When considering an occupation, most people look for a role model. They look around their professional world and ask, “Is there anybody here whom I would like to be like in 20 years? Are there older versions of me here? More accomplished, certainly, but basically like me.”
I have never found anybody working in English departments whom I wanted to emulate, or with whom I ever felt any connection. That, more than any other reason, is probably why I didn’t find a full-time job in academe and why, after my first year on the market, I didn’t look too hard and focused instead on making money and doing other things—for example, traveling, getting engaged, volunteering for my church, and training as a glider pilot.
It’s not that I don’t respect anyone. It’s just that very few of those I do respect are English professors.
Partially, it’s a gender problem. I can’t use women as role models because they are not like me. We think differently. What motivated me to go to graduate school was different from what seems to have motivated many tenured female academics I’ve talked to. Much of what I’ve heard from older women about why they became professors revolves around issues of professional acceptance, equity, the desire to allow other women’s voices to be heard, and wanting a place in which to say what’s on their minds. Also, many of the older female professors I’ve known were quite angry about those issues.
While I can certainly understand their drives, they are not mine. So, tipping my hat to women in English departments, I can discard them as role models.
So, what about the men?
I began to realize during graduate school that I was different from most of my male professors and even my male classmates.
Part of that disconnect stems from the fact that I’m a strange mix of values and upbringing. I think of myself as a postmodern baby with high modernist values. I was a dinosaur the moment I was born. Hatched in 1967, I am a Gen Xer. However, my parents were not boomers. My father was born in 1927 and my mother in 1933. The baby boom, like a plague of locusts, passed the Texter household by. I remember when I was 17 asking my father if he had fought the establishment in the 1960s. He smiled and said, “I was the establishment.”
True enough. He was an elementary-school principal.
I am not like most Gen Xers in the academy in that my outlook on life revolves around very traditional markers of success: money, family, religious commitment, and, because I do like writing, influence.
Of course, I respect intellectual achievement, too. I graduated near the top of my class at a competitive high school, attended an Ivy, and have written quite a bit. Most of the men I’ve gotten along with went to the Ivies or places like Emory, or, significantly, are European. Most of them, though, were not English majors. They studied business, political science, history, prelaw, and environmental design. Many of my friends in college weren’t even students. (They were fund raisers for Greenpeace and the Public Interest Research Groups, for which I worked during summers and immediately after graduation.)
In my Ph.D. program, I realized that what I respect intellectually is very different from what most of my cohort in the English wing of the academy does.
A recent experience is illustrative. I conducted an interview with an older male writer who graduated from my alma mater in the late 1960s. Wanting to be a writer of satire, he had studied with Joseph Heller as an undergraduate. I had known about this writer from my alma mater, but I had not read much of his work. So, in the two weeks before the interview, I devoured six of his novels.
I was amazed. He demonstrated the kind of distinctly male intellectual engagement with the world I valued, with characters who took heroic actions and wrestled deeply with intellectual problems—pirate philosophers. The writer’s worldview was deeply informed by the Enlightenment, by Voltaire, Swift, and Franklin, and when he and I talked, he expressed disdain for what he sees as contemporary academe’s dismissal of Enlightenment values.
He embodied the kind of intellectual swashbuckling I had wanted in graduate school and not found. Only one professor or graduate student I have ever met has this sense of intellectual derring-do, and I encountered him in England, where he teaches at the University of London.
Meeting this writer saddened me in a way. I realized how much time I had wasted in graduate school, where most of my engagement with the world of ideas came through writers like Marcuse, Adorno, Foucault, and other theorists—stuff I really didn’t like and that I wouldn’t read again if you paid me.
The people and writers I like have a sense of adventure, wit, and intellectual fearlessness. Those are not the values of most of the men I’ve met in English departments. In 15 years in and out of the discipline of English (including a few stints in publishing), I have made exactly three male friends (other than college and high-school chums and my fund-raising colleagues). That’s not enough.
In my master’s program, I made one male friend, who subsequently dropped out of a Ph.D. program at the University of Maryland at College Park. In my Ph.D. program, at the University of Minnesota, I made another male friend, who, interestingly, was Scottish, not American. The last I heard, the only job he could find was at a university in Lebanon. I made a third friend at one of the community colleges in Minnesota where I taught. He had written a few “Guy Noir” skits for Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion radio show and spent 12 years being spat on professionally as an adjunct in order to get a full-time job. He did land that job, but I don’t think I’m willing to pay that high a price for an academic position. The benefits don’t outweigh the costs.
*****
I also feel set apart by the values I learned at the all-male Catholic high school I attended in Pennsylvania. They were very different from those I saw in graduate school or in any of the institutions at which I’ve taught. Yes, there was intellectual rigor. A lot of it. Try six hours of homework a night while participating in debate, Spanish club, marching band, and AP programs, and having a new dating life. The school more or less catered to working- and lower-middle-class Catholic families, and, back in the 80s anyway, sent two or three people every year to the Ivies.
The values I learned to appreciate in high school were competition, controlled combativeness, achievement, honor, and impish humor. What I encountered in graduate school, on the other hand, were learning how to fawn and flatter and being made to defend ideas and political positions that I didn’t think were worth much.
In my Ph.D. program, especially after prelims, I lived a double intellectual life. I did all the stuff that I was supposed to do (and a lot more), but I also wrote genre fiction and attended science-fiction-writing workshops.
Many of the male (and female) science-fiction writers I’ve met are brilliant and fun to be with, unlike most of my teachers, colleagues, and fellow students. More important, they gave me something to aspire to, something I never had in graduate school. They write stories meant to be read by more than 25 specialists. At least one of them, the author of Jumper, produced a book that later became a movie. Another writes some of the tie-in novels to Star Wars films. A third wrote my favorite episode of the original Star Trek, “City on the Edge of Forever.” Their work, which often deals with the fate of nations and worlds, brings delight to millions of people. That’s a profound privilege that I would very much like to earn.
My deep estrangement from the academy probably came to a head while I was living my double life. At these writing workshops, I met men who were deeply engaged intellectually but who were not academics. Most of them had read far more than I had and are better prose stylists than I can ever hope to be.
At one workshop, one of the instructors was a brilliant editor who works at a major science-fiction publishing house in New York. I committed the faux pas of asking him where he had gone to college. He hadn’t. I realized then what a profound disparity there can be between academic credentials and intellectual abilities. I had never met anybody in graduate school as challenging as he was.
A few years ago, I reviewed Robert Conroy’s novel 1942 for Strange Horizons, an online magazine of science-fiction writing. The book imagined what could have happened if the Japanese had invaded Hawaii after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. A few days after Strange Horizons posted the review, the editor asked me to look at the comments.
S.M. Stirling, one of the best-selling writers of alternate history (a subgenre of fiction that deals with historical “what-ifs”), had steamed onto the site like a battleship. Deeply conservative, with a reputation for intellectually shredding people (he is a former lawyer), Stirling opened fire at me. The editor said, “If you don’t want to engage him, I won’t blame you.” But I did. I barely held my own in the encounter, but in about two bloody exchanges, I got more intellectual stimulation than I had in years in graduate school. While I disagree almost completely with everything S.M. Stirling has to say, I learned that the enemy is a very good teacher. And, as is not the case in peer review, Stirling and I each knew the identity of the other. We bashed each other intellectually in open combat. Stronger than I am, he pretty much won. But his was an honest intellectual attack, and I found it refreshing and exciting.
After teaching 150 credits in three and a half years, I made some money, and my evaluations and online ratings indicate that I did some good work and helped my students. But I never felt a sense of intellectual camaraderie with my peers or colleagues.
The adjunct work has dried up, and I’m basically moving on with my life. I feel as if I don’t belong in academe. And you know what? That might not be such a bad thing after all.
