A colleague came to yell at me in my office today. She delivered a long and passionate rant that went something like the following:
What are you doing here? Are you crazy? You are wasting your life on this place. Your parents need to be telling you this but since they are not, I will speak as your mother: you need to leave. This university does not deserve you. We don’t deserve you. This stupid state doesn’t deserve you. You can have much broader horizons, you could be making a much greater impact, you could be making so much more money, you could be spending your life with really interesting, brilliant people, and not these idiots you meet around here.
Look, I’m going to be 70 soon. And as I look back on my life, I feel enormous regret. I have frittered my life away, I have wasted it on this place. As I’m getting older, I’m thinking about end-of-life issues, I’m thinking about death. Don’t make the same mistakes as I did. You are an intellectual of the first order, you are a high-powered research scholar, what are you doing here? What? You need to leave. I love having you here but you need to go. Go on the job market, leave this place that is in a permanent crisis mode. I’ve been here for a quarter of a century, and there has barely been a year when we were not on the brink of extinction. This shit is not getting better. It’s getting worse.
If I had anything like your talent and potential, I would never make this enormous mistake of staying here. Leave!
I’m now quite shaken up by the whole thing.
Clarissa's Blog 
Someone said something very similar to this to me a few years ago. I am already seventy years old, and I am very happy to be where I am now. Of course, if you were to move to my university, I would be pleased, but trust your own instincts and needs, not those of a well-meaning colleague.
LikeLike
Clarissa, I’ve been a patient reader of all your daily blog posts. Never really know what prompted me, but I feel like responding to this.
“..Shaken up this..” – I really did not understand which attributed to this. Was it that your colleague was filled with so much regret? or Was it that this regret was filling inside you?
Regardless, human life is wonderful in that it is short. Well, 70 years is not really short. But short enough to do everything someone fancies. You pick and choose your battles. I’ve seen people who went on an auto-pilot mode day in and day out and still were very happy, excited about the next day. My threshold for same work/same place is about 18 months. I’ve moved jobs, places, countries every 18 months. I need the thrill of a challenge/unknown every once in a while to keep me alive. So do I regret – yes, although I am happy, I still regret not having to live that simple settled life. I hate that, but I still wonder how it would be.
In summary, regardless of what you do or don’t you’ll have regrets. It’s normal and just the curse of human life. We covet.
Once again, it’s a great job you’re doing out here on the blog and it still amazes me how frequently you keep this blog updated. Keep up the good job and I appreciate your spirit. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
LikeLike
““..Shaken up this..” – I really did not understand which attributed to this. Was it that your colleague was filled with so much regret? or Was it that this regret was filling inside you?”
– I’m exhausted to the point where I feed my husband with soap. 🙂 So I have a very intense reaction to the smallest things. So when people start vociferating and talking about death in my office, I get frazzled.
“In summary, regardless of what you do or don’t you’ll have regrets.”
– You just don’t know me well enough. 🙂
“Once again, it’s a great job you’re doing out here on the blog and it still amazes me how frequently you keep this blog updated. Keep up the good job and I appreciate your spirit. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!”
– Thank you!!! Keep coming back!
LikeLike
Shouldn’t this post be protected?!!!
LikeLike
From what?
LikeLike
\\ Shouldn’t this post be protected?!!!
From what?
I meant to be a Protected post.
LikeLike
It sounds like the rant was more about her than about you (there’s undoubtedly some projection involved, and it sounds like she’s in a hard place at the moment), but, still, I understand why you’d be shaken. Your longer-term response probably depends on the extent to which you share her assumptions about the value of what you’re doing now, and doing it where you are.
LikeLike
“Your longer-term response probably depends on the extent to which you share her assumptions about the value of what you’re doing now, and doing it where you are.”
– I wanted to stay here for good, until I retire. But the President of the university told me to my face yesterday that, pretty much, we should all go on the job market and stop taking up space. And today I’m hearing that at the meeting with state officials it was said that several of our state’s public universities will not exist 20 years from now. And I still have 30 years left before I retire.
The value of what I do at this university is enormous. But the question is whether the taxpayers of Illinois believe that we should keep doing it.
LikeLike
\\ The value of what I do at this university is enormous. But the question is whether the taxpayers of Illinois believe that we should keep doing it.
I don’t think it depends on what taxpayers believe. Some “people on the top” decide, but if one went and actually asked voters one would hear different things.
Universities need to launch a public campaign. Raise awareness about what is going on. Don’t know whether it would help, but at least trying can’t hurt.
Also, some voters may experience a cognitive dissonance (?), like a woman who said “I want Big Government not to touch my Medicare.” I believe many people are capable of understanding how something will affect them, if somebody bothers to explain instead of sitting quietly like the universities in your state seem to do.
LikeLike
“I don’t think it depends on what taxpayers believe. Some “people on the top” decide, but if one went and actually asked voters one would hear different things.”
– “People at the top” were voted in by voters. They weren’t imported to us from another galaxy.
LikeLike
“I believe many people are capable of understanding how something will affect them, if somebody bothers to explain instead of sitting quietly like the universities in your state seem to do.”
– The only person from my university who came to these discussions fully supported the idea of stealing research from scholars because that will stick it to the profit-making publishing houses. Well, at least that’s a position. Everybody else just stares vapidly. I asked a senior colleague I respect why people are so passive and she said, “Because academics are pussies.”
LikeLike
What a manipulative drama queen. She lost me here: “I will speak as your mother.” She is not only manipulative but also has gerontocratic values. She should seek out professional help because of her personal end-of-life crisis instead of manipulating her younger colleagues. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had a friend or relative who needed your job. Her rhetorics is so typical. Puts praise and manipulation into the same package. Older women frustrates me with the same shit since I finished the primary school. Recently I get this: No, don’t waste your talent on your own business, go work for a multinational company, because you deserve so much more than the constant struggling of a small business. You can make so much more there. Yeah, of course, now fuck off jealous old witch and let me live my life.
LikeLike
Many thumbs-up for Aglaonika’s comment.
That woman should have said: “We are lucky to have you here.” We can all agree that this is true.
The President at your university holds a policy of fear: your job is in danger so eat in my hand and do not complain. Getting rid of Spanish? In Illinois? HA!
LikeLike
“That woman should have said: “We are lucky to have you here.””
– This is a close personal friend, we communicate in a very direct manner. We are long past social niceties. Not that I ever was into social niceties. 🙂
LikeLike
Does she know what you had to do to secure a job there? And the professional situation of your husband when your arrived in that state?
I know she is yor friend, but I can feel the elitism lurking in her comment. Brrr…
LikeLike
“I know she is yor friend, but I can feel the elitism lurking in her comment.”
– OK, since when are we against elitism, my dear “PhD-from-Yale” comrade-in-arms? :-))))))))))))
LikeLike
I am an elitist. Sort of.
LikeLike
I am 70. One thing I do know is that we MUST choose our lives. If we don’t, then we lose. We lose what we might have become. It seems you followed your passion. If you do that, you will NEVER have made an incorrect choice. (But that doesn’t mean you will win the lottery.) We do have to live with our choices.
LikeLike
Well, given the previous post about forced OA and the next post about turning into an online university and your comments (e.g. you are the only one doing research and publishing in prestigious journals, etc.), doesn’t she maybe have a really good point that you would thrive better in a more research-oriented environment? What do you think about the idea of moving?
LikeLike
“Research-oriented environment” exists only for the established stars of a field, all 10 of them. 🙂 A 30+ tenure-track academic who ends up at Yale or Cornell isn’t placed in a research-oriented environment. She is placed in hell.
LikeLike
Would that you could do the EM Forster path of writing little yet reaching many …
I point out that it would clear ample amounts of time for the research you’d otherwise be doing anyway.
LikeLike
I spent some years as a typographer. I loved the work that I did (mostly we did advertising and other creative work). Every day was a new problem that I had to solve within the confines of what our machines could do, and I was good at it, even won a national award for a particularly difficult piece of work which required a creative solution. Then the personal computing revolution arrived, and my job was a casualty.
I enjoyed it while I had it. Then I had to do other things, which eventually landed me in research, which I like for much the same reasons as I liked typography (though without the artistry…but I try to fill that need in other ways now).
As long as you like your work and they’ll pay you, then stick with it. If you don’t like it any more, do something else or do what you are doing somewhere else. You are extremely talented and driven; you will not ever be without work of some sort.
LikeLike
“You are extremely talented and driven”
– Thank you, that’s so good to hear. 🙂
LikeLike
“I will speak as your mother”
My first reaction was that she has no idea how to convince you….
LikeLike
I should have explained. This is a running joke between the two of us that was invented by me. “I wish you were my mother.” It does sound weird to those who are not privy to the inside joke, I agree.
LikeLike
One of my colleagues said pretty much the exact same thing to me three years ago. I have been applying for other jobs ever since. None, of course, have been forthcoming; however, I will probably keep applying until I retire or change professions. 🙂
In the meantime, I also do whatever I can to change the school where I work. I am fighting the good fight to make us a better school all the time, but it sucks to have to fight so hard for basic things — like research support (in the form of proportional teaching loads, conference funds, etc.).
LikeLike
You should come here to Ghana. We always need Spanish language and literature lecturers.
LikeLike
“You can have much broader horizons, you could be making a much greater impact, you could be making so much more money, you could be spending your life with really interesting, brilliant people, and not these idiots you meet around here.”
Translated into German for you with the help of Rainer Maria Rilke:
“Archaischer Torso Apollos”:
http://rainer-maria-rilke.de/090001archaischertorso.html
“Du mußt dein Leben ändern.”
There is always another option.
LikeLike