One chilly December morning in 2011, I awoke from unsettling dreams in a strange room in Indiana missing several key pieces of information. Among them were: where I was, what I was doing there, and my own name. I was relieved that unlike Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, I was still in human form—Gregor Samsa I remembered!—but everything else was terrifying.
Eventually, I managed to recall my name and that I was in a hotel room paid for by the generous organization that had also paid for my two-year postdoctoral position in the German program at Ohio State University. This was supposed to keep me from dropping out of academe until the literature job market rebounded.
I had been attending a meeting of postdoctoral grantees, during which I was told: “We will be watching you very closely to see if you get a job.” That had precipitated intense anxiety, which probably triggered temporary amnesia, the “dissociative fugue” from which I was now recovering. Oddly, this fugue state was an unsurprising development, since I had been in the process of forgetting who I was for seven years.
Back in 2005, I had entered my Ph.D. program insisting that I would complete the doctorate purely for my own edification, and that I was therefore immune to the dismal employment odds. And now here I was in Indiana, during what was shaping up to be my third failed go on a job market that had taken over my whole life.
On the drive home, I started to remember more: We had been asked to share our progress, as it was December, and interview requests were rolling in—but, once again, and despite the support of many of my field’s biggest wigs, they weren’t rolling in for me. I knew my unlikely chances, and the other grantees weren’t even Germanists, but I was reacting to their good news with self-loathing and jealous rage. What academic dreams had transformed me, by most prior accounts a nice person, into a monster?
There was little hint I’d develop a blinding obsession with joining the professoriate back in my undergraduate days. Junior year, for example, I became so uninterested in Heinrich von Kleist that I nearly failed two courses in the same semester (and one of them had nothing to do with Kleist). Indeed, between 1998, when I finished college, and my entree into doctoral study after seven years of working in media and publishing. I showed little promise of a scholarly future.
So how did I wake up that bare December morning a humorless, bitterly competitive scholar, so terrified of letting everyone down—my colleagues at Ohio State; the organization that paid for my postdoc there; the university press that had recently offered me a book contract; my former dissertation committee—that it literally broke my brain?
The uncomfortable truth, one that my patron saint William Pannapacker discussed back in his pseudonymous days, is that academe is sort of cultlike. And our cult changes people. Fifteen years ago, I was safe from recruitment because I thought grad school was for nerds. But around 2003, I realized that if I sat in front of a piece of difficult German literature or philosophy and really tried to understand it, I actually enjoyed the intellectual fruits of that labor. Meanwhile, I couldn’t relate to conversations at my job as associate editor of Dance Teacher magazine, which mostly involved “carbs” and the avoidance thereof.
I was a nerd, and a walking grad-school indoctrination target.
My tenured colleagues sometimes get offended when I compare academe to a cult—of course they would, they’re in the cult! Still, they must recognize the similarities. In literary studies, for example, we have our own lingo—French-theory jargon, which is nearly impossible for outsiders to parse. We have quasi-scriptures from worshiped nondeities—Derrida, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty—which we recite, from memory, to win arguments.
And we re-educate our ranks using the cult playbook. First, isolate graduate students from the outside world, not by physical barriers but by monopolizing their time with the requirement to read thousands of pages of obtuse prose nobody on the outside cares about. Then break the students down, via evisceration of their naïve early essays, and thereafter by comprehensive exams and the dissertation process. Finally, shortly before they defend their dissertations, call them “brilliant” and fill their heads with dreams of R1 glory. Make sure they know there is no other noble path outside the Life of the Mind.
And so we do what we’ve learned: We publish. We attend conferences as sycophantically as possible, going to panels at 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday so that we can sit in the front row where Bigwig Who Wrote His Paper on the Plane can be sure to see us laughing at his jokes. We (ludicrously) expect a job, then we just hope for one, then we stop hoping, but keep acting sycophantic on the off-chance that someone, somewhere might hire us. And if we have a word to say about the entire process that is anything short of adulatory, we say it under a pseudonym, like an alarming portion of the contributors to this very publication.
The Chronicle uses so many pseudonyms for a damn good reason, which ties into the final way in which academe resembles a cult: abject terror of being shunned. We low-ranking academics believe we will be shunned if we dare offend the sensibilities of someone who might be in a position to give us a job or tenure someday—you know, everyone. Shunning would mean the irretrievable loss of our entire selves, because our identities are now inextricably wedded to our academic worth.
So, despite academics’ reputation for being big-mouthed troublemakers, what we are instead—at least those of us without tenure—are pathological self-censors, even in private. And this is what allows the cycle to perpetuate itself: Academics do ill-advised things, like refusing to hire any mortal to work alongside the great Derrida (and thus nearly decimating an entire French department, as happened in the well-known case of my alma mater, the University of California at Irvine). And we just stand by, because we are so terrified of getting kicked out of the club that we self-censor until we forget our own names and don’t recognize our own faces in the mirror. And we still don’t get a job.
Speaking of not getting a job, you may be wondering why I am so comfortable running my mouth. It’s simple: I have very little to lose. I’ve decided that four years of anguish intense enough to induce a fugue state was enough, so next year there will be only 149 applicants per position in my field. You’re welcome.
I’m now aboard the “alt-ac” track, where there are opportunities immune to academic shunning. Still, it’s sometimes a painful struggle. As Jessica Collier recently wrote in the viral blog post “Jailbreaking My Academic Career,” letting go of something to which you have devoted an entire decade of hard work can seem like a death. But it’s the death of the monstrous idea that every sacrifice—even becoming an unrecognizable shell of one’s former self—is worth it.
In my case, I let that monster take me over—and now it’s time to kill it, so that I can move on with my life.
