It’s great to see that, among the whiners and the drama queens and the obsessive passive voice users, there are very healthy, balanced, and happy young academics:
I’ve enjoyed my seven years as junior faculty tremendously, quietly playing the game the only way I knew how to. But recently I’ve seen several of my very talented friends become miserable in this job, and many more talented friends opt out. I feel that one of the culprits is our reluctance to openly acknowledge how we find balance. Or openly confront how we create a system that admires and rewards extreme imbalance. I’ve decided that I do not want to participate in encouraging such a world. In fact, I have to openly oppose it.
Do read the whole article. I don’t do things the way this person does and I’m at a very different kind of institution, but I really like the intense emotional and psychological health that inspires this article’s every word. Even just reading the piece is soothing and therapeutic.
Thank you, dear E, who sent me this link.
Clarissa's Blog 
Thank you. It’s still unusual to find a piece where the writer speaks to the reader as simply one person to another, without the repellant drone of expertise. I especially liked her lines: “Most people I know are incapable of giving advice I can follow…” and “By demoting the prize, the risk becomes less”. And I adore her magnanimity in including links to other people’s works.
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Yes, I liked this piece as well and again, it is the reason only to accept jobs at institutions where people are healthy enough to accept a healthy attitude. More grist for my mill, just any tenure track job is not good enough.
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Few places are as unhealthy as Harvard. Maybe even none. The environment there is ridiculously lousy. Everything is about intrigues, brownnosing, connections, terror. This woman is absolutely exceptional.
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and one in ten people at Oxford is plotting murder
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No, seriously, for every single person who got a tenure-track job at an Ivy (and I know a lot of them), this was the end of their career. They were squeezed out and discarded. Good, talented people. And they were so happy to get those jobs. 😦
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My quote is from Morse, so it must be true.
But, I suppose on a psychological level I was always aware that you should not whittle and narrow yourself to try to fit what other people considered desirable for success. Perhaps that is the best approach to take always.
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