On Being Postacademic
ON BEING POSTACADEMIC
by Kenneth Mostern
posted with permission from the author
for six people I worked with at UT:
Misty, Stan and John Z., who remain;
George and John E., who did better (I hope);
and Erik, who was, insultingly, rejected
1 On Department Life
This past spring I resigned from my academic job to manage a small nonprofit organization and pursue my work as a spoken word performer in the San Francisco Bay Area. For the previous six years, I was an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee. During this time I published a paperback book with a prestigious press and, while no one mistook me for an academic superstar, I showed every public sign of being a career academic. Though I received a great many negative retention votes over the years and it was once thought I’d have a difficult time, in fact there was very little contention when last fall I was voted tenure.
Yet I noticed how alienated I had become from my academic work when I first held a copy of my own book in my hand in June 1999. Three things happened the same month. First, twelve copies of the prepublication book arrived in the mail from Cambridge. Second, the person I was somewhat surprisingly still married to after this lengthy period of on again, off again relationship had not only determined that she could spend the fall with me in Knoxville, but that she would. Third, I organized the Southern Fried Regional Poetry Slam in Knoxville, bringing together some five dozen performance poets, most younger than me, to a three day public event. There was no question which of the three events had the least impact on my emotions. Weirdly, I had to confront the fact that I wasn’t even more proud of my Cambridge book than the chapbook of performance poems I had self-published earlier that year.
Anyone who knew me as a graduate student at Berkeley would have found this turn of events unimaginable. Indeed, in 1999 I was still sufficiently undercover that some of my colleagues first discovered I organized poetry events at bars when they read about the Regionals in the local entertainment weekly. My academic friends thought of me as particularly well-read about the academic institution and committed to working within it, as someone who, having succeeded in getting the proverbial “good faculty job,” considered it my political responsibility to care about the institution. Yet in a short period of time this caring, this emotional commitment, had apparently evaporated. Academia had gone from being my vocation to being the independent source of my most extreme alienation.
It is sometimes said that the University of Tennessee Department of English is a “traditional” department, training students in methods and for jobs that other schools have abandoned. Were only this true. Of course, as a marxist in African American Studies it would have been difficult for me to work in a genuinely conservative program over the long term, but a conservative program with a coherent sense of its intellectual mission in relation to the national community might have been a place of vigorous engagement. What I found instead was a department without an intellectual life, where once smart people did everything in their power to avoid a real conversation, looking forward only to the next time they had an excuse to leave the city.
Yet, let me warn you, this is not another story about how Berkeley is better than Knoxville. Most of the ways it is (and of course it is) are obvious, and the last thing the people reading this essay need is the sense of this superiority reinforced, as though the very real struggles of the UT students who I fell in love with year after year are somehow less significant because Knoxville has fewer cultural and political resources than Berkeley. Rather, this is the story of the forms of disengagement that structure academic departments in general. Certainly at the top of the profession, in places like Berkeley, scholars are far more likely than at UT to be engaged in national conversations. Yet at every level of the academic institution, a variety of individuals find that the best or easiest way to keep themselves going is by staying out of the way of department life. At prestigious schools, where people actually have the money to do so, this results in the incessant flying around the world making connections, and the consequent political overvaluation of the so-called global over working in local institutions. This itself is a form of disengagement. At the University of Tennessee — which is nowhere near the “bottom” as these things are assessed — most faculty members are involved in neither national or local conversations, and as a result become altogether disengaged.
The scariest thing a young faculty member experiences is not, as is conventionally supposed, the “need to produce” and therefore her/his experience is not aided by the “mentorship” of an experienced scholar. Rather, the young scholar’s fear stems from the fact that no one in the department is talking to each other about scholarship. Faculty are socializing, going out, schmoozing all the time, and the ideas that supposedly drive the work they do are not being discussed. The mentor, if assigned, will try to teach the young faculty member how to navigate the minefield of the department, but that is exactly what is alienating. . The mentor, especially when well-intentioned, may be the model for what is wrong, not an aid in coping. Indeed, if the mentor is really similar to the young faculty member in terms of ideology or social identity, the mentor may be a model for what the young faculty member does not wish to become.
The one conversation everyone is having incessantly is the one about the micropolitical maneuvers within the department. This conversation is, of course always done with armor on, with an eye toward alliances and enemies already made, with everyone watching to find out which camp the new faculty member will join. And while there is a relationship between micropolitics and geopolitics, it is far more tenuous, far more mediated by local institutional conditions, than the new faculty first imagines.
Because no one is talking about substance, only alliances, and because alienation is general, a vacuum exists at the center of institutional power which is not filled by talent or argument, but by those who feel most comfortable or justified taking advantage of it. For those in power, and for those who hope to attain power, the arrival of a new junior faculty member is to be watched closely for his/her schmoozing choices. As a result, it is not simply the case that junior faculty fear senior faculty, but that the senior faculty fear the junior faculty, walking around wondering whether this new person will contribute to their already hatched plan to take over the curriculum. The fact that the new person was hired with accomplishments and expectations much higher than so many senior faculty members does not help this form of fear, of course.
While it remains true that the power differential between tenured and untenured faculty makes the ubiquity of fear particularly threatening to the careers of junior faculty members, the longer one stays the more one discovers that one’s unhappiness is simply an example of the larger misery of faculty members. Senior faculty don’t exactly help or support one another either. Tenure might lead to a sense of security; it surely does not breed happiness.
The net that academics are ultimately caught in, regardless of the structure or the “progressiveness” of the specific department, is the net of personal power. Within the capitalist professional class, the criteria by which alliances are formed and judgments made is generally limited by an abstract and objective, rather than personal, question: did you make money for the shareholders? Even where personality or group dynamics dictates one or another poor relationship, there is some criteria of performance evaluation outside of academia’s twin criteria: personal alliance and ideology. In truth, it takes an incredible number of hours to evaluate adequately any individual’s research. For all but a handful of us, the number of people who have given our work that kind of attention is miniscule. We are tied to those individuals not the way a consultant is tied to a client’s account books, but the way we are tied to lovers and friends — and ex-lovers and enemies. Obviously, I am aware that markets create winners and losers, and also, that there is no “free market” unconstructed by the intervention of human psyches. Yet at least within the bourgeoisie the existence of a monetary reference point provides some resistance to personal power, while the structure of institutionalized intellectual work permits no such outside reference point — not community service, not ethics, not, in light of the inability of humanities scholars to agree about what such a concept might mean, truth. Academia has neither capitalist forms of abstraction nor socialist forms of solidarity to recommend it.
In a poetry slam, five people from the audience are chosen randomly as judges. You read for three minutes (there’s a time penalty for going over) and then these five people, who may never before have been to a poetry slam or indeed ever read a poem, give you numbers between zero and ten for your words and your performance. Instant gratification! Abstract, numerical judgment! Where else has an ironic reflection on the social condition of contemporary intellectual work been more apt? The numbers aren’t “objective,” but they are public, explicit, acknowledged; how different from the academy, where people have the gall to complain that poetry shouldn’t be “competitive,” as though anything in the academy were not. I started asking my academic friends to email me scores between 0 and 10 for my book, knowing how unlikely it was that any of them would have the time to actually read it through, or, having read it, respond substantially to it.
2 On the Job Market in African American Studies
I am a white man trained in the field of African American Studies, with a dissertation directed by the late Barbara Christian, one of that field’s most prominent earlier institution builders. I did what many (white) people swore was impossible and several skeptical others (of various backgrounds) proclaimed should be easy: I got a job. At a Research Institution. I had immense, unconditional support not only from Professor Christian but from a variety of scholars of African descent at every point in my intellectual development.
I am also a symbol of what for some, however unconsciously, African American Studies is imagined to be a revolt against: a white, Jewish, male marxist. This symbol, as I once hinted in my academic work, is principally the result of Cold War ideology. Of course there have been many problems for African Americans, and feminists of all colors, in Jewish/leftist/white/male dominated settings. Of course one might ask what such problems are being compared to, and why the marxist intellectual, in turn coded as a Jewish male, symbolizes a special rather than a typical problem. It matters that the people who in their responses to my work have tried to protect African American Studies from my supposed appropriation of it for marxism are not correlated by race and gender. African American scholars have supported and opposed me, as have white scholars. Poststructuralist white feminists were for a time particularly attacking, always in the name of something called “black feminism”; the small number of actual black feminist poststructuralists who have given me feedback have been on all sides of the issue, usually simultaneously.
Sometimes I believe that I was “only” at the University of Tennessee, as opposed to someplace far more prestigious, because of the above profile. Other times I believe that given my politics and the tendency of others to see me as a threat all out of proportion to the actual power inhering in my body — an everyday experience of black men in the United States, of course — if it wasn’t for the advantages of whiteness I’d never have gotten a job at all. I know some, but all too few, details that I can repeat about what happened in the discussion of my application at schools I would have liked to be at. I must admit that had I gotten a job at the kind of school I wanted and, yes, expected, I might have had a department experience just as bad as I had at Tennessee, and yet stayed in the profession. When I was a career academic, all I really wanted was the compensation of living in a reasonably interesting city; the University of Washington, or Minnesota, or Maryland was my goal, not Harvard.
Now that I have left the field and can speak freely, I would like to go over certain aspects of the shape of the field of African American Studies. In my view, this shape is bad for African American scholars of African American Studies, bad for non-African American Scholars of African American Studies, bad for African Americans who are not in African American Studies — and disastrous for the range and sophistication of scholarship and argument in the field. For all that, the observations below will make it clear that African American Studies is an extreme case of general institutional phenomena.
I begin with two things as given, one because academic English Departments can’t do anything about it (except by contributing to social change in general), and the other because academic English Departments are already doing the right thing. First, the reason there aren’t enough African American academics stems from the country’s refusal to educate African American elementary school students, to provide good health care and nutrition for African American infants. It stems from the funneling of African Americans into the state institution most set up under white supremacy for their “education”: prison. By the time African Americans become anything so peculiar as graduate students in English, they are either survivors, or people whose social position was always unrepresentative of the still largely segregated black community. Second, affirmative action remains a limited but nevertheless appropriate and ethical policy. While university English Departments cannot directly intervene in white supremacy at the sites of elementary education or the prison system, affirmative action must continue to exist precisely because this is where intervention is possible for English departments. Students need to see black teachers and black scholars; black scholars need money, position, and allies to confront the continuing everyday discrimination they face.
So my comments here are in no way in opposition to affirmative action. They are an attempt to speak openly about what so many people I know have been whispering for years: about what happens in an environment where affirmative action is uncoupled from other forms of justice, so that the scarcity of black professionals is crossed with the unhealthy practices of the academic hiring system which emerge from the micropolitics of university departments I described above.
Academic hires are always maneuvered from the point of view of alliances; in general academics prefer not to hire anyone than to have a line filled with their micropolitical enemies. When academics speak about the underemployment of Ph.D.s they are never honest about this. It is true that governing bodies in the US don’t fund higher education (or any education) at the level they should. It is also true that Deans and administrations count on a certain number of lines going unfilled every year in order to save money. If suddenly every single academic department committed itself, as an ethical action, to filling every line it had regardless of the supposed imperfections of those on the market, it would significantly reduce the number of unemployed. This might well lead to direct, and desirable, confrontations between departments and university administrations, and in turn legislatures.
I have not done the empirical research, so I can be proven wrong, but I’m betting I won’t be: there is no field in English departments where a smaller percentage of positions advertised are filled in any given year than African American Studies. Here’s a list of reasons and consequences, all of which emerge from the premises I’ve already presented:
1. When a specific African American scholar gets through the eye of the needle, s/he is acclaimed and receives an unusually high number of job offers. Departments and deans work especially hard to recruit her/him. Yet given the enormous amount of time and energy it has taken to evaluate this individual for hire and to recruit him/her, the departments that fail to hire their first choice are very unlikely to move on to other candidates.
2. Non-African American students are discouraged from committing themselves to African American Studies by fears of the job market. Everyone getting a Ph.D. in American literature now includes a novel or two written by a person of color in their dissertation. Yet almost no nonblack candidates actually receive primary training in the field, or devote their entire dissertations to it. As a result it is often a legitimate complaint that they are not adequately qualified to teach in the field. This in turn, of course, warps the kinds of research actually done in the field by white scholars past the dissertation level. In the past few years, when so many white faculty members whose early work is not in African American Studies have published books in the field, it has become overrepresented by scholarship that imagines it as a subfield of American Studies, rather than a field in which an autonomous culture and literature is studied. As a result, those who argue in favor of anything like the autonomous study of black literature outside the mainstream of American literature are on the defensive, and considered “old-fashioned.” I do not make this comment because I oppose specific arguments, but to point out that the current prominence of arguments for interracialism, rather than the autonomy of black culture, among nonblack scholars is probably better explained by the paths that most widely lead to their publication in the field than by anything resembling “truth.” This in turn has huge implications for how people of all racial backgrounds get trained in the field, who can get hired to teach black literature, and which black scholars will be acclaimed.
3. African American students are discouraged in subtle ways from entering any field other than African American Studies. Partly this is because of the presumption that the field is the one they are most likely to be hirable, but I doubt very much this is the main reason. Rather, it is an understandable response to the structure of lived African American experience, which suggests that if they don’t concentrate specifically on African American texts, no one will. Yet many African Americans who at 20 or 25 feel this intensely, will feel restricted by this later, as their authority to teach the same variety of classes their as white colleagues teach is questioned.
4. The overall result of the previous two points is that even years after prominent scholars like Nellie McKay started discussing the problem publicly, at the junior level field hires remain affirmative action hires and affirmative action hires remain field hires. The vicious circle remains difficult to escape. If a department uses a line to hire a non-African American scholar, they fear that they have tied up an Affirmative Action position for 25-35 years. They will, of course, make no effort to hire an African American to teach Shakespeare.
5. Of course, most African Americans are not superstars on the job market either. Only a certain kind of African American is, and this kind, because of the dominance of arguments for interracialism, and the putative alliance between contemporary theory and the social movements of the 1960s, is those whose research is theoretical rather than literary-historical in character. This may well have helped me get a job, as my research was in theory, not literary history. But this emphasis tends to produce an imbalance in overall scholarship in the field which contributes to its continued underdevelopment and marginalization. Only a sectarian thinks that Critical Theory is the only thing worth doing.
6. Even those African Americans who are spectacularly successful on the job market are not advantaged by this within several years. Such individuals are unusually likely to be asked onto multiple committees and to accept the responsibilities of “representation” on their campuses. They also often, rather than settle down and finish their work, which they receive little collegial support to do, instead fly around being stars, and indeed applying for other jobs, at the encouragement of their micropolitical allies. The result is that the country is filled with brilliant African American scholars — in specific cases the most brilliant people I know — who sit on dozens of university and profession-wide committees, who appear on half a dozen or more campuses every year, who don’t finish books or publish much at all. In turn their white supporters start mumbling about them, and initial difference in salary, which favored African Americans because of scarcity, will over the course of their careers disappear as white scholars who publish more and do less move into powerful positions in the profession.
7. Nonblack and unprestigious black scholars fill the jobs at relatively undesirable schools. The richest schools always manage to pay someone enough to stay. With very few exceptions, the middle of the profession is a revolving door featuring a spectacular number of unfilled lines, the same ones advertised year after year. I personally have interviewed multiple times for the same line at several schools. The single most dramatic case of this — the story of which will not be told here, the full story of which I will never know — is also the specific experience that set me on the course that ended on my resignation.
8. In spite of the supposedly massive amount of new scholarship in the field, everyone is in fact sitting around waiting for the next big theory out of the mouth of the next big African American graduate student, instead of developing and refining — or even bothering to read — what has already been written.
3 On Ambivalence and Commitment
Because department life alienates people once committed to the life of the mind; because the job market creates huge numbers of unfilled positions; because everyone believes that in a just world they’d be someplace better than where they are, the academy breeds ambivalence. A certain line of poststructuralist theory associated with Homi Bhabha among others has raised ambivalence to an ethical principle. For people of this ethical persuasion, the opposite of ambivalence is certainty, and anyone who suggests in their demeanor too much in the way of certainty is prima facie unethical. Of course, anyone who has ever listened to a liberal Cold War physicist speak of the supremacy of western scientific method because unlike all other methods, it presumes that nothing is certain, all can be disproven, knows that there is nothing new, or uncertain, about such a stance.
For marxists, the opposite of ambivalence is not certainty, but commitment. The relationship between ambivalence and commitment is structured like the Democratic Centralist Organization: of course there is controversy within the organization, but after specific processes and at specific times acting collectively is more appropriate than maintaining a stance of public dissensus.
For those who espouse the principle of ambivalence, certainty always leaves festering a certain remainder, which will come out. For those most committed to psychoanalytic criticism, repressed uncertainty appears in everything from the typos in your book to the violent outbreaks within everyday masculinity. Of course these scholars are correct. Nor does anything in this essay, or in marxism, suggest that one ignore this.
Yet for those who are committed to a nonsectarian left politics — among whom one is much more likely to find marxists than poststructuralists these days — the ability to agree to broad principles regardless of the reality of uncertainty remains central. In a capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal machine, coming to reasonably accurate terms (like the ones I just used) and plugging away at them is a primary meaning of left politics. So is supporting others whose terms are approximately, though not precisely, like yours. So is the institutional and ongoing linkage of your version of “plugging away” with those, on and off campus, inadequately theorized efforts which respond to different discursive and economic locations from one’s own institutional location.
On the one hand, successful academics are unusually bad at doing anything except arguing that their own position is correct. On the other, the practical inability to convince anyone except your four closest allies of your position produces the everyday experience of ambivalence. And right now, in the US academy ambivalence is the excuse for any and all personal unethical behavior that the middle class careerist engages in. After all, the paths of desire lead surprising places, and what were you expecting anyway, purity?
4 On the Joy of Leaving One’s Job
I am postacademic, not anti-academic, so let me recall the obvious. Academics do socially valuable work, both as scholars and as teachers. People whose most profound role is to think are absolutely necessary to anything resembling a “culture.” Academics have, compared to most workers, a substantial amount of freedom to make their own schedules, and a significant amount of time off. Academics are mostly doing what they claim they want to be doing. I claimed this when I was an academic, and I have never come to doubt the relevance of the work I did.
Thus the question: why are academics so miserable? Why has my resignation produced the most profound joy, the sense that I can finally get on with the things that are genuinely important to me?
Love. Academic careers are unusually disruptive to romantic relationships. I have no desire to fetishize marriage, let alone monogamy. I merely point out that lots of us still settle down with a single individual for an extended period of time, and that while an academic career is not unique in producing problems, it is extreme. We tend to start collecting a salary very late, between 28-35, and until then work exceptionally hard for no money and with massive uncertainty. Then we move. Most often we have no control about where we will live, a fact that produces more than the occasional break-up of a good relationship.
To this I would add the ambivalence, that, as I have been arguing, has its material basis in the navigation of a micropolitical environment that does not support the work we claim to be passionate about. A moment ago I acted as though the main framework for understanding the ambivalence of academics is political. But I was always thinking of ethical behavior in interpersonal relationships: of love. Of course one’s partnership may always break up, but there is a nonarbitrary relationship between staying in my marriage and us both choosing a common place to live over the never ending pursuit of those two jobs at the same university where we don’t really want to be anyway. Commitment is the choice to act in practical terms on the premise that you want to be with someone, that you believe in something as true. As an academic I was ambivalent, not committed, and nearly lost my marriage. This did not make me happy. And it is not idiosyncratic.
Location. Though in graduate school many of us say “I could live anywhere with my work,” this turns out not to be true. It might turn out to be true if we were treated well when we got to places thousands of miles from where we grew up and from where we were trained. But where one has neither a community of familiarity, nor a genuine intellectual environment, one is unlikely to know what one’s work is, let alone accomplish it.
This is why I went from being a participant in specific, local, political movements to being “global,” or at least travelling all the time. Because there weren’t enough people in Knoxville who shared my interests. And so while I am not arguing that localism or parochialism is any more useful a form of politics than cosmopolitanism, I am suggesting that the tendency for academics to assert the cosmopolitan as generally progressive is self-justifying and self-serving, a matter of relative class privilege, the ability to escape the local conditions one doesn’t like. Some academics build genuinely useful networks; others simply avoid responsibility for what needs to be done where they are.
Congregation. I was raised in a synagogue, and have been resolutely secular since shortly after my Bar Mitzvah. Maybe those of you who didn’t grow up in religious environments really are different from me, but I can now admit to myself something I didn’t know for a long time: that the academy was, for a time, my congregation. A congregation is not a set of people who agree; and it need not even be a bunch of people who believe. It merely needs to be a bunch of people who address each other as seekers, without fear. If an English Department can’t be that, what’s the point? If it’s just more alienated labor, I can do that elsewhere, thank you, with better consequences for the rest of my life.
So you can laugh all you want. I won’t tell you there’s no micropolitics in the nonprofit arts community I now work in, or that I’m making the revolution through my participation in poetry slam. I will tell you that I seek (very Protestant, very “American”) solace in the testimony of slam poets, our mutual desire to shout into a microphone “this is the root of my alienation.” Even in postmodern times, do-it-yourself art, the art of people who survive through other means, retains a political potential, an intellectual energy, a form of commitment to community building that I believe has fundamentally dissolved in the professional world of the academy.
And, yes, I know the critique of that position. So what?
