Tuesday, October 26, 2010

25. Academe is built on pride.

A cynic might say that while most of the Western world runs on greed, academe runs on pride. And at least according to the Biblical narrative, pride is worse than greed; pride was the sin of the devil himself.

Academe is full of people who think of themselves as smart. In the “real world,” applied intelligence is often rewarded financially, but those who have chosen to spend their lives in higher education will probably never be millionaires. Academics tell themselves that they have given up on the financial rewards that would have come to them in a different line of work, and they are more than likely right. Instead of measuring their accomplishments in dollars, they tend to derive their self-worth from their intellectual stature. Some academics work to prove the point with an endless torrent of publications, but most at the very least settle into a comfortable satisfaction with their own intelligence. But pride is easily wounded. There are two especially negative consequences of the fact that universities play host to high concentrations of people who think highly of themselves but are not rich. The first is that universities create environments in which people are easily offended and quick to defend their status. The second is that campuses are pervaded with a nagging feeling of resentment borne by people who feel that their talents have been inadequately rewarded.



32 comments:

  1. Pride was one of the major factors that contributed to my inability to see how bad the job situation was until I actually went on the market. And I think my advisor's pride in the quality my work and accomplishments as a graduate student contributed to hir inability to offer me appropriate guidance about how to prepare myself for the likelihood, no matter how good my work, that I might never find a job in academe except as an adjunct.

    Pride in my teaching ability as a graduate student made me glad to accept the role of adjunct when my TA-ship ended, glad to work hard to prove I could teach the same classes tenure-track faculty were teaching, but, as an adjunct, I was (and still am) doing so for a fraction of their salary. I am on the market for the seocnd time this fall, but I am not proud to be. Although I am still proud that I finished my dissertation and got the degree, I am increasingly experiencing that "nagging feeling of resentment borne by people who feel that their talents have been inadequately rewarded." It's affecting my teaching and my writing and my overall quality of life. My anger at my own pride and at the academic culture that encouraged it knows no bounds.

    Pride is the devil.

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    1. Is it not curious that these issues are never discussed in the academic setting? Talking about the negative aspects of academe is just never done. As assistant professor I would go into the office of the Chair and talk in a positive way. I could not actually tell the person what I actually thought of the university, which makes me think that another element besides pride is fear, fear of not fitting in.

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    2. Why couldn't you tell him?

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    3. I'm not that guy, but I'll reply with my thoughts. A lot of people simply predict the answer they'll receive when they start complaining or speaking negatively about the university then think to themselves, "Why ask it, then?". If you know your professor's personality and attitude on certain things, you'll have a tendency to just expect answers and, yes, perhaps even fear that they'll alienate you end up asking those questions.

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  2. I'm currently in my first year of grad school and I do notice a certain pompousness in the air around my campus. While I don't think of myself as prideful (especially given that I'm all to aware of how much I DON'T know), I hope that if I continue through my program that an inflated sense of self-importance will not be present on my (most likely short) list of accomplishments.

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    1. Another way pride begins to show up is internally because we all have a certain amount of pride and certain level we're willing to dip down to. For instance, when you start TA positions, a lot of people tend to glorify it and sometimes brag to others that it's their "position in the university" and they may get some good responses.

      The further and further you TA in some classes and fields, you just realize that you simply have limited power with the class and with it limited respect with the people you teach. I even thought myself at least above some other TAs, but certainly the kids I taught who would only be a year or two younger than I was.

      That's not saying I'm a bad person because I observed the same in my friend, it's just that you fall into cynicism with it all.

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  3. This is Anonymous #1 again: I don't know that I see pride as "an inflated sense of self-importance," although it certainly is this sometimes. I think we have a right to take pride in our accomplishments. The problem with pride, as I see it right now, is that pride contributes to blinding us to some of the really serious problems with academe right now, and that blindness turns us into unwitting victims and perpetrators of those problems.

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  4. All of the posts on this blog have been right on the money. I realized that academia is not for me during my first year of graduate school, while sitting in a methods seminar. I now find myself struggling to graduate because of the politics involved in the process, regardless of how good my grades are I cannot find faculty members that are interest in my research interest but instead I've had to whore myself out to other's interests...and I am tired of it. I have settled for a report option as a way out of the MA program at my university and I hope to God that I finish this December and move on with my life. This experience has taught me that the world of academia is not for me and at 24 I am glad to have learned my lesson now and not at 30. Thank you, author, for this blog. It makes me feel better about my decision not to pursue the PhD.

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  5. Ileft my PHD track program last year It feels so good to have some damn money in your pocket and not to have to worry about some bullshit department politics. I feel so relieved. I'm still in contact with a few people though most I've become out of touch with and I seriously feel sorry for them. academia is so myopic.

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  6. In response to Anonymous 1, who wrote, "I don't know that I see pride as "an inflated sense of self-importance," although it certainly is this sometimes. I think we have a right to take pride in our accomplishments. The problem with pride, as I see it right now, is that pride contributes to blinding us to some of the really serious problems with academe right now, and that blindness turns us into unwitting victims and perpetrators of those problems."

    The whole language of rights (as in, what I have a right to take pride in) is symptomatic of pride itself. One may have lots of rights in this world, but exercising them does not make one humble. In fact, defining pride as other people's problem (i.e. "academia's" problem) while refusing to see it in oneself is, with all due respect, hypocrisy. That doesn't mean academia doesn't have problems and it doesn't need reform - I think we all recognize that it does. But true reform starts with oneself--an examination of one's own conscience, motives, etc.

    True humility comes from knowing that no one is in any way obligated to listen to anything you have to say; that your ideas may end up mattering only to yourself; and that they may not be very good ideas in the first place.

    Many academics feel entitled to public recognition for their efforts. This is very human and understandable (as is pride, for that matter), but morally it is problematic. If you are living the life of the mind in order to get public acclamation, a job, a stable living, etc. then you really are doing it for the wrong reasons. Those things are only potential bonuses to striving for truth; the striving for truth itself is something a true striver will do regardless of whether or not he/she is rewarded for it.

    I think it is important to go into academia knowing that you very well may not get a job afterward, that your ideas may earn you enemies, and that you will be often at the mercy of politics, within and without academia. That is simply the way the world works. Those who end up sticking it through *anyway* are those who truly love the life of the mind, who are willing to make sacrifices for it, and who understand that no life decision they make will ever end their suffering.

    Academia, ideally, should be a labor of love. Those with other motives (i.e. desire for recognition, a "fulfilling" job, etc.) will find themselves struggling a lot more than those who understand that academia is a great opportunity for which academics all must pay a high price. But you can choose what price you pay - suffering or integrity? I would hope that as many of us as possible choose the former.

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  7. Thank you for the thoughtful contribution. Unfortunately, those who "stick it through" are just as often people who have found themselves on a track that it is not easy to get off. It is not always (or even usually) for a love of what they are doing.

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  8. Anonymous 12:41, you hope that most of us choose suffering over integrity??? I don't see the logic in that at all. In your comment, you seem to be saying that suffering and integrity in fact go together, that those who "suffer" for "the life of the mind" are the ones who truly belong in academia and hence have more integrity than the rest of us. Are you delusional? Or, maybe you have a trust fund and don't have to worry about banal things like earning a living wage like the rest of us?

    Sure, one's academic work should be a labor of love, but people can love their children and be proud of them, too.

    Pride is a problem in academia, but so is the kind of humility you're talking about. Academics, at least the ones who teach, perform a valuable service to society, and there's absolutely no excuse for adjuncts, who comprise more than half of the academic workforce, to be on freakin' FOOD STAMPS (to learn more about that, go check out Marc Bousquet's blog at http://www.howtheuniversityworks.com). Administrators know very well that people get into academia for love and not money, and they have been increasingly exploiting that humility.

    So, maybe we just disagree about the moral value of suffering and the economic value of academic labor, but I think there's a serious social cost to not taking enough pride in what you do to demand a living wage -- you may not have a family to support, but your colleagues down the hall might. Should their children have to suffer because they chose "the life of the mind"? Should their students suffer because they have to teach 5 classes a semester at 3 different campuses just to make ends meet?

    It truly is selfish to think that the "high price" you are willing to pay for living the "life of the mind" is only about the sacrifices you make in your own life, or about your own conscience and motives. You're part of a community, and that community is crumbling. If you care about it, you need to think beyond yourself.

    Pride is the devil, but that don't mean that the devil ain't sometimes right.

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  9. Do I detect sn element of sour grapes here?

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  10. SlackerMom, the grapes ARE pretty sour if you're trapped on the adjunct track, as so many of us are. A lot of grad students haven't tasted those grapes yet, but they should know that's likely what awaits them. People on the tenure track (yourself?) may be eating sweeter grapes these days, but your grapes are gowing on the same vine as ours. We need to work together to cultivate it, not against each other, so that the grapes may be sweet for all.

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  11. Hi Anonymous,

    You're absolutely right that the treatment of adjuncts is unconscionable, and I should have stressed that more in my reply. Humility is not about never fighting for what is just--in fact, striving for justice is an integral part of life. However, I truly believe that one can fight from a place of humility - ie. "I wish to establish humane labor practices," as opposed to a place of pride, ie. "I deserve a good job and public recognition for my work." The latter reflects a sense of entitlement--"my brilliance should be amply rewarded." Does that help clarify the difference?

    As you said, all of us have bills to pay, and have families to support. We all work hard to do this. However, academia is not the only way you can pay your bills. Nobody forced you to choose this particular career path; you just may have to end up in a different career than the one you planned in life. This is an awful thing, but it happens all the time to people in many industries, not only in academia (most notably the manufacturing industry, which has been decimated in this country). It is really unrealistic to think that institutions which are churning out tens of thousands of PhDs will be able to place all of them in jobs. That's one of the biggest problems with academe - departments overadmit grad students to supply the cheap, exploitative labor they need, without thought to how many of those students they will actually be able to place. At some point, humanities people need to take a look at the economics of basic supply and demand and understand that even in a climate where EVERYONE is pushing to go to college (as it's now what defines the middle class and serves as a prerequisite for any kind of social mobility), there are simply too many of them out there for everyone to get the kind of fulfilling job they had hoped for.

    So, some of the academic politics is personal, but a lot of it isn't. It's just the way the system is rigged, especially as more resources get shifted to the biomed fields.

    But in any case, it's useful to remember that humanists used to be patronized by wealthy nobles in the way artists were--today, we actually do have many more opportunities, and the American University setting is still, relatively, a free place in which to pursue inquiry.

    I myself don't know whether or not I'll get a job at the end of this. But I couldn't pass up a chance to read books for the next however many years. I think it always helps to keep one's expectations aligned with reality, to be flexible, and to be humble. We grew up in a culture that told us we could be anything we wanted to be, and have anything we wanted to have--that it was our "right" to be happy. Well, that's just not true. Or at the very least, it's a kind of thinking that leads to lots of crushed dreams and suffering.

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  12. Dear 100 Reasons,

    I find your decision to use a picture of Dante in this post quite appropriate, as Dante considered pride to be his own greatest weakness.

    Plus, you know, Dante is awesome.

    Sincerely,
    Me

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  13. Anonymous 12:41 and 7:36 claims to be humble rather than prideful, but your comments suggest that, in fact, you are taking pride in what you seem to see as a kind of noble sacrifice in suffering for the "life of the mind." I see that as hypocrisy produced either through naivety or privilege. It’s never the adjuncts – or grad students whose TA-ships don’t cover basic living expenses – who romanticize suffering.

    You also say, "I couldn't pass up a chance to read books for the next however many years," but you don't need to go to graduate school to read books. I would argue that just reading books is not the purpose of graduate school at all. Whatever it may have been in the past, graduate school in the humanities today is professional training for the career of scholar-teacher. Yes, reading a lot of books is part of that, but it's not all there is to it. If you aren't serious about pursing such a career, don't go to graduate school (and, as 100 Reasons points out in so many other posts, even if you are serious about such a career, there are a lot of reasons not to go).

    I do agree that "the American University setting is still a [...] place in which to pursue inquiry," but I disagree that it is "relatively free." Speaking just in terms of inquiry, if you are a graduate student, you are “free” to pursue whatever research subject/s and method/s your committee deems acceptable, which may not be the ones you would pursue if you were truly “free.” If you are an adjunct, you are “free” to pursue whatever inquiry you can in all the “free” time you have when you’re not teaching or preparing to teach those 6 sections of freshman comp you took on to make ends meet. If you are a professor on the tenure track but without tenure yet, you are “free” to pursue whatever lines of inquiry will lead to the greatest amount of publication, because if you pursue something that is interesting but isn’t going to get published, you’re not going to get tenure. If you’re a professor with tenure, you do have more intellectual freedom, but, increasingly, that freedom today is compromised by economic pressures. What do budget cuts mean for tenured faculty? Not only furloughs and salary freezes but increased class sizes, fewer adjuncts and grad students to teach introductory classes and do scut work, and diminished research funds, all of which contribute to less freedom to pursue intellectual inquiry.

    This comment thread has moved somewhat away from the original topic of pride, but the issues raised are worth discussing. When people talk about the economic and structural problems with higher education, we’re not just whining about the job market, about the privileges of being and doing whatever we want that you say our culture has taught us to feel entitled to. And we’re not just complaining about how our “right” to be happy has been violated (BTW, that’s in the Declaration of Independence, so maybe it’s not as trivial as you make it seem). What we’re talking about is a problem that the bloggers over at Roxie’s World have called “Excellence without Money”
    http://roxies-world.blogspot.com/2008/12/hard-times.html. The gist of it is that, as a society and as individuals, we don’t get excellence in higher education (true freedom of inquiry, good teaching, adequate research opportunities and resources) unless we collectively agree to fund it. If you think money doesn’t matter except in matters of pride, go read the whole series of posts. It’ll be enlightening.

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  14. This idea that suffering is somehow good is a Christian meme/script I think. I don't see anything wrong with pride if it has a justifiable basis and can't see anything good about suffering though sometimes suffering is necessary to achieve ones goals.

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  15. I think it goes well beyond pride and this might be something worth exploring in another reason: the department workplace environment is absolutely toxic. Fellow students are narcissistic, insecure snobs who find every reason to attempt to make you feel inferior. I remember if I said something like "wow, I'm exhausted, I only slept 5 hours last night" someone else would respond "wow, how could you possibly get that much sleep? I had soooo much research to do." and on and on. I was met with derision when I attempted to have some semblance of a social life - even professors commented on it, that I wasn't giving the impression of being serious enough. Meanwhile they were bitter, jaded, irrelevant jerks, several of whom were sleeping with the grad students. Positively incestuous and cultish.

    When I finally made the decision to leave, my mental health improved almost overnight. My fellow students responded mostly with a thinly veiled derision that I couldn't hack it (how quickly they forget I got As in every class, even stats). How else could they explain someone leaving their precious cult? Joke's on them - I'm happier and healthier than I ever was, and earn well over twice what they do.

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  16. By the way (I'm the same poster as the previous anonymous), I echo the statements that this blog is really wonderful in helping those of who got out to feel better about their decisions.

    Leaving was a really hard thing to do - it was all I'd ever known, and the way my department treated me was horrid. This blog confirms everything I always felt - academia is rotten at its core. Truly a pity.

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  17. ALL human careers/studies/pursuits are based on pride. Accumulating status motivates, often unconciously, nearly every single human. There may be a few people out there who don't feel the pressure to perform well at their job but academics are no more status seeking than anyone else.

    The difference with academia is that the absence of a clear power structure means that lots of professors can convince (delude) themselves they are near the top of the heap. Arguably that's a good thing but when perception and reality clash it can lead to bruised egos and bitchy fights.

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  18. well said, TruePath

    this blog is very therapeutic.

    I always thought there was something wrong with ME that I didn't fit in my graduate program. Seriously - I suffered panic attacks, depression, horrible self-esteem, eating disorders - it was the most psychologically grueling two years of my life. And for what? So I could prove via quantitative methods things that didn't even make sense? Shoot me now.

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  19. I would like to encourage pride after your PhD if you get a job outside of academe. If you end up in govt like I did then you have to remind the people that you work with that they have no idea that what comes out of their mouths if stupid, wrong, and b.s. So a PhD does count for a lot outside of academe. Secondly, their are politics in every job no matter where you go, so that is no excuse to quit school.

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  20. @8:19:
    You'd have a better chance at convincing your less educated co-workers how dumb they are if you'd learned the difference between "their" and "there" some time during your rigorous doctoral training.

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  21. I once read a report of a study, which unfortunately I've never been able to find again. It was looking at which occupational groups committed the most petty crimes (like stealing office supplies from an employer). Up at the top: professors. Why? According to the authors, because of this group's sense of underfulfilled deservingness. That's probably the sort of "pride" that is the focus of this fine post.

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    1. We sometimes bemoan our students' sense of entitlement. But you see a lot of the same thing in people on the academic job market, faculty believing their work is unappreciated, ect.

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  22. Yes some grad students wont be millionaires, but you will NEVER be a millionaire. Have you never heard of something called chance? Intelligence used to be highly revered throuought history, it still is....CEOS are highly intelligent and paid very well. Maybe you Christian zealots should go to school and make something of yourself and stop wishing everyone to working a drull job for little money. Oh and not all people in this world are Christian, so Sin has no bearing to me, a Satanist. We aren't in the middle ages, a point your are so whole-heartidly trying to prove. Have you even been to a college campus? Or have you only heard about it on Campus PD you know, the show on that moving picture box with sound. How dumb are you...I bet your IQ us below 70.

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    1. Are you missing a chromosome?

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  23. Grad school isnt a place to go to feel better about yourself, are you that egotistical. You accuse other students of narcissism, but you are the drama queen of it. So basically you got mad because noone would hold you hand and give you free money...boofuckinhoo. Your healthier because you couldnt hack it, and you may be richer at the moment with your $12 hr secretary job today but i hope your fellow students who will make $80 hr never loan you money when you house burns down, lose job, lose car, or suffer a debilitating career, so the jokes on you who can only look at today and not tomorrow, oh and As in low-level classes is nothing to brag about, so you can add 2 and 2 but thats about it.

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  24. I absolutely agree. Yesterday, I defended my comprehensive exam but I was given a conditional pass....on condition that I hand in another paper. Not because I didn't work hard on the first or that I didn't know the material. Oh no, I merely had the misfortune of handing in a paper that wasn't what the committee had expected. But the kicker was, they didn't know what they wanted until they saw something that they didn't like. I asked repeatedly for some guidance....what they expected. I talked through what I was planning on writing and every time I was met with thoughtless reassurance. In the end, instead of owning up to their mistakes or their laziness in terms of providing me with any form of support...they thanked me for my effort but wanted another paper (mind you they didn't tell me if I passed or failed. Just that they wanted me to answer three more questions in a paper). So, now because of their (pride) reluctance to admit any wrong doing, I am stuck doing another paper and wasting another month of my life. Grad school is hard. Sure. But it is the misplaced PRIDE of academics that really screw students over.

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    1. "We don't know what we want, but we know what we don't like when we see it."

      This could be said of any employer in the country.

      The US is headed for a sharp economic and cultural correction. All those years of pandering to stupidity are going to come to a head.

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  25. I have to say this is very true. I have to face these people quite often at meetings. Although I have much more powerful intellect than them, they have much more pride than me. So I don't talk to them.

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