financial status, lack of contact with friends and family, being single, and being female).
Graduate students–and probably females in particular–spend an absurd amount of time worrying about what professors think of them. This is not just because they are insecure, needy little babies. It is because the academic survival and career outlook of a grad student depend significantly on the quality of her relationships with senior faculty.
As such, I was intrigued to hear that faculty in my department have been doing a bit of bitching about graduate students during Graduate Program Committee meetings, an issue which prompted one of my fellow grads on the Professional Skills Committee to organize a session on Faculty/Grad Student Relations for younger graduate students. Now, some of the faculty’s complaints were entirely legitimate. Students who wait until the very last minute to request job recommendations or feedback on materials rightfully deserve to be admonished. I gave my reccommenders 8 weeks, so I don’t think I am one of the problem students, but no one has ever told me one way or the other.
But that’s actually sort of a problem in itself. One would sort of hope that faculty members could tactfully tell their students that they need X number of weeks notice on a recommendation or a request for feedback on a chapter or article themselves, rather than making it a topic for committee gossip. One would hope. Yet the colleague who ran the Professional Skills session reported that pretensions about openness and honesty between faculty and grad students followed by confessions about dissembling and manipulating in touchy situations was sort of a theme. When she asked each faculty participant to talk about how they wish to be addressed by grad students, one faculty member declined to answer. I am, as of this moment, now obsessing about the fact that I once called this same faculty member “Matt” in an email, thinking I remembered him introducing himself that way, only to go back and realize he signs all of his emails with an ambiguous “MC.” How can something as simple and straightforward as “How do you like to be addressed?” become such a locus for anxiety and misunderstanding?
Later, when they were discussing the need for directness and openness when setting the terms of an advisor/advisee relationship (how often you expect to meet, what kind of turn around time the advisee can expect for feedback, when the advisee feels they need to finish, how long it usually takes students of that advisor to finish, etc.), one distinguished professor admitted that when he doesn’t wish to work with a grad student, he becomes “really busy all of a sudden.”
From the safety of my pseudonymous blog: that’s fucking ridiculous. I am gradually–as professors begin to seem a bit less like towering, impenetrable monoliths and more like human beings–beginning to realize that many faculty members are as socially awkward and terrified of confrontations as their students are. But really, the standard needs to be a bit higher. Given the enormous amount of power an advisor has in a grad student’s life, the refusal to honestly negotiate the terms of a relationship and occasionally have difficult conversations about the student’s performance or etiquette isn’t really a simple personality quirk. It’s downright passive aggressive and detrimental to the grad student’s academic development and overall well-being.
Graduate students often feel as if they are constantly breaking rules and failing to live up to standards that no one has ever spelled out for them. Worse, the rules and etiquette change depending on whose class you’re in or who is conducting a particular meeting or workshop. Graduate students also frequently feel like they are imposters, as if someone at the university is going to realize that they do not, in fact, belong there and immediately send them packing. But even worse is the sense that maybe you don’t belong here, but no one is ever going to tell you one way or the other. All you will know is that the faculty members who work in your sub-field won’t return your emails, and the Graduate Advisor refuses to look you in the eye.
Ok, that’s not my situation, and I do know of excellent faculty members who were able to sit down and honestly tell them that things just weren’t working out. I’m reminded of Notorious Ph.D’s excellent post about having that very conversation with two grads in her own department. She describes that conversation as “difficult,” but I guarantee you that it was also compassionate. Grad school is too huge of an investment of time, money, and energy, and faculty are being downright disrespectful if they allow grads to simply flounder through the process with no clear signals about their progress or their future in the field while complaining about them to the colleague down the hall.
So it’s time I come clean and just say it: I took a stab at the job market, and nothing happened. It’s really ok. I have a year of funding left, which means a luxurious 18 months in which to turn a merely defensible dissertation into an awesome dissertation, send off some articles, and generally get my house in order while taking another stab at the market next fall. I made a promise to myself this summer that I would spend no more than two years on the academic job market before looking for opportunities elsewhere, and I am, for the most part, still committed to that. At this point in my life, I am ready to leave the “student” qualifier behind and start making grown-up money. I am not in any way enamored with the prestige that a university job confers, and I am open to considering a number of different career options in and out of education. On some days, I’m even pretty sure that a high-powered academic job isn’t for me: that the politics of university department are too oppressive, that jumping on the tenure track treadmill will require too many sacrifices, that I’m not sure how much longer I want to wait before reproducing, etc.
Then weeks like this one happen. After an awkward first day, my class gradually begins to warm up. They start asking interesting questions and propose provocative topics for their first writing assignment. I spend an hour after class discussing Dante and C.S. Lewis and fantasy literature with one student. Meanwhile, I’ve been emailing back and forth with an archivist at a research library that I want to visit this summer as she helps me identify holdings that I can reference in a fellowship application. On the bus Monday, I got an email from her notifying me that the papers of a 1900′s female journalist I am interested in have just been made available to the public, and I think I may have squealed audibly, as this was quite possibly the most thrilling news of my month. As I complete the funding application, I find that I am fantasizing–a little prematurely–about spending day after day walking to this library and devoting hours to perusing its holdings. I can’t think of a single thing I would rather do this summer, and I’m sure that a little part of me will die if I can’t pull it off.
In short, I fucking love what I do. I don’t love the low pay, or the uncertainty about where my career is going from here, or the students with shitty attitudes, or the colleagues with the shitty attitudes, or the ridiculous pressure to tailor research topics to the frustratingly narrow standards of “marketability,” or even the prospect of starting the tenure clock. But during weeks like this, suddenly it all really seems worth it. Maybe it’s just that I’m coming off a fellowship, where it was pretty much me and my computer in a daily staring match, and I’m remembering how much I love really working, how much I love my on-campus routine and just the experience of being at a university all day. But all of a sudden, I’m sort of feeling like, “Dammit, I would really miss this if I did something else.”
When I read Historiann’s post on graduate school as a form of self-mortification with quasi-religious implications, the part of me who wrote this post last summer goes “Yeah,” and another part of me goes, “No, that’s not really it at all.” In some ways, I am sort of attracted to the aura of sophistication that an advance degree confers, but in many other ways, I am just a huge dork who loves this crap and actually believes that what she’s doing is sort of important, even if no one ever recognizes it. So in some ways, the analogy with religious vocation works. Both academic and monastic life are about committing oneself to a belief, something you are willing to sacrifice a tremendous amount of personal comfort for. And yes, there is a certain degree of masochism in that, as well as a certain degree of smugness. But ultimately it is also about a kind of guileless love and naive belief and a willingness to put up a whole lot of bullshit in order to make that love the center of your life.
It’s a kind of sincerity that isn’t always easy to own up to at a time when irony seems to be the default mode of looking at just about anything, and as someone who has always prided herself on being responsible and pragmatic and adult about things, I’m hating myself just a little bit. I’m reminded of an application essay I read recently in which the student talked about her complex relationship with her parents. Her father was always the practical sort who was happy having a normal middle-class job and spending time with his family and taking pleasure in stability. Her mother, however, was a former Navy pilot, skydiver, and documentary film maker who frequently sacrificed sleep and mental health in order to pursue her interests and follow her dreams. The student always identified more with her father, having witnessed and resented the ways in which her mother’s aspirations impacted her life and always vowed that she would pursue a practical, remunerative career path. Then she discovered that she loved acting, that she was outrageously good at it, that she never felt more at home, more herself than when she was on stage, and she went “Well, crap.” Because there is nothing certain, nothing practical, and for most people, nothing remunerative about pursing acting either in college or as a career. And yet, she writes, she feels she has to take it as far as she possibly can.
In some ways, I’m not sure that we really choose our vocations or our dreams. To a certain degree (mediated by biology, cultural background, family history, economic status, etc.), they choose us, and there is something profoundly weird about realizing that your vocation conflicts, to a certain degree, with your notions of what constitutes a healthy, productive, and socially responsible adult life.
When I started this blog, I promised myself that I would never apologize on my blog for sudden drop-offs in blogging activity, seeing as I do this entirely in my free time and largely for my own amusement. However, in order to assuage that shame-ridden people-pleasing, neurotic part of myself, I feel the need to apologize for the recent drop-off in blogging activity. There was a flurry of dissertation productivity. Then I got angry with the internet. Then there was Christmas, which was partly held at my house this year and was basically a three week-long parade of family events. After that, I needed to detox from, well, humanity for a while. Oh, and I got sick. But I think I’m back in action now and do, in fact, have a backlog of post ideas I want to get out, including a follow-up to my last one.
While my holidays were mostly quite wonderful (though exhausting), I was reminded that being in graduate school and having to interact with friends and family who don’t really have a concept of how long it takes to write a thesis can be pretty demoralizing, judging by the horrified looks I got when I told some people I expect to finish in six to nine months, which is actually making pretty good time. Furthermore, after trying to explain my dissertation, which does have to do with religion, to the fundamentalists I grew up with, I started just saying “it’s about Mark Twain” (which is sort of true) and moving on.
My sister who is a sophomore in college and I decided we should print cards for students to hand out to people who ask this sort of stuff. Mine would read:
Yes, I’m still in grad school.
Oh, about a year.
I have three and a half chapters done. Out of five.
It’s about Mark Twain.
No, we’re not having kids any time soon.
Hers would say:
I’m a psychology major.
Yes, I love ____ College.
No, I don’t have a boyfriend.
Yes, I’m fine with it.
I feel like there’s a fortune to be made here. Or perhaps I’ve simply misunderstood the whole point of small talk.
I am currently at a big national academic conference at the moment, and it has been a phenomenal experience. I’ve heard some fantastic talks by very smart people in fields close to mine, and I’m walking away with some new perspectives on my own objects of study. However, it’s also become abundantly clear that academic conferences are an excellent place to see people behave like narcissistic, anti-social assholes.
For example, I just attended an outstanding plenary address by a prominent historian of science at a prestigious university. After her talk, she was kind enough to stick around as long as we cared to and answer questions. There were probably about two dozen people who stayed until the very end of that session, and nearly everyone wanted to answer a question. We were passing a microphone around, trying to give everyone an opportunity to talk, but there were three people in the group who, once they got the microphone, refused to give it up. They asked their question and then a follow up and then another follow up and then a rebuttal. This got so obnoxious that the president of the association, who was moderating, had to get up and ask everyone to limit themselves to one question. As she did so, the person who presently had control of the microphone, continued to talk over her and demanded that the speaker address his particular answer to the very large, very nuanced problem under discussion. When he was forced to finally pass the microphone, he then got up and left.
While this guy was most certainly the worst offender, there were three or four others who exhibited the same types of behavior: interrupting the invited speaker who was skipping lunch in order to talk with us, refusing to allow others to participate in the conversation, and acting as if their own research on a tangential topic completely invalidated the premise of lecture.
I don’t really have anything more interesting to say about the situation than this: Don’t be that guy.
Another pet peeve: people who radically overestimate the amount of time they have to give their paper and then, when the two minute warning is given, skip huge section of their paper and say something like, “I think I cover the rest of this in my conclusion.”
I wasn’t planning on posting the video about the wide-eyed undergrad pathetically beseeching her cynical professor a grad school rec, because it’s reached the saturation point on the academic blogosphere, but I want to make a point about it, so here it is for your enjoyment:
At one point, when the prof is talking about the dire financial prospects for someone seeking a Ph.D in the humanities, the student says “Money is not important to me.” It’s treated as a kind of naïve affectation, but I want to argue here that “I don’t care about money” is actually a historical feature of our professional rhetoric and part of the ethos of professionalism in general. In order to do this, I’m going to give you a long, rambling history of the American professions beginning in 1800, so bear with me or go find some cat pictures. I won’t hold it against you. I like cat pictures.
My major sources in this little dissertation are Samuel Haber’s The Quest for Authority and Honor in the American Professions and Paul Starr’s The Social Transformation of American Medicines. Burton Bledstein’s Cultures of Professionalism is also something of a classic in this field.
During the eighteenth century, the professions were limited to and therefore derived their authority from the gentile classes, and in the U.S. leading up to and just after the Revolutionary War, professions largely followed this European model. In late-eighteenth century London, medicine, law, and the ministry were the three learned occupations considered respectable enough for—and therefore limited to—gentlemen. Even within those professions, there were strata that distinguished the learned practitioner from the technician. Physicians, for example, were classically educated and had “some medical training, which he might have acquired in various and seemingly casual ways. He attended to internal diseases and prescribed drugs; yet, as a gentleman, he did not work with his hands” as surgeons and apothecaries did (Haber 4). Social status and education level also determined one’s potential rank within the clergy. Bishops were noblemen, whose “preeminence contrasted sharply with the wretchedness of the deacons, who … in the eighteenth century had become a fixed ‘clerical proletariat’” (Haber 5).
Few nobles or gentlemen immigrated to the American colonies, however, which meant that the professions there had to be filled by relatively ordinary men. But at this point, that leveling was more a matter of necessity than the deliberate assault on privilege that would instigate the nineteenth century professional crisis. Rather than lowering the status of physician, lawyer, or minister as professional titles, acquiring those distinctions raised the status of the individual who acquired them by attending one of the newly established universities. As Haber indicates, “professionalization in America was linked with the ‘art of rising in life,’ with upward mobility” (Haber 6). In other words, the professions, with their institutionalized associations with status and privileged knowledge, helped create the elite and ruling classes of early American society. Yet that ruling class would not exactly mirror that of Europe. American doctors never succeeded in duplicating the occupational ranks of physician, surgeon, and apothecary, just as “the attempt to set up a cohesive elite of Anglican priests and to bring a bishop to America failed” (Haber 9). The emerging professional class did, however, succeed in establishing collegial organizations in the style of the Royal College of Physicians or the Inns of Court. These organizations helped establish licensing laws “to raise standards, esteem, and, more improbably, the incomes of practitioners” (Haber 9). By 1866, those standards and the esteem they conferred would be a rather distant memory.
Haber attributes the precipitous decline of the authority and sense of gentlemanly honor associated with the professions to the broader leveling impulses of the post-revolutionary and Jacksonian periods, which “joined with the spirit of expansion to inspire a widespread attack upon various forms of exclusiveness, restriction, and monopoly” (Haber 93). Yet, Haber notes, this was an “equivocal egalitarianism” that “mixed a vague animus for leveling with a distinct eagerness for rising in the world” (Haber 93). Thus, institutional gateways into the professions and the social standing those professions could confer were collapsed, but only for white men. Rather than abolishing the notion of social hierarchies, “the expansion of political democracy in this era, through suffrage extension and the new political devices that accompanied it, to all appearances made most white males, irrespective of social standing, religious belief, merit, and even virtue, members of the ruling class” (Haber 96).
Evangelical Protestantism was both an impetus for and a beneficiary of these leveling impulses. American evangelicalism largely eliminated Anglican Church hierarchies. While elite divinity schools such as Harvard and Yale continued to produce learned clergymen in the tradition of the highly literate and hierarchical Puritans, the Second Great Awakening saw “a style of religious leadership that the public deemed ‘untutored’ and ‘irregular’” become “successful, even normative in the first decades of the republic” (Hatch 5). The foundation of new Protestant sects like the Seventh Day Adventists, the Methodists, the Baptists, and the Latter Day Saints was instigated by religious visionaries that did not come out of and, in fact, defined themselves against, those elite institutions.
Just as populism and sectarian innovation had profound implications for the future of American Protestantism, similar forces would shape nineteenth century medicine. First of all, increasing emphasis on technical know-how over elitist classical education led to a proliferation of training colleges, opening the medical field to nearly all white men and even some women who wished to pursue medicine as a career. Accompanying that expansion of opportunity was a relaxation of standards. In the 1820’s, individual states were already beginning to abolish medical licensing laws, and such rollbacks escalated through the 1850’s. Yet, as Paul Starr points out, the reasons for the near wholesale elimination of licensure were complex and its affects paradoxical. Attacks on medical licensure began as a way of ensuring competence, as popular opinion held that a medical license was “an expression of favor,” the means by which medical societies maintained their unearned place of privilege (Starr 58). As Starr argues, a medical license was only meaningful “if it was accepted as evidence of objective skill. But the belief that medical societies and boards of censors were merely closed corporations, like the banks and monopolies, utterly subverted their value as agencies of legitimation” (Starr 58). Abolishing licensure was a means of forcing traditional medical practitioners to compete on the market with other approaches, reaffirming the belief that rational knowledge ought to be accessible to the layman, free from “all the traditional forms of mystification that medicine and other professions had relied upon” (Starr 58). This shift in attitudes was, in fact, a crucial turning point that would enable mid and late nineteenth century doctors and researchers to challenge “outdated bases of legitimacy” and build a profession based on modern science, which Starr argues “shares with the democratic temper an antagonism to all that is obscure, vague, occult, and inaccessible” (Starr 59). However, that same populist shift would also hamper those very scientific developments, which, in their constantly compounding specificity gave “rise to complexity and specialization, which then remove knowledge from the reach of lay understanding” (Starr 59). The mid-nineteenth century, then, the tumultuous half-century period between the decline of eighteenth century professional medicine and the rise of modern medicine saw that profession first reach its nadir in terms of both authority and competence.
Thus, the 1880’s and beyond were marked by a gradual resurgence of the very idea of professionalism as a class of workers marked by the specialized competencies they derived from education. Medical colleges and law schools were reformed. Licensing laws were re-established. The AMA was formed, and as the twentieth century began, new professions began to arise, and the rise of those new professions had a direct relationship to the formation of the modern university. In the 1920’s, future doctors were, for the first time in over a century, required to get a Bachelor’s degree before entering medical school. The disciplines that constitute the humanities began to consolidate around particular required no degree—began to arise.
People who occupied these disciplines also began to articulate certain ideals about what it meant to be a professional. Industrial capitalism was starting to become a big deal, of course, and professionals began defining themselves in contrast to the two essential human components of that system—the laborer and the businessman—and they did so by articulating a particular relationship to money. Namely, people involved in business were all about money, but “professionals” were totally above such mercenary concerns. Rather, professionals were loyal to a different set of ideals and ethics and therefore didn’t care about money. Now, in the late nineteenth century, this was a rather disingenuous position. It conceals the degree to which the formation of barriers around the professions—education requirements, licensing—were constructed in order to raise the standard of living for those who occupied them. By eliminating competition from irregular practitioners, for example, doctors were able to command a much higher wage. In a way, the appeal to higher ideals and ethics—“I don’t care about money”—was a way of reducing cognitive dissonance, of insisting that the elimination of competitors (which resulted, once again, the exclusion of women and non-white persons) was purely a matter of ensuring standards.
So, for a period of time, “I don’t care about money” was as much about preserving privilege as it was about making sure doctors and lawyers knew what they were doing. To argue such isn’t to argue that the regulation of professions that so directly impact the public well-being is a bad thing. It’s simply to say that it wasn’t entirely about the public well-being, and it behooves us to be honest about that.
So what does this have to do with professional rhetoric and the dismal employment situation for academics today. Basically, I’m arguing that “I don’t care about money” has made it impossible for us to have truly honest public conversations about what things cost and how much the people providing certain services—like medical care and education—deserve to make. One the one hand, that rhetoric can be a way of shutting down anyone who suggests that certain professionals maybe aren’t entitled to millionaire salaries (doctors and lawyers, anyone?). But on the other hand, if you are working in a low-demand professional field that is facing budgetary retrenchment, the people who control the money will be perfectly happy to use your sense of professional ethics and ideals to pay you less. If you and your colleagues are constantly giving off the vibe that you’d totally work for free if you had to, someone may eventually take you up on that.
This is a problem that the medical profession is also facing right now, particularly in the context of debates about healthcare reform. The public impression that all MDs make investment banker salaries is increasingly become as fantastical as the impression that professors only work six hours a week. Pay varies according to specialty and employment situation, but doctors have seen their salaries shrink considerably over the past three decades. My father, for example, who specializes in ear surgery, makes half a million a year. His partner, who entered the same specialty thirty years before him, easily made the equivalent of twice that at the height of his career. Doctors who work in research or in corporate hospitals—especially general practitioners—make considerably less than my father. There is a very simple reason for this: as the cost of care has risen, insurance companies have slashed provider reimbursements and corporate hospital systems have cut into provider salaries. Private practices are becoming increasingly costly to run and increasingly less remunerative.
Now, I think there is a very important discussion to be had about whether half a million dollars is a reasonable salary for a doctor. But once again, it is very difficult to have that discussion because doctors (rather understandably) do not respond well to assaults on their standard of living, especially when its accompanied by the implication that they are just greedy bastards. That resistance is compounded when the President himself spouts egregiously false information about how much doctors actually make for certain procedures. Also, I think there are reasonable concerns about where the cuts to provider incomes will actually stop (at $100,000 a year? Less than that?) and whether doctor salaries will still be enough of an incentive to prompt bright young people to take on massive piles of debt in order to go to medical school or whether it will, in fact, become a bait-and-switch like grad school.
I also think there is a very important discussion to be had about what a college professor should reasonably expect to make during their lifetime, but that is a discussion that has become all but impossible due to the total batshit ideas that pundits and large swaths of the public have about what professors actually do and, one might argue, a lack of solidarity among academics themselves. But “I don’t care about money” is a part of this too. One of the problems with that cartoon is that it sort of makes it seem like that undergraduate student came up with these ideas about what being a professor means all on her own. In fact, her appeal to Harold Bloom is, in a way, an appeal to an older model of the academy in which “I don’t care about money” could be an effective way of preserving privilege, in which those who did the “business stuff”—administrators and legislators—could be regarded with disdain and hostility because of their lack of allegiance to a higher set of academic principles and mercenary obsessions with dirty, dirty money. This is an academic culture in which that undergraduate student could have been fed a metic ton of nonsense about the “life of the mind” being its own reward.
But, of course, that’s bullshit. We do care about money, but not all academics are very honest about that fact, even the ones who are barely making a living wage. “I don’t care about money” is a way of saying, “I can barely make rent and I have a mounting pile of debt, but I’m still better than you because I live a ‘life of the mind.’” In other words, “I don’t care about money” is simultaneously a pernicious bit of snobbery with a rather prestigious historical pedigree and the thing that is biting us in the ass.
Tenured Radical has a phenomenal series on the economics of professorial salaries going right now, and the conversation has lapped over onto Historiann. If you are currently seeking a distraction from grading and/or writing, you could do worse than their comments threads. The first post begins by noting that TR’s salary has more or less stagnated at $107K a year and shows no signs of going up despite an increasing workload. I confess that when I first read it, my lizard brain said “uh oh,” because I was anticipating the demands from less well-paid individuals that TR simply be grateful for what they may justifiably feel is a largesse. And, admittedly, as someone who alone nets about $17K a year from what are essentially three part time jobs at my university, I experienced a twinge of “suck it up” myself.
But I’ve written about “being grateful” here before. There is nothing wrong with counting your blessings and reflecting on the fact that you are better off than many others, but there is also nothing wrong with demanding a remunerative wage for the work you perform, especially if that wage is commensurate with the wages earned by individuals with similar levels of experience in the same job (which is all TR is really asking for). Similarly, “being grateful” doesn’t benefit the people who are less fortunate than you. It benefits the people who stand to benefit by not paying you OR the people who make less than you. It tells your employers that they can reasonably expect all of you to work for free if they simply appeal to your sense of personal and professional ethics.
As I’ve said before, despite what looks on paper to be poverty level wages, I too experience the pressure to simply “be grateful.” I have spousal support, after all, though it comes from a spouse making a public school teacher’s salary. Also, we have no debt and substantial equity in our home, the product of being on the good side of the last decade’s real estate bubble. And I attend graduate school largely tuition free (except for that one semester) and get decent health benefits, which is more than can be said for most grad students in the humanities. In other words, even as a grad student, I have a pretty decent middle class life. And I do, much of the time, feel grateful for that modicum of economic security and reflect on the myriad other forms of satisfaction I derive from my job.
But occasionally that life and those forms of satisfaction are inexplicably used as a rationale to get me to work for the university for little or no extra money. That, folks, is ridiculous. At what point, exactly, is one allowed to respectfully decline to do extra work for free? When you can no longer afford your mortgage? When you finally qualify for food stamps? No, at some point, I think it is reasonable to do as TR is doing and weigh the costs and benefits of agreeing to do more work for free and, you know, finding some other line of work. Because, for better or for worse, that’s the free market, baby, and as long as there’s a healthy supply of suckers out there willing to just “be grateful” for living a life of the mind and getting to work with young people and blah blah blah, universities will feel free to capitalize on that.
Coming soon: The cultural capital of “not caring about money.”
Ya’ll, Kate Harding is back! Yay! Last week, she wrote a brilliant screed about the media treatment of Tyler Clementi’s suicide, and today she is back with another “TFA (Total Fucking Asshole) of the Week.” She makes the essential and so frequently missed point that whenever the media encounters a horrifying story in which people do evil things to each other over the internet, they mistake the context for the cause, the medium for the real problem. The narrative becomes, essentially, “the internet did it” rather than “the internet was the tool by which a malignant narcissist and total human fail inflicted unspeakable psychological pain on another human being.” By this logic, the perpetrators are transformed into victims themselves, “good kids” (and in some cases adults) who were corrupted by the heinous influence of Facebook, video games, 4chan or whatever, as if the Wild West environment of the internet were powerful enough to override the myriad forces of socialization that somehow teach most people that it is perhaps not ok to torment a dying child or film two people having sex and posting it online without their consent. I mean, I grew up a “digital native” and continue to be a pretty avid user of the internet and social media (as well as a fan of certain reality shows and video games), and yet it would never occur to me that this sort of behavior was even remotely defensible.
The same fallacy appears in most popular discussion of “internet addiction,” which, as research psychologist Nick Yee points out, is a problematic term for a whole host of reasons:
The primary objection to this methodology of creating psychological disorders is that for any given media form, hobby, or activity, it is probably true that some percentage of people will fall into this criteria of “addiction”. The only difference is that researchers choose only certain activities to investigate for addiction disorders. And thus, we have IAD and we are asked to believe that people never watch TV too much, never play golf too much, and never work too much. The Internet is dangerous whereas other activities are wholesome and good. But if any and every activity can have its very own addiction disorder, it’s not clear that such a notion is meaningful. On the other hand, picking and choosing which activities we deem “addictive” seems more and more arbitrary.
Yee specifically studies what he terms “problematic usage” as it pertains to online games (think Everquest or World of Warcraft). His extensive research shows that problematic usage occupies a space in a dialectic between the attraction of the medium (how fun or rewarding it is) and external factors. In other words, the achievement-oriented nature of a game may provide a player with a sense of power that they lack in their own lives. Similarly, the relationships that multi-player online games may foster can be as rewarding (and in many ways less risky) than outside relationships. As Yee says in another article,
It would also help to acknowledge that oftentimes, other factors such as depression, low self-esteem, mood disorders, high stress, or traumatic events such as unemployment or marital crises can make a person more susceptible to developing a dependency on a variety of potentially destructive behaviors, including playing online games. It would help to mention that behavioral dependencies in general share many common features and predisposing factors, and that creating loaded terms for specific technologies can make it harder for people to understand and help resolve the problem when the rhetoric focuses so singularly on the technology. And finally, it would help to mention that behavioral problems seldom have simple and single causes, but rather are typically produced from and sustained by a variety of inter-related factors. It doesn’t really help anyone when the entire issue often boils down to simplistic “yes/no”, “good/evil” stances in media reports.
Furthermore, this lack of general understanding (both by the public and by clinical psychologists) of the external factors involved in problematic usage make certain forms of treatment counterproductive:
The difference between Attraction Addiction and Motivation Addiction parallels the difference Dodes makes about physical and psychological addiction – whether a real life pressure exists that pushes the individual into this particular outlet. In both contexts, because the psychological pressure or problem is far less visible than the physical drug or the game, the main cause of the addiction might be blamed entirely on the tangible aspects – the drug or the game, even though it is only a part of the problem. Because Motivation Addiction can masquerade as Attraction Addiction, it gives observers the illusion that taking away the game will resolve the addiction. But because it is not the game that is causing the Motivation factors in the first place, taking the game away forcefully oftentimes compounds the problem because now the individual has no outlet and feels even more vulnerable and helpless.
We’re all quick to chuckle at a video of a child freaking the eff out (TW for psychological distress in a minor) when his parents take his games away and frequently either label that child a deviant or make general pronouncements about the perils of internet usage or gaming without asking the all-important question: what the hell is going on in this child’s life that makes this such a traumatic experience?
At various times in my adult life, I’ve been involved in certain online gaming communities. It’s something that my partner and I enjoy doing together, and it is a fun way to stay in contact with friends from across the country. We have also met some pretty extraordinary people in online games: professors, district attorneys, ministers, high-functioning adults of all sorts. However, games have also occasionally put us into contact with people who use games in problematic or anti-social ways.
The following story merits a trigger warning for discussion of suicide. Skip down a few paragraphs if you wish to avoid it.
For example, one evening, the sole teenager in our group–a mature eighteen-year old that looked to some of us as mentors–logged on and and announced that he had just taken an overdose of Ativan and various other sedatives. He was logging on to say good-bye and to tell us that we were all like family to him. As you can imagine, we wigged out. I knew from personal conversations that this kid lived in my state, just a couple of hours away, in fact. A friend of mine happened to have his phone number, so while I called the police department, my friend called him and kept him awake and talking until paramedics arrived at his house. After a brief stint in the hospital, he survived.
Many people would have looked at this kid’s life and said he had a gaming addiction. He played constantly. Sometimes, he would stay up for 48 hours at a time playing, and not even doing the fun stuff. He would devote his time to repetitive activities in game that I would consider mind-numbingly boring. He would often make jokes about how much he played, simultaneously wearing it as a badge of honor and yet acting a little bit ashamed of himself. Most people would probably say that this kid’s parents just needed to take his computer or internet connection away. Some might have said that it was his gaming that made him depressed or some such nonsense.
In fact, this kid had a severe case of bi-polar disorder as well as a host of other mental illnesses (he reported hearing voices at times, for example). It was the manic phases that kept him up for days at a time and the depression that kept him from leaving his room. Furthermore, he was not receiving adequate treatment. His parents didn’t understand or really believe in his disorder. They sent him to doctors to be “fixed,” and offered him very little personal support in his treatment. Those doctors frequently played musical meds. Those of us in the group who had experience with mental illness were often rather horrified by what he told us about his experiences with doctors and therapists. To make matters worse, this kid was about to graduate high school, and his parents had just announced that they would not be able to send him to college (financial constraints probably played a significant role in the under-treatment or mis-treatment of his condition). In other words, had this kid not been an avid gamer/internet user, his life still would have objectively sucked. There were a host of external factors contributing to his usage, not least of which was a longing for human connection and understanding that was almost entirely unavailable to him in what we problematically call “the real world.” While it is certain that he was playing too much, taking away his games entirely probably would have made matters worse.
Similarly, I am not sure that depriving the tormentors of Tyler Clementi of their Facebook account would have made them less sadistic or assholish. Kids have been inventing ways to publicly humiliate their peers long before the internet made it marginally easier.
After the suicide attempt, both his parents and doctors got more aggressive about his treatment. I still worry about the guy, but he and I have long since stopped really playing much, so I don’t know what’s going on in his life right now (which on his end, is probably a good sign). Last I heard, he was receiving decent treatment and had enrolled in massage therapy school, which he was enjoying immensely (he had wanted to study physical therapy in college).
TW lifted from this point on.
“The internet did it” is a convenient way of deflecting responsibility for various personal, familial, and social problems onto a medium that already incites fear and paranoia. As Yee says,
Creating labels such as “online gaming addiction” gives us the illusion that we’ve identified a new problem in our society instead of talking about the real and chronic problems in the world we live in. Instead of talking about why our education system is failing us, or why a tedious 9-5 existence is inevitable for so many, we have created a way of not talking about those problems. People who find empowerment in an unsatisfying world are labeled as “addicts”. We brush aside the larger social problems by labeling their victims as deviants. And along with that, all the nuances, complexities, and multiple factors in behavioral and psychological problems are ignored in favor of a simplistic single factor model.
Talking about internet or gaming or social media as social evils is a way of not talking about why people with mental illness continue to be demonized and treated as “problems” in the medical system, why it is so difficult for children in reduced means to obtain the healthcare that they need to survive. It is also a way, in the Tyler Clementi case, of not talking about why even in the supposedly liberal and permissive spaces of college campuses, identifying as LGBTQI continues to be so unspeakably shameful. It is also a way of not asking where the hell the responsible adults are in any of these situations. How is it that the sadistic abusers of Tyler Clementi got to the point where they go do such an evil thing and not even see a problem with it? Why is it that “responsible adults,” including their parents and lawyers, continue to make excuses for them? Is it really because we are supposed to feel oh so sorry for these kids, whose promising lives have been cut short by one stupid act? Or is it a way of avoiding complicity, avoiding the fact that by ignoring warning signs, by failing to label horrific behavior as what it is, by refusing to champion children who are being physically and psychologically tortured, by persisting in victim-blaming, the “responsible adults” have failed to fulfill their trust and have revealed themselves to be either ineffectual or completely sick themselves.
You guys are awesome. The comments on and responses to this post were fantastic, and I wanted to follow up by letting everyone know that the crisis of confidence did come to an end. In some ways, just writing about it and coming to the realization that this is a pretty common experience helped resolve those questions about my qualifications and temperamental suitability to academic work. There are two Very Important Lessons that I took away from the experience (aside ways to perform better in an interview), and I thought I would share them here.
1. My constant need for reassurance and approval from others probably stems from my unwillingness to perform that service for myself. Yeah, that’s sort of Therapy 101, stuff that I covered in the first year of counseling, but it’s a surprisingly difficult idea to apply to one’s life. But the simple truth is that I am an intelligent person with more than an average share of common sense. I understand what the qualifications for doing this sort of job and living this sort of life are. I am capable of weighing my strengths and weaknesses, and I am capable of saying, “Sure, some aspects of this path I’ve chosen are really challenging for me, but I do actually belong here.”
Kind of like this but a lot less adorable
Why don’t I do this for myself? Some it probably comes from growing up female in an environment where being uppity or over-confident was a liability. Some of it just comes from being a former teenager and fearing the social repercussions of thinking too well of myself. In therapy, I was introduced to the concept of the Inner Critic, which is that voice that basically tells you you suck. In many people with depression, the Inner Critic can be pretty abusive, but in a healthy person it actually performs an adaptive person. Your Inner Critic is there to tell you when you’re being an asshole, when you need to work harder, when you’ve crossed a line or done something that isn’t in your best interest. I guess it’s sort of like that concept of Conscience. It’s there, ultimately, to protect you. There have been certain situations in my life where I counted on my talent and the quality of my work to get me something (into my first choice college, for example), and I was blindsided when it didn’t work out. So, my Critic is sort of trying to make sure I’m never surprised like that again and consistently reminds me of my slim chances for success in anything. Basically, I have an abusive boyfriend living in my head.
I find it interesting that no only do I require explicit affirmation from other people but that in the absence of any other information, I tend to infer disapproval. It’s a sucky way of entering the world and trying to interact with others, but ultimately it’s also a way of externalizing my Critic, of taking all of the shit I say to myself and putting it in mouths and minds of others. Then I can sort of blame them for the fact that I feel terrible about myself. It’s my sister’s fault that I hate my body. It’s this professor’s fault if I hurt myself later on today. It’s my parents’ fault if I’m too scared to interact with people. Etc. Perversely, it sort of makes me feel a little better, like my depression is totally the fault of everyone I’ve ever come into contact with, but that’s a huge burden to displace on another person. My sweet partner tells me I do this thing where I fight with him in my head before he even enters the room. Usually, it’s because I’m feeling insecure about something–the cleanliness of the house, my lack of productivity that day, whatever–and I decide that he’s upset with me about it, and proceed to chew him out for being a demanding jerk.
2) Sometimes a little external validation helps. My Inner Critic knows that I require affirmation, and he thinks that makes me a weakling and constantly polices my behavior for anything that smells of “fishing for compliments.” That makes a pretty logical and simple task like taking my advisor aside to talk about a shitty mock interview more complicated, especially when I’m afraid that I might cry. At some points, my Critic sounds a lot like Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own, saying “there’s no crying in academia!”
I need a Rosie O’Donnell or Geena Davis type to remind my Critic that he’s an abusive has-been drunk. Anyway, I happened to run into one of my co-directors yesterday afternoon, and he could tell that I sort of had something I wanted to talk about. So, we went back to his office, and I explained what had happened (without tears!), and he was completely and totally sympathetic. When he found out who had conducted the interview, he informed me that one of those people is notorious for giving blistering critiques in defense and writing groups and committee meetings department wide, that she is pretty thick-skinned herself and therefore didn’t have a great bedside manner with vulnerable grad students, though she is a brilliant scholar and a rising star in the field. Furthermore, four other faculty members had approved of my job materials, which meant that the poor reaction of one of these interviewers was probably an anomaly. Not everyone is going to respond to every item in a job letter the same way. You can’t please everyone. This makes perfect sense.
So I wound up getting my affirmation anyway, and I did not suddenly become lazy or arrogant or entitled after hearing that yes, I belong here. Furthermore, it would be insulting to the faculty members who have supported me throughout the process to suggest that their good opinion doesn’t count, that their investment and confidence in me was misplaced, just because one other person–no matter how brilliant–had a problem with me.
I’m getting there guys, but it’s a process. Thanks for reading.
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