Thoughts on Academia

Last week a friend posted about her disaffection with academia. The post got me thinking about my own views on the subject, which once upon a time I blogged about on this site. (My plan at one point was to get a PhD in the humanities.)

First, and for one thing, I really wish I had the hours and freedom of an academic. Though it might seem odd to my friends in academia, I also wish I had the salary of an academic (I do work at a newspaper, after all). Though there's plenty to dislike about the day to day work of a college professor, it's still better than most other "regular" jobs — so excluding things like being a professional musician, for example — that I can think of.

But while the lifestyle keeps academia on my list of things I might go back to someday, there's a lot more than prevents me from actually pursuing it. The biggest of those things is the writing.

Probably my biggest qualm with academic writing is that you have to become a superstar for it to matter much in the humanities world. Sure, if you're Harold Bloom or Stanley Fish your work influences people far and wide. But most academics are not superstars. Their work is read by very, very few people, and meaningfully influences only a fraction of those readers.

I think that's why I've gravitated toward journalism and even blogging, where between the different things I write I have thousands of readers every day — and I work at a relatively small paper in a relatively small city. If I worked in a bigger market, I'd have even more readers. And even in my short professional life, I've seen my writing have some, very modest influence in my community. If I was writing to an academic "community" I suspect it would be much smaller, much more difficult to influence, and much more detached from the material world. But feel free to disagree with that assessment.

I don't know what the future holds for me career-wise (probably not crime writing at the Daily Herald, as much as I like it now) but no matter what happens I don't think I'd ever be happy primarily writing academic papers on the humanities. I applaud those who do like it, but I want my writing to, you know, be read.

Anyway, I guess that's my biggest qualm about academia.

But there are others. In all my time in college (which was much longer than most people), for example, I really only encountered two or three professors who were meaningfully engaging with the community. More often, I found professors who seemed to think it was beneath them to participate in Provo's (sometimes admittedly provincial) culture. Perhaps my professors were engaged in ways I couldn't see, but I think few of them attended cultural events in Provo, patronized Provo's independent restaurants, or (and this is huge) even lived in Provo, where their college was located.

That attitude wasn't universal and it was probably influenced by the fact that professors at BYU are LDS and therefore might feel the church provides them with sufficient community engagement, but it nevertheless strikes me as a kind of provincialism itself. (Again, however, I can't stress enough that I had wonderful professors to whom this description doesn't apply even remotely.)

Well, this post is getting long enough now, so I'll wrap it up. But it's been nice to think again about academia and perhaps I'll post some more thoughts in the future.

Goodbye Academia Part 5: The Public Intellectual

I think that what I've been hoping to become as a result of my education, often without knowing it, is a public intellectual, or even a man of letters. And, basically, I see a successful public intellectual as being someone with the chops of an academic, but the charisma of a public figure. I see it as someone who thinks (and can write) as deeply as a professor, but who is also involved in the translation of those thoughts into the public consciousness.

And, despite some negative aspects to working in academia, there are definitely things I like about it, which I'd like to couple with non-scholarly publication and other work.

My understanding of what it takes to become a public intellectual is probably naive and biased. However, as far as I know, most professors don't regularly write commentary for newspapers or TV. Their books aren't praised for walking the line between academic and popular works. They aren't tapped to serve with politicians, or transition back and forth between academia and industries like, say, consulting (which theoretically should have a lot in common with the critical study rhetoric and texts).

In other words, most professors that I know tend to work almost exclusively within academia. And that's great.

But there is also a different kind of professor. At NYU for example, film professors listed publications in The Village Voice and The New York Times. Some of the professors I researched at USC and UCLA routinely serve as judges at well-known film festivals. Some of the English professors that I researched had more "public" work listed alongside their scholarship. (Herbert Blau, for example, at University of Washington, has worked in theater and fashion, but now also teaches in the University of Washington's English department.) The point here is that there are some people who write or produce both for academics, and others. (Stanley Fish, Wendell Barry, and Nigel Spivey are examples of people who have done this to one degree or another. An while I don't agree with everything they say, I do admire the venues available to them to say it.)

Obviously, the people who become public intellectuals are those who have risen to the top of their respective fields (with a lot of hard work). And, they also typically don't have those opportunities straight out of school. Yet, the another thing they seem to have in common is that they studied at, and then often worked at, really good schools. My conclusion: to become a public intellectual it's helpful to have an elite academic pedigree. Also, one has to aspire to that position. I think a lot of people are happy to simply teach and publish within their discipline. Which is cool of course. But others definitely hope for a more diverse work load.

Like I said, this is probably an incomplete vision of what it means to be an intellectual. It's certainly romanticized. But ultimately I don't think I'd be content teaching three or four classes a semester at a remote state school and publishing in Western Humanities Review or The Journal of American Culture for the next 30 years. (Both those journals are great ones that I used in my thesis.) I don't expect to have a regular column in The New York Times, but I'd like a career path that at least includes the possibility of public work/writing in addition to submitting work to academic journals. For most professors—and for whatever reason—it seems like those doors aren't just closed, they often don't exist at all.

So the point, it seems, is that like becoming, say, an astronaut, becoming a public intellectual requires a pretty specific career path. Without that path, the probability of reaching that goal is minuscule.

In my case, it was literally not until I began writing this series of blogs that I began to understand my own ambitions and goals, but as I look back on the choices I've made and the people I professionally admire, it seems obvious that I was looking for some balance between academia and public work (because I enjoy parts of both). Not surprisingly I suppose, as I've gravitated away from scholarship, I've moved toward journalism, which is in many ways the flip side of academia. Instead of emphasizing specialized writing, it's more populist and very general. It has a clear purpose, and reason for existing. Obviously it has it's own problems too, but without a degree from an elite university a choice likely has to be made between public work and scholarship, and I'm as surprised as anyone to find myself gravitating toward the former.

Goodbye Academia Part 4: The Work (Scholarship)

I'd like my career to be at least one of two things: fun, or meaningful. Ideally, it'd be both. And while I know that there are aspects to even the funnest and most meaningful jobs that are tedious and un-enjoyable, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a career to have an overall net positive amount of fun and/or meaningful-ness. (Obviously many people, and perhaps myself in the future,have to work just to survive. Still, who doesn't want to have a job that offers more?)

In my last post of this series, I basically commented on the less-than-fun aspects of being a professor. But that leaves the question: is it meaning? Does it matter?

Increasingly, my answer to that question is "no." When I entered BYU's master's program I was very confident about the power of professors to shape society. They teach people, sure, but they also publish research that affects how people thing. To be honest, this aspect of the job excited me much more than teaching.

Yet as I researched, I became increasingly disillusioned with the academic publishing environment. Scholarly conferences were not only boring, but individual sessions were poorly attended. No one seemed to care. Scholarly journals weren't getting much more interesting, just because I was moving up in education status. Though I had frequently defended the relevance of humanities scholarship, by the time I was halfway through my master's degree I had completely lost faith in its ability to do anything but earn people tenure. In other words, it didn't seem to matter.

Basically, academic publishing in the humanities is, at best, a kind of trickle-down intellectualism. It supposes that there are a few experts who are qualified to explore certain topics, and that what they find will eventually (somehow) influence something. That's a really disheartening thing. It means that while most humanities scholars are politically liberal, they are among the most culturally conservative people I can think of. They are trying to conserve the past (literature, or other historic texts), and they are doing it by joining a small corps of power-holding elites. So it doesn't matter how many liberal issues they support, their career choices are literally the definition of conservatism.

Which has made me wonder: where is the populism? Where are the people who are so skeptical of power structures that they try to redistribute authority in academia?

The answer, of course, is that they're probably not academics. Or, if they are, they're exceptions to the rule. They probably don't publish as much, get denied tenure, and end up teaching at lesser institutions.

Or whatever. The point is that as I've come to see the academic publishing environment as more conservative, as well as less capable of affecting social change, I've become under-enthused about entering it.

Goodbye Academia Part 3: The Work (Teaching)

In my last post about academia, I noted that the absurdity of the job market is one of the things that had deterred me from entering the profession. Another thing was the work itself. 

There are a couple of big things professors do: teach, and publish research. Obviously there are a lot of other, somewhat smaller things they do, but those are the biggies. In this post I'll talk about the teaching, and in the next post I'll tackle publishing and other aspects of the profession.

To begin, I should say that I love teaching. It's like putting on a performance. I love the kind of confident, self-deprecating humor that fits so well in the humanities classroom. I love when students run with a topic and actually seem engaged. Much of the time I also enjoy conferencing with students, particularly when we don't have to focus on specific assignments, but rather talk more abstractly about ideas.

Overall, I think I could be very happy being a teacher of English, film, and other humanities related topics. On the other hand, there are some terrible aspects of the job.

Like grading. I truly despise grading. I hate it because it's un-enjoyable, and I hate it because I don't like the idea of grades in the first place. My ideal university wouldn't concern itself with quantifiable measures of success like grades; rather people would learn what they want and be tested by how they apply their skills, debate their ideas, and critique their environment. 

Obviously that's overly utopian and simplistic (especially today, when education increasingly values "results" as opposed to learning), but that doesn't change the fact that hate to grade papers. Usually when I get papers I weigh the value of throwing them all away and telling my students they were incinerated in terrible car wreck on my way home (which I miraculously survived). I've never resorted to that, but the point is that grading is a big deterrent to becoming a teacher. 

More broadly, however, I've also been surprised at how different a student-teacher relationship looks from the latter position. As a student, I've always enjoyed debating and coming to new conclusions. In many ways, that was the only way I could learn. However, I didn't realize that the vast majority of student ideas are old news to teachers. (I think I understood this vaguely, but I didn't realize how quickly it got monotonous). 

When I was teaching English 150, for example, I'd read the textbook many, many times by my final semester. That meant that students reading it for the first time were going to have a hard time thinking of or saying something that I hadn't either heard or thought of first. Or that was even very interesting. 

That's not to say that it didn't happen, it just didn't happen that often. And, I don't think that's a reflection on my students. I had just been thinking about the topics for so much longer, and talked to so many more people about them, that it was rare for something new to come up in class or student-teacher conferences. 

I remember one time a student did come in to a conference with some amazing ideas. It was invigorating and we talked passionately and at length about those ideas. When the conference ended I was simultaneously exhilarated, but also wondered if I had crossed the line of what was appropriate; I had simply been sharing and debating opinions as a person, without objectivity and or any attention to how it helped the student with any particular task (I also momentarily ceased to be concerned with towing any particular party line—which was always a struggle at BYU—and was just honest about what I thought about things). 

The point is that my teachers have frequently opened my eyes to new ideas, but my students rarely have. Maybe that's my problem, I don't know. But that's the way things have gone. (My students at SLCC frequently amaze me, but that has more to do with their life stories and has little connection to what I'm actually supposed to be teaching them.) 

There are also other things about teaching that I don't want to do. For example, I dislike teaching writing and composition. I would actually have emphasized in rhetoric as a master's student at BYU, except that that option's most obvious career trajectory led to teaching writing classes. For me, the prospect of a life spent teaching First-year Writing or (worse) Advanced Writing was ineffably depressing. Many of my good friends have chosen that path and love it, but for some reason, I just don't.

So all in all, there are aspects of teaching that I like, and that I don't like. Like the job market, this fact led me only to apply to a few really good schools, because I felt that that decision would lead to a career in which I had more control over which classes I taught, how I taught them, and how often. On the other hand, if I was going to have to teach too many classes (and thus have more grading), or classes I dislike and/or fundamentally disagree with (like composition courses), I wasn't interested.

Goodbye Academia Part 2: The Job Market

I love studying and teaching, but I can't do it forever and still manage to pay the rent. That means that, unfortunately, the academic job market has been a factor in my PhD application process, and my recent drifting away from academia. Here are a few thoughts on a profession that is apparently scarce, not particularly high paying, and takes forever to qualify for. (read part 1 of this series here!)

First, getting a professorship in the humanities is really, really hard. And it's no better in film departments. Recently, a few friends of mine have circulated this article, which paints a pretty dire picture. It says that hiring of humanities professors may be down 40% this year, and that's on top of the already low hiring rates that were declining before the recession. (During one semester in BYU's master's program I took a class in which we spent at least a month studying academia and its job environment, among other things. My understanding from that course, and other things I've read, was that a few years ago about 40% of recent English PhD holders got jobs. More recently, I've heard that number drop to 20%.)

So that's pretty terrible. It's also one of the main reasons I only applied to prestigious schools. I figured that with a degree from NYU or UCLA, the chances of getting a job increased. Of course, my professors always noted that a motivated job seeker can distinguish him/herself no matter what school he/she attended. But realistically, if there are two job candidates that are equal, coming from a better school counts. And there are a lot more than two candidates who are equal. 

The other weird thing about this whole situation is how much time it takes to get through a PhD program (most of those I applied for claimed they took five years, though I know many professors who have taken longer to do theirs.) According to that article I linked to above, a lot of people finish with debt. And in some cases, a lot of debt. Many professors don't get paid that well either (especially considering that how long they've been in school), so the debt/money issue could continue to be a real problem for years to come.

This is another reason I only applied to a limited number of prestigious programs. All of them potentially offered funding, and if any of them accepted me without funding, I was prepared to decline. (With the exception, perhaps, of NYU, simply because it'd be great to study film in New York City.) 

Realistically, however, I didn't want to invest five or more years and a whole lot of borrowed money, only to spend many more years looking for an endangered-species-of-a-job. If I was going to do a PhD, I wanted better odds at having some security. Of course, I wasn't attracted to the profession by the money, but I was (and still am) growing tired of being a starving student. 

It's worth mentioning that there are other kinds of jobs for PhD grads. Read that article above for more info on things like adjunct teaching. I'm currently an adjunct, and while it's an interesting socio-cultural experience, it's no way to survive.  

Ultimately, then, I saw the PhD application process as a forerunner to the job application process; getting into a good school foreshadows, in my opinion, the possibility of getting a good job. Getting into a mediocre school or getting rejected, on the other hand, foreshadows getting a bad job, or none at all. There are exceptions to this pattern, but they are just that, exceptions. And I didn't want to bank on being an exception. 

Goodbye Academia Part 1: Rejection

It looks like I won't be doing a PhD, at least in the immediate future. I was going to write a single post explaining why and what I thought, but it got very, very long. So, I've decided to break it up into parts. Also, I'd be lying if I didn't say that doing a multipart series on my blog wasn't at least partially inspired by a friend's fantastic discussion of his beard-related problems at BYU, which you can read here.

After finishing a master's degree at BYU last year, I decided to apply to grad school to do a PhD. There's not many careers that require—or even value—an MA in English, so teaching at a university seemed like a good thing to shoot for. 

So, all through fall of 2009, my primary "occupation" was applying to PhD graduate programs (I did other things, but saw them as secondary). Though I initially planned to apply to around 15, I only ended up submitting applications to 9. Six were in film, and three in English. They were:

Film: 

NYU

USC

UCLA

University of Wisconsin, Madison

Brown

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

English:

University of Pennsylvania

Northwestern

University of Washington.

I chose these schools based on simple criteria: 1) Programs that appealed to me based on their focus/faculty specialties, 2) Programs with enough prestige to get a good job after finishing, with at least a remote possibility of it turning into a really good job down the road, 3) Location, 4) Other assorted factors. 

It's also worth mentioning that though my current degrees are already in English, I almost didn't even apply to any English programs. I have a lot more work experience in film, am more interested in it as an art form, and liked the film programs more. In the end, however, I decided that I'd love to live in Washington state (hence that school), UPenn has great placement and is an Ivy League (and I had a good contact there), and I also had a good contact at Northwestern.

I also think I had a pretty strong application. I had a number of conference presentations, a good writing sample (according to some professors), a published film review in a scholarly journal (and a number of non-scholarly publications with varying pertinence to the field), strong letter's of recommendation (also according to the people who wrote them), etc. Overall, my letter recommenders told me that I was a strong candidate. 

Nevertheless, I have been rejected by all but the University of Michigan, and I don't have high hopes for that school. I have no idea why I've been rejected, but the most basic reason is that the schools I applied for received more suitable applications. I also didn't apply very broadly (as I was advised to do by many people). Three schools in English and six in film hardly ensures entrance into either field. Plus, I mostly only applied to top tier programs (Washington and Michigan aren't necessarily the very top in those respective fields, but they're still very good). 

Because I'm not dying to undergo the financial, emotional, and psychological bludgeoning that the PhD application/rejection process entails, my many years of school are likely at an end. The application for each school cost between $60 and $90. Plus, I retook the GRE (big mistake, btw), which cost over $100, and I had to pay $20 to have my scores sent to more than few schools. There were also a bunch of other expenses along the way which made the application process very expensive. 

More importantly, no matter how nice the rejection letters are, they might as well be a blank piece of paper with the words "you're worthless" scribbled on them. (Or better yet, they could be one of those audio cards that I think are made by Hallmark and play a song when you open them. Except in this case, they could just scream obscenities and insults and leave you to figure out the rest.) Though I don't actually believe I'm worthless, I had no idea how difficult it would be to receive 8 (soon to be 9) consecutive rejection letters. Seriously, it takes a toll.  

Of course, there is still the possibility that I'll get accepted into Michigan. It's slim, I think, but it exists. However, at this point, I may not accept an offer to go to Michigan, as I'm increasingly content with the way things are turning out. Since I've been out of school I've cultivated some new career possibilities, and my qualms with academia are stronger than ever. So stay tuned for the next installment of this series to find out why getting rejected might actually be a really good thing.