Y outh, it is said, is wasted on the young. Likewise, I argue, life in academe is wasted on academics.
Here’s a well-kept secret: Life as a tenured college professor is the best America has to offer. Of course, listening to most professors you’d never know this. Academics love to complain about academe. Many of us inhabit a besieged mental space where haughtiness and self-doubt mix to grating results. Years in grad school, where we were harried transients starved for validation, not to mention powerless and broke, have honed our habits of anxiety and resentment.
What’s more, many academics share the dual curse of being both Lifers — having been in school for basically ever — and True Believers, having been fully absorbed into the system that made them. Academe is not merely their living but their life. It’s the only reality that’s really real.
This is unfortunate mostly because it makes for boring parties, but also because life in academe works best if you don’t care much about academe, in the same way that a life of wealth is better for people who don’t care too much about money.
I was already onto this dual curse by the time I entered academe. I grew up on an Israeli kibbutz, a small, rural community organized around Marxist principles. The Zionist pioneers who built the kibbutz were True Believers. Kibbutz kids like me were, by definition, also Lifers. Our communal ideals were the only legitimate criteria by which to gauge the worth of a life. Kibbutz reality was the only real one.
I left for America at age 26, a high-school dropout and army veteran with neither plan nor money. I knew not much about America and nothing at all about higher education. In many ways, I was behind my classmates at the community college where I took my first steps.
But in other ways I was ahead. Once you’ve escaped one matrix, you become hip to their existence. I recognized academe as a game long before I learned the rules. It was easy for me in grad school a few years later to resist the propaganda.
Thus academe as a calling — a system of meaning comprising an identity, and a set of criteria by which to measure self-worth — held little appeal for me. But I could see how it might work as a job, enabling, rather than constituting, a good life — a harbor rather than the sailboat.
Before I became acquainted with academe, I believed that one fundamental choice in life was between freedom and security. On the kibbutz, we gave up personal freedom for the security of the communal embrace. American life is premised on the opposite bargain: Shoot for the moon, but if you crash, tough luck. What I saw embodied in a faculty position was a new promise: a life combining security and individual freedom.
For security, you’d be hard pressed to beat the tenure system. My job and income are guaranteed. I also enjoy broad autonomy. Nobody monitors my movements or tracks my whereabouts. I don’t need to watch my back or kiss anybody’s backside. I choose what research interests to pursue and how to pursue them. I also choose which classes to teach and how to teach them.
This combination of autonomy and power gives rise to a sense of control, which, according to the research, is a strong predictor of well-being and happiness. It also helps that my work serves a good project. The educational system may have problems. But education itself is a solution.
Now granted, teaching well in college requires stamina, aptitude, and skill. But it’s not backbreaking. It isn’t lonely, pointless, or boring. And I get to spend much time with bright young people.
As a bonus, teaching also allows for the occasional touch of grace. A former student who wrote me recently about her fond memories of my class signed off: “Thank you for being that professor for me.”
Still, if I were a Lifer and a True Believer who lived for academe, then I’d have true cause to fret. Success by the rules of academe means working at a prestigious university, publishing a lot in top journals, being cited widely, and winning awards and large federal grants. I, on the other hand, work at a liberal-arts college that is largely absent from the national conversation. My scholarly output and reach are decidedly small-time. I have about 20 academic publications, which over the last 20 years have garnered about 250 scholarly citations. I’m no rainmaker. The largest grant I’ve ever received was in the low five figures.
Yet if I look at academe as enabling rather than constituting my life, the story takes a heartening turn. This job allows for peace of mind and ample free time. The job has allowed me to raise my daughter as a single father. If you like solitude — I do — then you can have it in abundance. If you enjoy travel, this job affords vast opportunities for travel without demanding it. You can teach abroad, lead travel classes abroad, or just use your free time for leisure travel.
The job allows me to keep a small private clinical practice, which I savor as a way to give back and also as a kind of inverted travel — I get to behold fascinating landscapes, internal ones, without having to leave my chair. The job has also allowed me time to develop my writing beyond academe — a satisfying pursuit, made more so by the fact that my livelihood is not dependent on it.
Not everything is golden, of course. College professors have their share of brain-numbing tasks. There’s old-fashioned paperwork and its evil digital twin, email; there’s bullshit, which is to life in academe what dust is to life on the farm. Grading is often a chore, apt to beget sinister dreams of oblivion.
Of greater consequence is the growing sense that the future is bleak for my little Eden in obscurity. When students now tell me they want to go to grad school so they can one day have my job, I tell them they shouldn’t — not because I’m afraid they’ll be coming for me, but because I’m afraid they will be going nowhere.
The charmed life of the tenured liberal-arts college professor is going away; in this I have little doubt. I recognize the signs — the rattle of loosening bonds; the odor of creeping inevitability — in part because I have been there before. The kibbutz system I grew up in is already gone, vanquished by the invisible hand of capitalism. In this way I am already a living fossil, the ghost of an extinct species. There’s sadness in that. But sadness is not the end of the world. It is just the world.
Perhaps academe will change for the better. The fact that social change upends things we like doesn’t render the change bad for society. But I think that those of us who are lucky enough to have this life should savor the immense joy of it. If we are wise rather than merely learned, in the future we’ll at least be able to say that we knew what we had even before it was gone.
Noam Shpancer is a professor of psychology at Otterbein University, in Ohio.