The Perils of Academia

April 20, 2011

As I prepare to enter academia as a student for the first time in over two decades, I am full of trepidation. I grew up in academia; I know its pitfalls. I know the departmental political in-fighting; I know the petulant rants and tirades of academics, which would get them fired in the business world; I know the petty territorial skirmishes, as savage as in the wild yet unacknowledged by the supposed aesthetes engaging in the battles. At least in the business world this competition is open and acknowledged; in academia it is denied under the veneer of culture and thus infinitely more vicious. I know that departments are, after all, microcosms of high schools with their dramas, cliques, and side-taking. Faculty are often polarized on both theory – understandable, at least – and personality – rather unforgiveable, to my mind. Lord, I am hoping I left high school far behind…

Some of the pitfalls of academia were so aptly expressed in Muriel Barbery’s book The Elegance of the Hedgehog. In this novel set in France, one of the narrators muses thus on the oh-so-intellectual thesis written by a resident of her haute bourgeois apartment building: “but intelligence, in itself, is neither valuable nor interesting. Very intelligent people have devoted their lives to the question of the sex of angels, for example.” I agree. Call me a pragmatist, but I disdain purely intellectual play with no thought of contributing to humanity’s betterment. I know. I’ve been there.

I wrote my MA thesis in Linguistics on “The Relative Nouniness and Verbiness of Gerunds and Infinitives”. Yikes – it pains me to write it. Do you even know what gerunds and infinitives are? Most people don’t and are none the worse for their ignorance. Now, I did enjoy the intellectual game, but let’s face it: who cares? Through what stretch of the imagination could the relative nouniness or verbiness of anything count? In what way might it conceivably matter? How on earth could anyone be bettered, uplifted, enlightened by this thesis? Yet I passed with flying colors, my thesis advisors and committee praising my innovative approach to analyzing gerunds and infinitives. Wow. An innovative approach to analyzing gerunds and infinitives. Now that’s what the world needs. My thesis was like taking a microscope to a very tiny corner of human knowledge and further dissecting that minuscule corner. The light shed on that little nook will never filter up to normal human beings, you and me. So I consider it a futile effort, and even then I knew it was. It is no wonder I escaped from academia as soon as I graduated, despite my professors’ entreaties to begin a PhD. I needed to reconnect with the real world, with real problems, and with real people.

In another passage, Barbery brilliantly picks apart the basic strategy of academics as they desperately try to ‘publish or perish’, often scratching out meager little corners in their field that could hardly be of wider interest just so they can publish something, anything (and the plethora of academic journals only adds to this syndrome), pad their résumés and thus earn tenure. Apparently this is universal, or at least rife in Europe as well, as Barbery states in the field of philosophy:

…if you want to make a career, take a marginal, exotic text that is relatively unexplored, abuse its literal meaning by ascribing to it an intention that the author himself had not been aware of…, distort that meaning to the point where it resembles an original thesis, [and] devote a year of your life to this unworthy little game…

I’ve been there, too. I remember my friends who were earning their Master’s in English dissecting a text to a molecular degree that the author was unlikely to have imagined in his or her wildest dreams. I, too, kept publishing after I started working, squeezing one micro-insight after another from well-worn, hackneyed material just to publish it and be able to list it on my résumé.

I was climbing the professional ladder then. At some point, I hopped off. I just lost interest. That’s someone else’s game, and I have no interest in playing it. Publishing when I actually have something to say is a worthy goal; publishing just to stay ahead of the game (or barely tread water, as the case may be) is a bore, a futile, self-serving end in itself. As Barbery, my new intellectual heroine, says, “What is the purpose of intelligence if it is not to serve others?”

I hope that as I start my new degree, a PhD in Anthropology, I can find a way to avoid trifling office politics and make a contribution that will enrich all of us. To serve others, as Barbery says. I hope I can avoid the perils, pitfalls, and politics of academia and instead find its rich vein, then mine it for my and the world’s edification. What a hopeless idealist, after all this time. Still, if you ever feel a pressing urge to explore nouniness and verbiness, you know who to ask. Good to know!