For various reasons I find myself on the hiring side of technical interviews. This is not a customary position, as most of the hiring I've done has been in a role as a professor on a hiring committee. Academic hiring is its own idiosyncratic hellscape.

This new role had me thinking about how academic interviews function (or fail to function) as technical interviews for the business of academia.

For my own go-rounds in the academic hiring cycle, as a job candidate, I used to think that job talks and the like were piss poor ways of assessing candidates. I've come to see their value a bit more as I've gotten older. Certainly on the teaching side, having a job candidate do a mock class of the sort that they might regularly be called upon to teach has proven illuminating. More often than not, people who have experience and are good at it can show off pretty effectively. On the other hand, poor performances under such conditions can be misleading, as it may well be the case that a particular candidate has never been in, for example, a very large lecture class, but would be an amazing teacher in that medium if given a semester to get their lecturing legs under them. I certainly didn't have a lot of experience with big lecture classes early on, but a semester of teaching a big lecture class can work wonders. So while the exercise is useful in seeing who is comfortable and effective off the bat in that forum, it still strikes me as a bit unfair if misinterpreted. And, of course, old crusty faculty have a tendency to misinterpret, saying all matter of nonsense (as I realized later, sitting on the other side of the process) about how a poor performance in that mock lecture meant that such and such candidate couldn't do the kind of teaching necessary.

The case with academic lectures (so-called job talks) and their associated rituals (Q&A and varieties of interrogation or collegial deep discussion) is a bit different. In theory this is what graduate programs train you for, conducting and presenting your research in an academic forum. People's mastery of their content shows pretty clearly, both in the way they present and in the way they answer questions. That said, it's still a hazing ritual of sorts. I've done some shorter job talks, where the emphasis was on conversation, or where a hiring committee reads a bit of your work first and then the talk was a kind of bonus. These have all worked well, as they imitate in various ways the conferencing and lecturing world of professional academia.

But the more I thought of all this I wondered at how the kinds of things that academic job processes tend to focus on — mostly research and teaching — are ignoring the real technical pain points of higher ed. I am speaking of course of the ultimate academic pain point: having to work in the fucking academy.

It's not just so-called “service” or the idiosyncrasies of your “colleagues” (potentially lifelong); it's also the various rules and regulations and institutionalizations that make life miserable. It's the less fantastic parts of teaching, the daily grind of all of that. Academic job processes, against the kinds of questions that are de rigueur for technical interviews in some other fields, feel like they are rituals of academic idealism, attempts through sympathetic magic to convince ourselves that the business of professoring is other than it really is.

One quick example: I rarely heard, either as a candidate or on a hiring committee, behavioral interview questions. The few times I did hear them, it was because I asked them. Over time it became my signature kind of question to ask, the “tell me about a time when...” kind of question. I thought for a while about why that was, both about why I found that kind of question compelling and why it was not something I often heard from others. That I asked such questions become one minor indicator of my being a bit out of step with the world I was in. On the one hand, most hiring committees aren't really trained or versed in the business of hiring. That's a stain upon universities that they can't help define best practices and employ HR or other professionals to make searches better. It's no wonder that academics fall back to a kind of idealized notion of the life of the professor as researcher and teacher and employ crude tribalism and various kinds of snap judgements about personality and qualifications in order to make decisions via committee. (I should be clear here — I am not saying that other hiring processes are fantastic. However, it is fair to say that most corporate hiring, however problematic in various ways, has a more intentional thinking around the business of hiring.)

What would it be like if academic hiring had technical interviews that were really about the business of professoring? Sure, a research talk and a swing through a classroom could be part of that, but I think there might need to be some other parts too, a technical exam on the finer points of higher educator-ing:

• Say No to the Narcissists: This would be an exercise at a dinner party, or possibly for in between any other events — corridors, chance meetings, etc. — where you have to navigate an obstacle course of other academics, some meaning you well and others not so much. You must say 'NO' firmly but politely to the academic narcissists who are only trying to get you do their work for them, whether that be bits of research or some sort of service obligation where they want you to “partner” with them (but you're the only one who doesn't know that that means you'll be doing all the work for it.) You have to find the few allies who actually mean what they say about working with you collaboratively, if such people are even there in the room (no guarantee!). Bonus points for how deftly you shoot down the narcissist and protect your time without them thinking negatively of you so that they'll screw you over on your next merit review.
• 1000 Emails: Plain and simple one here. Just an hour in my inbox. Have fun. See how many useless adminstrative emails you get through before you feel IQ points slipping from your grasp. Respond to the student emails without being an a@#hole and without losing your mind (“Dear [student], Thank you for telling me about your impending absence from class. Unfortunately, the “required” cruise with your family, while sure to be fun and a much deserved break these 4 weeks in to the term, does not constitute an “excused absence” under the class absence policy. As to your request that I send you the class notes...“)
• Administrative Endurance Challenge: A 24 hour technical challenge which simulates what it is like to get a new class approved. Fill out all necessary paperwork, send to committees for pointless feedback, make changes and wait on more pointless feedback by faculty member with ax to grind about some issue that he dealt with 20 years ago with some other member of your department who is his mortal enemy... and so forth.... Then wait. And wait. And wait. At last moment, throw in an administrative snafu generated by some deanlet who last taught in 1975 but is convinced (fucking convinced) that they know a thing or two about teaching and how to structure a proper essay assignment. This exercise requires a locked room and a clock so that you can feel the hours of your life tick away. Needless to say, the room should be emptied of all heavy or loose, throwable objects before beginning.
• Inappropriate Tolerance: The field's wide open on your creativity here. My favorite is to send job candidates to some elevated faculty member or even administrators house where said house has been decorated, floor to ceiling, with art that shows something obviously inappropriate to sane people. (e.g. genitalia, like loads and loads of male members. Just.... everywhere. On 14 foot high ceilings.) and then
• Beg for money: Nothing fancy. Just set them loose on campus and make them beg for money. If you can scrape together at least $500 then you can put on a conference. Can be combined with the Narcissist challenge by allowing one of the narcissists to define the topic of the conference at the last minute.
• Travel budget: This is an advanced mathematics challenge. Try to figure out how to get to a conference, vital to your professional career, on your allotted yearly travel funds of $300. Bonus points to those who choose non-traditional accommodations or forego eating or paying for their children's clothing. (In that case, it's a bit of a wash, as points have already been deducted by at least that portion of committee members who find the idea of procreation offensive among the professorate. They will, in any case, make sure to schedule you to teach at 6 PM in order to punish you.)
• Faculty meeting: Simple exercise really. See if a candidate can make it to the end of the meeting with minimal visible sign of having been traumatized by what they've heard. Bonus points for being able to restrain themselves form pointing out how much of what was just said violates multiple laws or is just generally wrong-headed and absurd. If the candidate manages to do all that while contributing in any way, all the while not pissing off the old crusty folks for having the gall to speak up and express any sort of view and dexterously avoiding aligning with the wrong faction, then that's the person to hire.

Surely there are more.

And, yes, all of the above are, in one way or another, based on things that actually happened. Usually more than once.

#itchytweed

It is wrap-up time in academia, at least for me, and I have gotten to the point with grading where it is a torture to sift through the online gradebook. Some of this is self-inflicted, as I tend to favor high-frequency low stakes assessments. So lots of assignments that count for very little means better learning for students but more of a slow burn for me. (The alternative would be epic grading sessions to plow through a small number of high stakes assignments) Over the past few years, my ability to punch grades and feedback into the system online has degraded to the point that I seem to be having some sort of traumatic reaction any time I launch the platform. I grow immediately angry and resentful and want to do anything in the world that is not this.

It's burnout, textbook-case, obvious and long-simmering.

But it's more than that too.

At first I thought that I was procrastinating a bit with final grades because of some sort of lingering fear of transitions. It is the last major thing I have to do before leaving. Everything after this is clean-up and tidying. It's the last publicly professorial act that I do before heading out of academia after [large number redacted] years. A student in one of my classes this term mentioned that she didn't want us to skimp on class sessions at the end — even though everyone was tired and worn down from the semester over video chat — because she was graduating and she kind of didn't want it to end. I thought about that, considered it. But that's not what's going on for me. I have some emotions and such about ending and transitioning but they are mostly relief. Endless relief that I don't have to worry about the ridiculous things that I have had to pretend to care about for so long. Relief followed quickly by hope and excitement and feelings of freedom and possibility as I haven't felt in nearly 10 years. So, no, not really holding on to anything there.

Grading is the part of the gig where I most visibly started to stumble. Other parts of burnout I could hide, but grading was where I knew that I had nothing left to give. It's the part of the academic gig where there has always been the biggest distance between what I'm told I have to do and what I want to do. Grading is one of those systems that has become, for the students at my institution, purely transactional. I don't blame them for that; it's how they've been conditioned to treat grades. But it gets in the way of learning, and that annoys me. Yes, I also have grown weary of the constant attempts at grade negotiation come the end of the term. But ultimately I think that grading has become symbolic for me of some sort of mismatch between a mission which is about learning and one that is about fulfilling requirements and satisfying bureaucratic mechanisms. I didn't get into this gig to be a cog in a grading machine. It's why I can still speak with students individually and give feedback across hours and days or correspond with them and interact, but I can't do it if it's just to feed the system. I could keep teaching ad infinitum if that grading and “requirements” component were removed; but locked in a system where teaching is inextricable from requirements and a very traditioanl grading structure, I can't do any of that for another minute. I'm already broken. That says something about me and my personality but also something about higher ed and the difficulty of teching at scale in the current environment.

Of grading tools in particular, in the last 20 years we've gone from systems where students would have at least some responsibility for tracking their own grades to online systems where students assume that some external tool will track every minute detail of their performance in a class. This is a separate topic, but underscores my frustration. I have a note to students at the beginning of a course about how they are responsible for tracking their grades and the online gradebook should be treated as a convenience, but I don't think that sinks in. They expect everything auto-calculated, auto-recorded, immediately updated (forgetting of course that there is a person — namely me — who has to do hours upon hours of labor in order to feed that apparently “automatic” system). This has a lot of negative consequences for students. They become passive witnesses to their performance in a class. It also means that, as in so many things in higher ed, responsibility has shifted from students to professors. And it hides my labor, which I of course find frustrating. My time is spent oiling the gears of an online grading tool, trying to cajole it to display what it should, and wondering whether the machine is serving me or I the machine.

Those are the components of burnout — frustration with the tools, mismatch of mission, feeling like labor isn't acknowledged or visible. And maybe that is all the small stuff that together feeds my rage at grading. I am grasping for something more than that because I think that it's not just a me thing. This past year in particular has seen a huge rise of interest in alternative online education. In some areas of professional skills training — coding, data science, design, etc. — the kind of training one can get on these non-university platforms is both robust and cost effective. Universities should be on high alert; these alternatives are compelling. All that universities have over online platforms is the inertia of their credentialing, i.e. being able to offer a degree, and a certain kind of experience that they might be selling. Some universities may have brand loyalty and, of course, the top universities are in a different category. The Ivies, etc. aren't going anywhere. But in general, grading is one of the most visible distinctions between online learning platforms and higher ed. In a strange way, online learning platforms do more to focus on actual teaching and making sure people learn skills than, in my experience, my institution has done in its classes. We're required, as faculty, to waste endless effort on structuring requirements and on the minute details of grading. Sending course proposals through the curriculum committees leaves me thinking always that they don't really care about the teaching. They really just care about the logistics.

The time I waste thinking about grading, oiling the rusty gears of the online grading tool, feels like one small creaking groan as the university slips off its lofty peak further down towards ruin. That is hyperbolic I suppose, but also what has been floating around at the edge of my mind as I get this last round of grading done. This sort of labor is wasted, but it's also a sign of what's wrong with the university. So much effort on the epiphenomena of education, to the detriment of other things. So, yes, I resent it as a personal time waster, but not just because it feels like that for me, or out of some sense of selfishness. I want students to have feedback on their learning. That's what I signed up for. But grading is now something else. It's just gears spinning in the air, useless and counterproductive. Fuel for the voracious maw of the institution, justified because that's how things have been done and propelled by the inertia that keeps higher ed chugging along, oblivious to all else.

There are two kinds of mind poison that linger after extracting oneself from the academic priesthood. The first is yourself thinking like an academic. That's about thinking of projects as never-ending, worrying that your expertise is not expert enough, drowning in imposter syndrome, giving away your labor for free and so forth. But there's a second kind of academic mind poison too, not completely divorce-able from the first, which fosters the condition of constantly looking over one's shoulder, an intrusive thought which asks “What would an academic think?” about whatever it is that you are doing.

I struggle with this WWAAT (pronounced “Whhhaaaat?”, with extreme condescension) ailment periodically. It's easy to think that's just my critical brain doing its thing, but over time I've come to realize that it is the trained reflex borne from specific sorts of signals and cues that one gets as a graduate student and professor. In a simple sense, academia is always about decorum: one feels constant pressure to conform. That is natural in a highly hierarchical system. So one learns very quickly how to have conversations with “senior” peers both in a department or in one's discipline at large. There are certain areas of research or teaching that are more acceptable than others. There's a box that you are put in, often in graduate school but certainly by the time of daily professoring, where you are expert in x, y, or z and pretending or acting otherwise is an indulgence at best, professionally prosecutable in the skirmish wars of teaching schedules or publication. Some research is better left to the future, for “after tenure” or some undefined halcyon day when you won't have to worry about what grant agencies or peer review committee think. And then there are the soft decora, post-lecture parties where you need to talk aout the right places to visit in Rome or have the correct opinion on a recent article or be on the right side of a departmental faction.

I have had all of these experiences, reinforced both implicitly and, usually, with explicit admonition from well-meaning people. I would like to say the advice was wrong or misguided, but in fact in all cases they were right. Deviating from the lines or pursuing those pursuits would have and is looked down upon or looked on askance. The fact is that the academic system is set up to reward a certain kind of cultivated groupthink. So-called peer review simply reinforces this, as does the still widespread though perhaps a bit ess ostentatious system of insider networks and personal connetions. I have in many cases benefited from this; in other cases not.

That is all a problem within academia, but not really my interest. (Indeed, one could hardly build a better engine for creating a groupthink cult than a highly hierarchical power structure cloaked in the language of collectivity and peer power.) The issue is how much that inculcation lingers. I find myself still thinking, about endeavours in business or writing or anything public but well outside my life in academia, what would an academic think? What would that audience that I hvae had to worry about for so long think about this bit of popularizing writing? (answer: waste of time. finish the book. that's the only thing that matters.) What would they make of me doing a podcast? (answer: panderer! oh, how you'e lowered yourself!) What about all the teaching I do? (answer: stop wasting your time. No one cares.) And the business side of things, well, that would just be an epic dismissal I'm sure (“Selling out the life of the mind, I see...”, “Couldn't cut it!”, folllowed by a big dose of “Just who do you think you are?!” and belittling).

The appropriate point would of course be “who cares what academics think?” No one should spend a second worrying what the cult thinks of the world at large. In most cases, that academic habituation reeks of fear: the fear of stepping outside a box or imaginingthe value of things that aren't within the “academic” world. The well-meaning advice of people has always been about their concern, because they did care in many cases; but it was focused around a fear, a fear of what otherws would think, a fear of rejection. What kind of a way is that to think all the time?

That poison has to be purged. For my own work, it's a daily struggle to let those intrusive thoughts float away. But it's a forever scar. Maybe it won't hurt so much or ache, but it can't be completely undone. At a practical level, getting rid of that poison means committment to other activities, spending time among people who don't have those academically-twisted ways of viewing the world. It means thinking a bit less about expectations or expertise or how one appears. It may be a bit of shedding vanity. If I look like a moron or a fool, so be it. Life is short and at a certain point, maybe there isn't so much left to prove.

For academia itself, I don't know if that culture can ever improve. Once institutionalized, there will always be some who are comfortable in that power structure and in that cult. They will defend it by claiming that they are upholding standards or that they are championing the bounds of the discipline. or they'll hide behind the weasel words of shared governance and peer review, ideas which in theory could be mechanisms for equality and raising all boats but in practice are tools wielded for power and prestige and with effects contrary to their stated intentions. But there may be more that can be done to provide counterweights to this kind of thinking. (and indeed, there are some initiatives that have this effect, partiuclalry aimed at graduate students.)

In the meantime, the answer to “what would an academic think” should be pretty clear. No one should care what an academic thinks.

So do you think there should be philologists in universities now, studying this broad range of subjects? Or is that impossible?

I think it’s very difficult, not for any intellectually solid reason, but because of the institutions that have grown up around disciplines. For example, if you are an assistant professor of art history in an American university and you write a book about Dante, you’re going to get fired. You’re certainly not going to get tenure. It’s very difficult for people to ignore the present disciplinary boundaries and get away with it in the structure of the modern university. People who are not hampered by universities can do this kind of work and they should. People who are old and in no danger of losing their jobs can write a book like I wrote.

One correction there. It's impossible for anyone not already at the twilight of their career to do this kind of work. Not difficult. Impossible.

#itchytweed #highered #100DaysToOffload

#itchytweed #highered #academia

Today’s humanities disciplines are not ancient, integral modes of knowledge. They are modern, artificial creations—where made-up lines pretend to divide the single sandbox in which we all play into each boy’s or girl’s own inviolable kingdom. It is a sham. . . . If the lines were real, disciplines would not need so relentlessly to police their borders within colleges and universities

James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities, 385

Last week Shadi Bartsch published a pithy piece in the Washington Post about the latest iteration of debate/discussion/confrontation around race, the discipline of Classics, and the adoption of various bits of antiquity (Sparta, stoicism, hyper-masculinity, etc.) by the far right. I have no interest in wading into those issues and their various and ugly eruptions in that field, except to say, as a starting point for what piqued my interest, that I agree with Bartsch on all points.

As I have no skin in this game about Classics specifically, seeing all of this from afar has made me think a lot about a different sort of question, relevant to all parts of the academy nowadays. Namely, who gets to decide the future of a discipline? Who gets a say in a field of study?

What I see repeatedly in this Classics upheaval is a very old pattern, one not, to my knowledge, highlighted very well in anything I've read. Do amateurs or “professionals” get to decide the nature of a field of study? It's the old debate between antiquarians (the amateurs) and historians (the true professionals). Or it's the debate between the academic insiders and those outside the academy. Young vs. old guard. Professors at elite institutions vs. those further down the academic food chain. Whatever the labels, it's a question about who gets to decide what's worth talking about; then who gets to decide how to talk about what's worth talking about.

In the Classics example, this is happening at two levels. First, there is the inside-baseball debate about whether relatively young and largely minority members of the professorate (or the graduariate) get to set priorities of the discipline and chart a new course which might mean self-destructing and eliminating existing departments. Hence the mild but not overly confrontational pushback by the generation that includes Prof. Bartsch, among many others. There is nothing left vs. right about this; it is simply a question of who gets to set the agenda and who is truly an insider, a mover and shaker, within the discipline. It is, for anyone in academy, as familiar as what goes on in evaluating tenure binders or dealing with the personalities in any faculty meeting.

But there's also another insider/outsider form of contestation, one which maps imperfectly to the politics of today and crudely casts a lefty academy against a right-wing appropriation of classical culture, literature, and iconography.

Prof. Bartch's WaPo piece is a public airing of the intra-Classics debate over what to do about that larger insider/outsider debate.

I don’t want to throw up my hands and yield ancient history and ancient literature to this group [i.e. right-wing].

That's talking to fellow academics more than anyone else. So's this:

What we need to do is “take back the classics.” For millennia, they have been read differently by different cultures. There is no reason they cannot withstand the test of our time, too. We can save the classics, as long as we believe the sins of the father should not be visited upon the sons and daughters.

That's all good common sense and remarkable that it needs to be stated. But her conclusion belies what may actually be at issue here. Has Classics been stolen? If so, who stole it? Who has the right to “own” a discipline?

The fact is that academics aren't the only ones who get to decide the future of fields of study. Sure, you can shut down and re-absorb a bunch of Classics faculty into other departments. You can split up the discipline's various parts. You can shove the unpleasant history of Classics down the memory hole. But that won't erase present, past, or future appropriations of the Romans or Greeks and it certainly won't help alleviate information about antiquity used for hateful or distasteful ends.

Everything I've seen about this is framed in terms of social justice and race and right or left. But the journalistic compulsion to extract a simple narrative that echoes current political conventional wisdom misses the pervasive context here.

This is also about the role of the university and the role of academic disciplines. It's about specialist communities in an age of widespread information distribution and technologies which allow for immediate and broad publication. The problem is one of academic disciplines, and particularly humanities disciplines, and how they conduct themselves in the world.

Put bluntly, who really cares whether Classics departments exist or not?

I suspect that the answer is... not a lot of people. (The outrage! How could I say that?! Ok. Ok. I hear you. But calm down for a second. What are some of the smallest departments on any campus? As wonderful and fascinating and enduring as the material is, does the existence of a specific department or unit devoted to the field impact all that many people relative to the larger higher-ed ecosystem? And, no, elite departments are not going anywhere. But at many other kinds of institutions, it is a very different kind of calculus.)

It's not just Classics of course. Also in recent weeks, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Geoff Shullenberger makes a number of important points about the way that questioning academic disciplines, particularly humanities disciplines, actually serves the financial and corporate needs of the university. His argument focuses primarily on English departments and the question of who gets admitted to Ph.D. programs in an age of necessary austerity. But he highlights well the way that different kinds of rhetoric around academic disciplines can be more than simply two sides of a debate. A key graf towards the end of the piece:

The moral emphasis on social justice in humanistic scholarship might be viewed as an effort to reassert substantive values against the “corporate bureaucracy” that the university has become. But this contestation will ultimately prove illusory. The faculty members and departments pursuing these causes are also obligated to operate as market actors procuring resources in a hyper-competitive environment. As a result, their rhetoric is still subject to neutralization by the corporate university. This is even more obviously the case now that many presidents, provosts, and deans have embraced the discourse of social-justice. Full-throated commitment to political causes is now a means by which colleges compete for publicity, prestige, and grants. And if support for these causes is integrated into the university’s proclaimed mission, departments that emphasize them lose their distinct value proposition.

I think this is right to a large degree. At the least it gives me pause and makes me wonder whether the “debate” in a field like Classics will, inevitably, come to serve the financial values of universities. One might well ask why universities will continue to support Ph.D. students in larger numbers than the academic professorate can absorb if members of the discipline are themselves calling for its dissolution and realignment. Indeed, this is just one of many completely fair and legitimate criticisms that runs through conservative reaction to these episodes, e.g. here. Why support courses in a discipline which some of its own members are calling racist? Shullenberger's important recognition that “faculty members and departments ... are also obligated to operate as market actors procuring resources in a hyper-competitive environment” highlights how easily any idea about changing or modifying disciplines can be adopted into something that will look outwardly unobjectionable, even noble, while ultimately having very different ends and goals.

Put another way, thinking about disciplinary edges and boundaries is a fairly periodic ritual within academic disciplines. It's also a ritual which administrations always make use of in order to realign departments and spending with priorities. More often we see this as a jumping on bandwagons, opening new programs and the like; but it can also mean the absorption and redistribution of programs or faculty.

Sullenberger focuses on the difference between inward- and outward-facing rhetoric.

This disjunction between inward-facing and outward-facing rhetoric is also not new, as Bill Readings describes in his 1996 book The University in Ruins. For Readings, an uncertainty about both the place of humanistic scholarship within the university and the university’s place within society has led to an “impasse between militant radicalism and cynical despair” that afflicts humanities scholars like himself. In “militant” mode, they may propose radical overhauls of their own fields of study; but in “despairing” mode, holding onto what they have is paramount, so they pay lip service to the traditional humanistic values they might otherwise denounce, not out of any conviction but for lack of any other available justification that might be seen as valid in external contexts.

These distinctions are crucial. In our current day, when inward-facing debates can immediately become outward-visible due to rapid digital publication, social media and the like, this does more than muddy the waters in a debate about the virtues and vices of a discipline. It also makes the sort of convergence of seemingly disparate points of view towards a corporatist end, in the terms described by Shullenberger drawing on Readings, all the more likely. Universities can't remain neutral or silent. Therefore every inward-facing debate or debate within a discipline is in fact a form of public airing, part of the calculus of publicity and prestige which drives the neoliberal university (for lack of a better term).

I think this is the crux here. Insiders are airing their insider debate in public; but it isn't public-facing in its rhetoric or goals. It is still peformative within the confines and norms and expectations of the academic ecosystem. Dissent, even radical eating of one's elders, is a defining part of academic performativity. One might identify it as capital “C” Critique perhaps. Disciplines police their own boundaries as part of the game of disciplines, particularly in humanities. Where, ultimately, is everyone else? They are still being disrespected and looked down on. What is framed as a push-back against dominant narratives is in fact still a debate among the most elite. It may not start out that way and it may not feel that way from the inside, but by virtue of taking place in the academic stratosphere, it is flattened into that mold. And the endpoint is ultimately an inside-baseball kind of issue. Do Classics departments (or Anthropology or English or whatever departments) still exist in something like their present configuration? It is, ultimately, something that risks becoming only the pragmatic business of how administrators organize academic units for budgetary purposes.

James Turner, who I quoted at the top, is right:

Today’s humanities disciplines are not ancient, integral modes of knowledge. They are modern, artificial creations—where made-up lines pretend to divide the single sandbox in which we all play into each boy’s or girl’s own inviolable kingdom. It is a sham. . . . If the lines were real, disciplines would not need so relentlessly to police their borders within colleges and universities

Let's double underline that. If the lines were real, disciplines would not need to police their borders.

Do amateurs care whether one learns about the Ancient Romans from a Classicist or a literary scholar or a historian or someone in an “Ancient Studies” department? Those distinctions matter only insofar as they are echoes of schooling that one might have experienced. If a computer scientist offered something new about the ancient Romans, and it appealed and was interesting, was well-presented, would that be rejected in the public world of blogs, internet information and the like? Should it be rejected? Ultimately, we may just want to know something interesting about all that antiquity.

This is a debate playing out against the reality that humanities disciplines are, by and large, not the gravitational center of the university. The action's happening over in the Business School or the Law School or the innovation / design / entrepreneuring academy (or whatever name they've given to it). All those pre-professional disciplines have a very different relationship between academic insiders and academic outsiders (or amateurs) than many humanities disciplines tend to have. Humanities disciplines like Classics or English or History or Philosophy contain professors who are, in their community, the professionals of the field. Everyone else, no matter how interested or how much you read, is something of an amateur. (And, yes, there are some variants and exceptions for things like professional writing programs or creative writing, but I'm talking about broad mindsets here.) Professional schools both draw much more from practitioners and also have a different sort of ongoing relationship with the expertise of those outside the academy. There are professionals both inside and outside the academy and, if anything, in many fields it is those outside the academy who represent most clearly “professional” status. In some fields, being an amateur is not really a thing. (Can you be an amateur lawyer in the same way that one can be a sort of amateur classicist? I'm not sure.)

Monks talking to themselves

When I see this Classics debate playing out it feels distinctly out of time, like eavesdropping on a monks' conclave from the Middle Ages over what kind of robes to wear. That sounds dismissive, but I don't mean it to diminish the important intellectual, ethical, and social issues relevant to this debate. Rather, rearranging the internals of the field seems like a distraction from the more urgent existential crises of academe. Do you have to be within a university to be a professional? Is being an amateur enough? And, most importantly, is it in fact the amateurs who have control of the larger territory anyway?

Writing on a completely different topic, John Warner put out an open letter to Heterodox Academy which I came across after I started writing this (now rather lengthy) post. His argument struck a chord with me, in part because he zoomed in on the distinction between elite universities and non-elite higher-ed, calling out clearly the way that much discourse around higher-ed imagines elite higher-ed and the concerns of professors and students at elite institutions as the most important and default higher-ed. There is an analog of the hierarchy that I'm tracing — insiders and outsiders, professionals and amateurs — in what Warner is taking about as elite vs non-elite concerns and assumptions. He starts with trying to locate the source of his unease with Heterodox Academy and zeroes in on the paternalistic and generally “elite” assumptions of what they tend to focus on and by the academics they tend to promote.

It’s as though HxA is a discussion club held in one of the lifeboats from the Titanic, debating the various virtues of travel by luxury liner even while thousands of other passengers are sucked into the icy depths as the ship tips skyward before making its final plunge.

(right there with you John!)

and a little later:

I wonder if some of the HxA activities are the proverbial whistling past the graveyard, even as the corpses rise from their crypts and lurch toward snacking on the living. Are you as worried as I am about the existential threats to nonelite higher education, particularly public higher education?

The full piece is definitely worth a read on its own terms, but I appreciate Warner's calling out of the facile equation of higher ed with elite higher ed (both in this piece and elsewhere). The endpoint is similar to mine: are the concerns and perspectives of professors at elite institutions really the big issues facing higher ed?

To put it another way, all academic disciplines police their own boundaries. For humanities disciplines, it's all the more urgent because the disciplines are “modern, artificial creations” with “made-up lines.” Classics is even further prone to this problem as it is, by nature, a discipline which brings together scholars who usually have a foot in at least one other area (literary studies, history, philosophy, etc.). One of the ways to police boundaries — and this is triply true of Classics, a discipline which historically has required significant training in Greek and Latin as precursor and prerequisite to admission — one of the ways that disciplines define themselves is by excluding amateurs. (Following Sullenberger's focus, we might say too that disciplines do this policing by establishing a private, inward-facing discourse.) It might be nice to think that disciplines are created around content and methods, but in practice they are as much defined by inclusion and exclusion, by identifying insiders as opposed to outsiders and, in the academy, by creating hierarchy whereby the most insider insiders are also the most professionalized, the most non-amateur; by extension, those in the provinces, outside the centers of power and production and attention, or sidelined as adjunct or conditional labor, are, notionally, lesser professionals, not quite amateurs, but still without a full membership in the discipline and its future.

In the case of a field like Classics (like many humanities disciplines), the difference between who gets to be a professional and who remains an amateur impacts basic assumptions about why we might study or learn about the past (or literature or history or philosophy) in the first place. These articles about the flare-ups in Classics tend to miss the importance of this fundamental divergence. Far right views of the Classics, like most “amateur” perspectives (“amateur” from the vantage of the institutionalized professional), tend to privilege the way that we can draw on the past for our present needs. Amateurs publicly value how the past can talk to us. By contrast, the posture of the professional, the academic, and particularly the elite academic, is much different. Professionals must be seen to elucidate, probe, question and expound, but the idea that one would be in thrall to antiquity, or in the power of the past, is anathema to the scholar's project. The scholar's journey, such as it is, from love to a form of critical distance or cynicism, is fairly common, a rite of passage among academics. In the extreme form, the professional must publicly reject love of content and display his or her mastery of critical habits. Maybe you can indulge in that love in introductory undergrad courses; but even there, such pandering is only performative, to engage and invite the callow uninitiated into a taste of the higher critical mysteries. Amateurs pursue as fans; professionals should appear above all that.

The problem I find with all these pieces, both about the specific field of Classics and many related debates, is that they seem to think there are two sides at play here. They take for granted the structure of higher-ed against which all this takes place. But everything here is a symptom and outgrowth of the current state of humanities in a highly corporate higher-ed filled with widespread precarity and disparity among the professorial and a-professorial labor force. Ironically, the very tools of historical analysis and close-reading which are so central to many humanities disciplines (looking at you Classics) seem to be forgotten when it comes time to assess what's going on here. And in doing so, the current debate misses the bigger question and, potentially, important ways of thinking about the very real problems around disciplines like Classics.

Who gets to decide the future of an academic discipline?

The real problem is that the professionals, and particularly the elite professionals, think that they have the most important voice in this. What these debates miss is a different sort of resolution, or at least a more important field in which to put one's efforts. I suspect that the amateurs ultimately get the last word on this. (Sidenote: how much is the “Classics” which is being maligned actually the product of early 20th century amateurs, politicians, and non-academics?) And I also suspect that that in characterizing amateurs primarily in terms of the far right misreadings of classicism and ancient masculinity, these pieces (and the scholars themselves) are excluding a much larger population of people who are interested in things like the Ancient Greeks or the Romans simply because they want to know more. People are interested in the Ancient Egyptians too, because it is cool to think of stuff that is so remote, almost alien. They could be interested in Ancient China or aboriginal Australia if presented with something that piqued their interest. Ancient stuff is cool precisely because of ignorance and not knowing something, because of the thrill of finding something out about something so remote and distant and seeing bits where it might be similar. The amateur might approach with wonder and not knowing. They might listen to podcasts on ancient myth or ancient history (mostly done by other amateurs and enthusiasts I might add).

Academics are sabotaging themselves by playing insider baseball, as seems to be the case going on with Classics right now. Though dressed up in the guise of public debate, it is still performative insiderism. I appreciate Prof. Bartsch's pragmatic end. The approach cannot be to shut down or cut off or rearrange deck chairs and dissolve departments The only viable approach is to engage, often and widely, with amateur and professional alike.

I would go even further. We live in an age of hobbyists and enthusiasts, amid a redefinition of what it means to be an expert. There is not such a clear distinction in an age of popularizing podcasters and bloggers and widespread availability of information. (Arguably the distinctiveness of academic professionals is itself an anomaly in the long history of thinking about literature, history, and humanities subjects in general.) That is the affordance (and yes, the danger) of our current technological moment. Amateurs have a voice — perhaps the louder one — especially in an era where the tools of information are rapid, public, and easily adaptable. Universities must do a better job of supporting their faculty in these public arenas, not as questioners or critics but as enthusiasts of their fields of study. There is a role that can be both engaged and critical voice at the same time. Moderator, fellow investigator, companion rather than antagonist. But there is no room for that in the academy and certainly not for younger faculty. At present, public engagement is a potential risk for even the most comfortably tenured; even for the dedicated and interested, it is, framed within the expectations and norms of the professorial carrot and stick system, a time suck, and a drag on your CV in the eyes of tenure committees. No, the accepted mode is dissent, inward-facing and in the high and exclusionary tongue of academe.

The way forward lies with enlarging the role of universities in public life and with how they reward and incentive the work of the university. The road through rearranging the disciplines and arguing about their boundaries is the same stale academic game, the same old insider debate, and an intellectual dead end for anyone outside the high priesthood of academia.

This paragraph from Noah Smith's late-to-the-party revelation about the overproduction of Ph.D.s made me laugh:

A handful of angry, downwardly mobile English Ph.D.s aren’t by themselves enough to overthrow the institutions of society, but they can make hugely outsized contributions to unrest and discord if they are so inclined. Remember, these are very smart people who are very good at writing things, and well-schooled in any number of dissident ideas. Those are the kind of people who tend to lead revolutions.

Riiiiighhhhtttt..... because upon leaving academia the first thing that Ph.D.s want to do is foment rebellion. Not feed themselves? Not do interesting work? Spend time with family and friends? Read some good books?

I particularly like the choice of English Ph.D.s, as that hints at a dig against social justice or various other hallmarks of English departments in recent years without actually saying it. To put it plainly, people leave academia for a lot of reasons. And they go on to do a lot of different things. Perhaps a few moments surveying Versatile PhD, Jobs on Toast, or simply recent columns in Inside Higher Ed (see, for example, years worth of John Warner and The Chronicle for Higher Education would provide a better picture.

The lead-up to this gem is a dubious line of argument about how discontent among elites leads to social unrest:

Many historians have advanced some version of the thesis that dashed expectations among elites can lead to social unrest. Most recently, historian Peter Turchin has warned that overproduction of elites is a harbinger of discord in modern America.

There are a few problems with this argument as it relates to Humanties and Social Science Ph.D.s (who are, let's remember, a tiny tiny percentage of the population):

1. Are humanities Ph.D.'s nowadays really all that unaware of their prospects? The fantasy of a high paying academic job at an “elite” institutions is what is romanticized, but that's the myth of the professor, not the reality. That grad programs teach for a single career has already been changing, though it needs to be changed more. Those so-called “dashed” expectations have been around for a fairly long time and are even more the case if one looks outside the US. On the other hand, graduate students nowadays tend to know the contours of academia's bleak landscape, even if they think they are going to defy the odds. See, perhaps my favorite compendium of truth on this matter, 100 Reasons not to go to grad school, currently stuck at 98 (though I think that's just a tease to invite the reader to supply his or her own reasons). What's changed in the past decade and a bit has been widespread awareness of the contingency of the academic career path. It is not that everyone who got a Ph.D. 10 or 20 years ago was handed a job on graduation. There was plenty of attrition, plenty of people going off to do other things, and already a pretty widespread difference between the way that students from the most “elite” schools or programs got jobs relative to graduates of the less “elite” schools and programs. The paradox, such as it is, is that people know the job market sucks but still get pursue the Ph.D. anyway.

2. Calling humanities Ph.D.s “elite” is fairly laughable. I strongly suggest checking out the Chronicle's data on faculty salaries. While there are plenty of high-end salaries for full professors at top-notch universities, that's not where most faculty are. Visiting positions (i.e. the entry market into professoring) can pay very little, fellowships even less. Most of my students who turn around and get jobs teaching in high schools with their modest BA or MA degrees make as much or more than entry-level faculty. This is not some new thing. You might say, on the other hand, that many Ph.D.s are trained at “elite” schools. Or you could say that being part of a group that constitutes around 1% of the population is “elite”. But Ph.D.s (and professors for that matter) aren't, on the whole, “elites” in the economic sense that doctors, lawyers and other highly educated professionals are. In fact, we tend to be acutely aware that our long years of education resulted in less financial rewards than those professional peers. Humanities and social science Ph.D.s don't tend to have illusions of great riches in their careers. (If you're looking for economic elites in the university ecosystem, remember, it's the upper administrators, not the majority of faculty.) Does that mean that professors aren't perennially bitter about the tight winner takes all market where professor x at rich college makes twice as much as professor y at big state U? Sure, of course. But that's a far cry from being “elite” in the way that the economic one-percent in the professional class is “elite”. If elite means “upper middle class”, then perhaps there's more truth to that, but in that case we might as well be talking about everyone who has a college degree from a fancy school and feels like they aren't putting it to its best use. Ph.D.s aren't different from BAs or MAs in that regard.

3. People pursue Ph.D.s for a variety of reasons. To argue from the perspective that the only payoff is an economic one is simply wrong-headed. This paragraph is a perfect illustration of what happens when you try to perform mind-reading on people not like yourself and see your subjects as focused primarily on a single value metric (namely $$$).

Even more fundamentally, many doctorates are simply not worth it in purely private-sector terms. A history Ph.D. can go into a corporate personnel department or marketing or consulting or launch their own startup or do a million other things — but it’s highly questionable whether they’ll do much better than they would have if they'd just taken a job straight out of college or acquired a master’s degree. So while computer science or statistics Ph.D.s can probably hop up a few rungs on the corporate ladder as a result of their degrees, and engineering and biology Ph.D.s can go get a job in a private lab, doctorate holders in the humanities and social sciences are often going to be underemployed.

But what would make anyone think that that's what motivates Ph.D.s in humanities and social sciences?

In fact, I suspect (and I'll admit I have no hard data on this) that most Ph.D.s in humanities would agree that “many doctorates are simply not worth it in purely private-sector terms”; they would then likely say that they don't care and that this kind of thing misses the point.

I'm going to answer this with personal experience here. I will always have scars from academia. There are things that I'm angry about from that but on the whole that doesn't mean my expectations have been “dashed.” That's simply experience, that's life, that's learning, that's perspective gained. Along the way I also acquired some nifty skills, dug deeply for many years and achieved expertise in a subject which I loved, contributed something of value to the world at large through teaching thousands of students, met and interacted with (some) brilliant people, and experienced things that were worth it and valuable to me whether or not they feed into a corporate job or show up on my resume. Could I have moved faster, more directly to a career as an x or y or something else? Sure. Of course that's possible. Any Ph.D. could have taken an alternate path and done something straight out of college and started a different career. I knew that back then and I know it now. But that wasn't my choice. That wasn't the point. There's a lot I would have lost that way.

You can't have everything all at once. That's life. That's experience. That's common sense.

In the meantime though, keep an eye out for that army of English Ph.D.s and their impending revolution. They'll be the ones subversively loitering outside the shabbiest mid-century classroom building available, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes with fine imported tobacco while discussing Lacan's perspective on Pokemon, as mediated through Melville's minor epistolary works. ... Or possibly just talking about the weather and all the grading they have to do in intro composition courses. One or the other. Either way, you can't miss 'em. (And make sure to give them a wide berth as you walk past.)

I haven't always appreciated the importance of endings. As I wind down my academic career I have been thinking a lot recently about endings. The venerable 1980s self-help volume Transitions makes a big deal of endings. They're the part we're liable to overlook and not give their due. They feel unpleasant, or at least less pleasant than the excitement of thinking about what comes next. I am particularly prone to revel in the planning and, conversely, susceptible to avoiding endings, never really ending things, and letting things linger.

This goes along with the common academic problem of not knowing how to say “no,” particularly early in a career.

How do I end things? A friend relies on documentation. Write up and put a narrative to it. That makes a sort of ending. Another strategy is to shut things down methodically. I have been somewhat better about actively cutting all the threads of obligation that define my ongoing academic work. I've been telling people that there are things that I'm just not going to get to, long term projects that are not going to be completed, and academic obligations that have hung over my head which are simply not going to get done before I leave. It feels a bit like declaring academic bankruptcy.

So much of academic life is borne of a false narrative of endless continuity. This is something that feels like it is different from other fields. My wife, when she left her job, was given a few months of off-ramp to shut things down. It was a normal thing to do. People move to different companies all the time. No one stays in the same place for their whole career. A decade is a lifetime in that industry. I would like to give “two weeks notice” and, technically, legally, I can do that. But that leaves classes in the lurch, graduate students without advising and mentoring to finish their degree. I don't think I'm indispensable. Quite the opposite— the more time one spends in higher education the more one realizes how completely dispensable everyone is to the business of the university. They would gladly replace me with someone who teaches more classes for less money, regardless of intellectual mission or training. It is all about the money in the end. But in the short term it would be disruption. And as a lifelong introvert and peacemaker, disruption is the last thing I want to do.

Every ending feels like an aggressive act of disruption and violence. It makes me feel like the asshole I always tried to avoid becoming as a professor.

The problem is that the alternative is to continue to be an asshole to myself, to ignore the fact that it's ok to want to do something different. It's ok to call out higher education in general (and my specific institution) for its failure. It's ok to see the higher ed bubble and the imminent wreckage on the horizon.

It's ok to find the ends of things.

I thought of myself as a blocked writer for years; I am not a blocked writer.

I saw this advice from Ray Bradbury:

What if you have a blockage and you don’t know what to do about it? Well, it’s obvious you’re doing the wrong thing, aren’t you? . . . You’re being warned, aren’t you? Your subconscious is saying I don’t like you anymore. You’re writing about things I don’t give a damn for. . . If you have writers’ block you can cure it this evening by stopping what you’re doing and writing something else. You picked the wrong subject. -from “Telling the Truth,” the keynote address of The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea, sponsored by Point Loma Nazarene University, 2001

Academic writing, writing for others, writing what I thought I needed to write — all of that was so damaging. It was worse than writing for money. I couldn't love what I was writing because academic writing had become a chore and a job that was beholden to someone else's whims, to someone else's wants, and to everyone else's not giving a shit.

Being blocked as an academic writer is not the same thing as being blocked as a writer.

I wondered why it was that I could teach, with joy and creativity, or why I could give talks and parry criticisms with style. There was still love there, in those modes. Sure, we can also label perfectionism or claim something like that. But my insides knew. They knew something was wrong and something needed to change. My brain couldn't compute it.

I wrote without difficulty before grad school. And then I felt the slowing, the impediments, the things that squeezed me down to a trickle of myself, a drip here, a bit of moisture there.

I produced intellectual condensation. I squeezed a painful drip or two from a pained prostate. Choose any disturbed metaphor. That's what academic writing is.

I'm not a blocked writer. Why did it take so long to hear that?

Round Peg, Square Hole

When trying to find a way into this, I struggle for a foothold. There are many ways in and not a few of them lead in tangled messes over and around each other. It is a giant knot of who I am, strung along a particular journey, crushed from without by a sense that there are more pressing issues.

Herminia Iberra's book Working Identities makes clear how much our notions of job and work are tied to our notions of self. For a professor this seems especially the case, with no end of think-pieces on how the professorial life is (or is not) a vocation, a job unlike others, or even a cult. The various professorial sub-labels — academic, teacher, researcher, administrator/coordinator/director/chair — fit in different proportions. “Teacher” is comfortable, like the simple cotton t-shirts I used to favor. “Researcher” is a bit stiff in the neck but I can put it on when appropriate. “Academic” is tight in all the wrong places, like it's been shrunk in the wash. A strangling collar that won't close, pants three sizes too small, and a jacket that rips down the back as soon as I put it on.

A former co-worker (in the rhetoric of academese, a “colleague”) told me, when it was clear to me that I had not real interest in continuing down the path of tenured professoring, that I had always been a round peg in a square hole in the department. I don't know whether that was meant as complement or criticism or both. I take it as indictment of the department I was in at the time and its exceptional narrowness; but of course I would see it that way. I'm not alone in pointing out the ways that modern academia is hostile to generalists and, for all the praise and theorizing of inter- intra- and trans- disciplinarity, the practice of working in, across, and through multiple disciplines is both extremely difficult and exhausting at many if not most universities. I had, for better or worse, come from places where such work was both the norm and made to look easy; I ended up at an institution and in a department with the worst kind of departmental silo-ing and entrenched intellectual conservatism. So while what I offered was attractive to them, in a grass is greener kind of way (that's why I was hired); what I was able to do was always constrained (that's why I was worn down year after year and eventually quit). I was a round peg, or maybe some sort of spiky ball with tendrils — use whatever image you like — being asked to be a block doomed to sit in a boring old square hole.

At an institution where the status quo is all blocks in square holes, it is taken for granted that one stays in one's place. Successful academicians at such an institution do the same thing, over and over, on and on. Same classes, same narrow area. I hadn't realized that I had been put into a particular square already or that those boundaries would be used to define what I should or should not do. I didn't realize that learning through teaching — the default method I had seen at the rather more elite institutions where I had come from — was not the regular mode. There were lots of things I didn't understand. I felt like I was living in some sort of Bizzaro world. Everything is angular and off, but no one seems to see it. Everyone does the opposite of what seems right and yet thinks that this is simply the way things are done. Even after all these years that feeling hasn't left, as if in an alternate universe where up has been defined as down, in a kingdom ruled by a Mad Hatter and a somnolent door mouse.

Quit lit always begins and ends with identity, because the process of leaving professoring behind is the process of, in Iberra's framing of all work crises, moving from an old identity to new one. Like the expected changes of state with growing older, adolescence, mid-life crises and the like, it's a reorientation about who one really is. For that reason quit lit can be self-indulgent and privileged, as any memoirist genre or any exploration of the self. It is a working through of how we got here, where to go, and what that means for what we thought ourselves to be. Like any memoir, the point is both personal and public, both therapy in the moment and sympathetic connection for anyone who wants to proceed further.

I have struggled for a long time to make sense of how my path started to veer and how to write in a way that serves that therapeutic purpose, that can be an exercise worth doing amidst all the other daily tasks and pressures and the work that continues on. I have had to come to grips with my habits, characteristics, capacities and limitations; among these is the curse of unyielding high standards or, in the more loaded common parlance, “perfectionism.” When someone first used that word of me it came as a surprise; in retrospect, it becomes obvious and presaged by blaring markers if only I had had the knowledge to recognize it. I could organize a chapter or an essay or a paragraph, drill down into the details and draft it carefully, imagine carefully an audience and worry about how to present myself and how to write it in such a way that I don't come off as too privileged or whiny or ungrateful or pretentious, elite, stupid, foolish, or any other negatives which are the Scylla and Charybdis of personal writing. Or, I can write as it comes. I can do the opposite of what I so often did as a professor — the hedging and accommodating and worrying about what everyone thinks and how one should behave in the hierarchy. I can perform a bit of sympathetic magic against academic gremlins.

Thus begins a counter-spell to the academic mysteries.

Be not a round peg in a square hole. brekekekek koax koax.

#postacademia #quitlit #highered #academia