À propos the previous post. I know why people keep writing these hysterical articles about the horrors of academia. I’m not as green-horned as I used to be when I first started out in academia and took every such outburst completely seriously. I have now realized that this is all done on purpose to convince the general public that we are all dying of exhaustion and are on the brink of starvation. The goal here is to avoid getting our exceptionally wonderful lifestyle being taken away.
I can understand that goal, to an extent. The problem, however, is that people read and talk about these imaginary horrors so much that they end up convincing themselves that they are true. As a result, an intolerable environment of endless freak-outs, profound misery, and constant stress is created in academia. People who want to do their work and enjoy their lives get bogged down in this apocalyptic worldview and find it hard to have as good a time as they would without all these collective freak-outs.
In the meanwhile, alongside the drama queens and the stress-mongers, there are successful, productive scholars who can teach others a lot and have really crucial knowledge to share. Take Jonathan Mayhew and Z, two academics from the field of Hispanic Studies whose insightful, passionate writing about academia and research has literally changed my life. I’m now a lot more successful and happy as an academic than I was before I read and followed their suggestions. Such people could enrich crowds of academics with their expertise.
I understand why the mainstream newspapers and websites don’t want to allow productive, powerful academics to speak and prefer to subject us to the spectacle of disintegrating self-hating individuals. Why the supposedly academic publications such as CHE and IHE never ask for contributions from brilliant, happy, well-adjusted scholars is still a mystery.
To people who are only just starting out in academia, I have the following advice:
1. Avoid these misery-promoting publications as much as you can.
2. Find several good, helpful blogs run by scholars who write well and who will not try to discourage you in order to get rid of competition.
3. Avoid spending too much time with miserable people who like wallowing. There are unhappy people who actively work to change their situation. Such people can be an inspiration. But those who whine and whine and whine for years are not helpful.
4. Don’t dedicate more than 1 hour per week to discussions of how everything is horrible and the world is about to end. You’ll have to dedicate some time to them in order to be collegial. But make sure you schedule a massage, come read my blog, or do some breathing exercises after each such session.
5. And most importantly, remember: professions where there is guaranteed job security, huge benefits, little work, no competition, no deadlines, no hardship, no conflict, completely amazing colleagues, absence of obnoxious bosses, tons of money, and tons of free time do not exist. You have chosen to be an adult and develop professionally. This means that you will encounter problems on your way. But you will resolve them, gain experience, and feel satisfaction as a result of doing so.
Clarissa's Blog 
Those are all good suggestions although I still do not really recommend academia. Remember, there is work in Spanish and that makes things look very different than they do from the POV of English, German, and so on.
From person experience I really do think you need double income to be an academic, because you are not guaranteed working in the kind of conditions your own professors are. In a mid to low level academic job, even if tenure track or tenured, you will have a lot lower pay than that and a lot more out of pocket expenses for research and also health/retirement. Since you will be living far from everywhere, you will also have high expenses for care of old parents and things like that. Therefore, the double income, or extra assets, etc., are really key. This is not obvious the first few years but somewhere in late 30s (somewhere around 4th year review or tenure time), if you don’t start getting raises or at least sharing expenses with someone who works (or works to lower expenses, like my student’s wife who grows all their food!), and especially if you have to move jobs a couple of times, it starts to get more and more serious. I have good genes and don’t mind working until I am rather old, but I do like to travel, and that is largely what I got into academia for, and I cannot afford it.
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What’s the alternative, though? Sales? An office job? Ten free days including holidays and sick days in a year? Eight hours a day in a cubicle? 0 days maternity leave (like my friend, a lawyer, is getting)?
N. loves travel, too, and he makes enough money to afford it. The only problem is, however, that he has to be at work for all but 10 days per year.
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The alternative would be such a job in one of the places that now, I have to travel to. I have had other serious career interests as I have explained on blog, other kinds of research – activist – writing jobs. So perhaps the reason I do not feel academia is the only option is that I am as well informed as I am and have thought my interests out as well as I have.
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The working conditions in this country are so bizarrely, ridiculously, horribly bad that I shudder at the idea of confronting them. I honestly don’t know how people deal.
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*personal, I mean
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P.S. Also on the travel — you need it even more if you do not have a top job. At a top job there are many conferences and symposia right there, you do not have to spend money to get to them. Me, I have to get myself to New Orleans/Austin at least, and that is just to see books and people in the way one must in order to marginally keep up. So I really, really would say beware and be sure you know what you are getting into, and do not allow people to guilt trip you into continuing to try when you have already seen academia as you are getting to participate in it is not allowing you to do the things you wanted to do, or be the person you wanted to be.
If I had it to do again I might or might not. I am truly honored to be cited here as a person with life changing advice … but the big difference between me and you/Jonathan is that I do NOT think this is the best career in the world, and so on. I also think it is going to be less and less of a good idea as the corporatization and privatization of universities goes further.
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“If I had it to do again I might or might not. I am truly honored to be cited here as a person with life changing advice … but the big difference between me and you/Jonathan is that I do NOT think this is the best career in the world”
– Of course, this is a matter of personal preference. But I never saw you disparage the career choices of others out of spite. People can like the academia, dislike it, not want to be in it at all. But what is the point of shitting all over it for years and years without actually going away, like some people do? I don’t’ get sales, would never survive in sales, not even for a week. But I feel no need to tell people in sales how they will all fail and suffer and fail and suffer, you know?
“So I really, really would say beware and be sure you know what you are getting into, and do not allow people to guilt trip you into continuing to try when you have already seen academia as you are getting to participate in it is not allowing you to do the things you wanted to do, or be the person you wanted to be.”
– Exactly.
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These things having been said, I am against the custom of negativity and suffering people have, and the resentful poses they strike.
— One of my graduate school cohort, flipping out because of “deserving better” (than Washington University in St. Louis, which is in Missouri, which was the problem).
— Another, because of the schedule not being flexible *enough* (at an R1, give me a break).
— Another, because it is a job and the institution does not have the goal of nurturing you as a person.
— Assistant professors in my department, utterly intolerant of certain fulls because they are old, utterly unaware that said people are the reason they have lower teaching loads and better general situations than do those of us who have been there longer; I have told them not to make fun of said fulls in my presence, yet they “forget” at every opportunity.
I am against all of these people and their immaturity, yes, but I would hardly say people who recommend against going into academia do not have legitimate concerns.
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From upthread, on failing and suffering, yes. I of course actually do fail and suffer but I think it is because I was told so many times I would, it was like a curse or an infection, my resistance lasted up to a certain point only. People should stop saying fail and suffer and start pointing out the actual difficulty, it takes brains and skills and the ability to be sanguine in certain ways, and you have to get with program on that. They say fail and suffer because they imagine one is a poor little girl seeking a nurturing atmosphere and do not accept that it is they who think the academia is so sweet and kind and forgiving, not the allegedly pure and innocent you or me. (And a PS on that: the academia is actually quite forgiving; otherwise I would have been forced out long ago.)
“The working conditions in this country are so bizarrely, ridiculously, horribly bad that I shudder at the idea of confronting them. I honestly don’t know how people deal.”
Well, try being a member of one of the liberal professions in South America without a second source of income … check out the sexual harrassment situation at universities that speak Spanish and what I gather, German … it’s not ideal, and it’s getting worse, but well …
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I have suffered, but not because of academia per se. I think in any other profession I would have done much worse. It’s nice that Spanish can offer you jobs where you don’t have to be extraordinary just to be in TT at all.
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Well, if I hadn’t worked always in institutions whose goals were so different from mine I would not have these doubts. OSU and KU are part of the known world, whereas the places I usually work are other planets — truly.
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Continuing, as that published too fast — my exhaustion comes from the double bind of trying to change myself to fit and be acceptable where I am, and then change back to be able to do research. It really takes a lot of energy and I do not do well keeping both identities — I need two personalities and characters, and two sets of goals, and transition time; I would do better at a job where I could just be me, and it would be a certain kind of academic job or else another kind of high-level research and writing and speaking job. I have just realized, or just articulated the crux of it: I am utterly allergic to caretaking, the caretaking role, and that is more or less the job description for FL faculty at most places I have worked (not at the ones I liked), and this is the problem I have. I will think about this.
To be continued, with what I really had to say, which is brilliant…
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Anyway, on that, I have decided to emulate certain other professors with bad circumstances in difficult countries. My colleague points out that we, women of color and whatnot, and in US, do not have the privileges elite men in the 3d world have, like Jacques Roumain, but I say, there was Mariátegui.
Here is the brilliant thought, though, in my style of counter-advice: it is because of the nice life that one has to write. To the extent one has a good job, one is living it up somewhat selfishly if one does not. But one shares one’s good fortune by sharing one’s ideas and discoveries in writing.
I am of course not the first to say that or to remind people of that, but with all the emphasis on “productivity¨ and the complaints that one’s piece may only get 5 readers and may be meaningless or not say a lot or be earth shaking, it is easy to allow to go out of focus the real reason for research and writing — one really is trying to find things out and figure them out and let people know. “Research is B.S.” is the part of all the complaining that I most disagree with.
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And I will elaborate on one point, and then stop hogging thread.
“Here is the brilliant thought, though, in my style of counter-advice: it is because of the nice life that one has to write. To the extent one has a good job, one is living it up somewhat selfishly if one does not. But one shares one’s good fortune by sharing one’s ideas and discoveries in writing.”
The reason this is brilliant counter-advice is that nowadays research is considered selfish if it isn’t R&D or bringing in big NIH money … you are supposed to teach and serve, and we were supposed to be out with Habitat for Humanity today showing we were good and not useless people. And I was taught that research was just something you did to survive.
(Footnote: the person who taught me that retired in 1986 and I just saw him cited a few times today, in things published within the last 5 years. People think his stuff is useful, or use it as a benchmark. So the way I was brought up is an example of the gatekeeping Clarissa discusses here.)
So this is the point, and I am getting redundant: research is fun and it is not pointless or self indulgent. That should go without saying but people say it is non fun and pointless and self indulgent all the time, so saying the traditional thing, that it is not those things, is now revolutionary.
! (It amazes me how many people from within the very profession are anti research, it really does.)
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Ay, I cannot resist. One more thing.
“Why the supposedly academic publications such as CHE and IHE never ask for contributions from brilliant, happy, well-adjusted scholars is still a mystery.”
They have Ms. Mentor who is considered brilliant, happy and well-adjusted (I disagree & would leave profession if it required I be her).
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Unrelated: http://www.bbc.co.uk/mundo/ultimas_noticias/2013/04/130405_ultnot_pildora_del_dia_despues_nm.shtml
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