To work in academe is to live at an angle slightly askew to the regular run of American life. This is especially true if you work in its lower rungs. Here, time seems to move more slowly. Money has only a notional relation to work. The values are monastic, but the lifestyles aren’t. A sense of incipient but ever-deferred catastrophe hangs in the air. Melancholia reigns.
As a Ph.D. student in history, I’ve long wondered why this should be. What in the past made American academe so strange? In some ways, of course, it isn’t so unusual. Like many other American industries, it enjoyed a brief and unrepeatable boom after World War II. This was followed by two or three decades of low tuition, solid benefits, and expanding opportunities, and then a long slow decline brought on by neoliberal retrenchment. The current world of academic work, precarious as it is, simply shares in all the pathologies of the work force as a whole.
Institutions don’t die for lack of meaning. People do.
This, however, doesn’t capture the full picture, for as much as academe is shaped by the pressures affecting the economy as a whole, it also remains a society apart. In searching for a historical analogy to help us understand our current predicament, I recently experienced a pang of recognition in an unexpected place: Beyond Nationalism, the historian István Deák’s magisterial 1990 history of the Hapsburg and Austro-Hungarian officer corps.
How does the life of a present-day graduate student or junior faculty member resemble that of a 19th-century Hapsburg army officer? Let me count the ways.
A majority of Austro-Hungarian officers were born to fathers who were already in the military, making the officer corps resemble a closed caste, with only a small side door for outsiders to enter. Based on my experiences at least, this reliance on hereditary enlistees is increasingly true of American academe today.
The parallels continued through the long years of training, conducted in military schools in conditions of near confinement. Through most of their careers, but especially at the beginning, officers had almost no control over their lives. Once they graduated, they had six weeks’ leave, after which they took a train to their new post. These postings were scattered across the Empire. Usually, they were far from comfort and excitement, and the only sources of recreation were gambling and drink. Much of one’s time would now be spent training very raw recruits.
Once in the army, officers’ lives were organized to the minute by a vast and overweening bureaucracy. Officers were not permitted to eat in “low-class” restaurants, to ride an omnibus, to travel third class, or to “carry the smallest of packages (unless it appeared to contain chocolate or candies).” A request to buy a cat for hunting mice in the barracks had to pass through the hands of 48 administrators before it could be granted.
The bureaucracy decided whether one could start a family. Officers in the Hapsburg monarchy could not marry without official permission, and official permission was only granted if they could post a “marriage bond” — a lump sum, the interest of which could provide for the necessities of family life (and support a war widow, if need be). On the plus side, internal evaluations were characterized by a familiar sort of grade inflation. A “fairly good rider” did not know how to ride a horse; a “good shot” couldn’t hit a barn. It was very difficult to be so incompetent as to be fired. One was much more likely to die in a duel.
Being an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army exposed one to all sorts of unpleasantness. Military writers described it as “a wandering, restless existence,” characterized by poor pay, involuntary celibacy, exile, boredom, and the distant prospect of a violent death. There was only one compensation for all these sacrifices: the officer’s elevated status. Officers lived in society but were not quite of it. Nor were they enmeshed in party politics. They served the Emperor directly. They had to be ready to die for him. In his novel The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth described the sense of separation this duty brought about:
The officers went about like incomprehensible worshipers of some remote and pitiless deity, but also like its gaudily clad and splendidly adorned sacrificial animals. People stared after them, shaking their heads. They even felt sorry for them. They have lots of privileges, the people told one another. They can strut around with sabers and attract women, and the Kaiser takes care of them personally as if they were his own sons. And yet before you can even bat an eyelash, one of them insults another, and the offense has to be washed away in blood!
Dueling was the mark by which officers’ signaled the difference of their caste. It also served to paper over the differences between them. For the fact was, they lived their lives on two very different tracks. As Deák puts it, “in few public institutions did rank count for more than it did in the military.” A brisk career brought an officer good pay, challenging assignments, posting in a big city, a shower of decorations, a shot at the nobility, enhanced marriage prospects, and better schools for his children. A slow career, on the other hand, meant poverty, social isolation, the ennui of a remote garrison, the deadly routine of treating raw recruits, and having to take orders from superiors who were former classmates.
American academe today likewise operates on two tracks. In my experience, it’s about a 50-50 proposition. Even if you have little control over where you ultimately end up, roughly half of us who enter get to have a stable life, with a secure job, the ability to afford a house and raise a family. The other half never find a permanent perch. They shuffle from postdoc to postdoc and temporary appointment to temporary appointment, while living in the vast, slow, empire of waiting. That, or they disappear completely.
This raises the question: What is it all for? Even if in their last days the officers of the Hapsburg monarchy knew their mode of life was outmoded and their Empire doomed, at least they had their Emperor, and their honor. In the academy today we have — what exactly?
The First World War swept the world described by Deák away. For all the catastrophism present in thinking about the academy today, a disaster may not free us any time soon. In the meantime, what exactly are our lives in service to? A political cause? An abstract idea, like academic freedom, or progress in the human sciences? It would be a great thing to figure out, and soon. To paraphrase the American art critic Dave Hickey: Institutions don’t die for lack of meaning. People do.
