A few years ago, an Oxford don finally decided to take action against a rival professor: He killed him. Fortunately, murder is still fairly rare in academe, but enough backstabbing goes on in the profession to put Jacobean tragedy to shame. The public tends to think of academics as hyper-rational creatures, but the fact is that they live their careers through their emotions.
When I became a professor, I thought that all I needed to do to be successful was to teach well and to publish significantly as well as copiously. I thought that academe was a meritocracy, in which hard work and devotion to my subject would be recognized and rewarded. And in many ways they are. But what I didn’t learn in graduate school is that becoming a professor has more in common with court intrigue than with learned lucubration. I’d need to emulate Machiavelli as well as to teach him. I’d have to learn to deal with the emotional lives of my colleagues as well as with their intellects.
It took me a while to grasp this truth. I observed other junior colleagues who, like cygnets reared among ducks, seemed to glide elegantly around the murk of envy and resentment while I waddled and splashed water in the wrong faces. I remember one smooth fellow who, though he dressed unassumingly and looked like a naif, unerringly knew where the power was and how to feed the frenzy of honor and pride that governed it. Actually, this colleague was less like a swan and more like a shark.
I, on the other hand, lined my nest of learning with books and tried to incubate more. So ignorant of the ways of the world was I that an older colleague felt compelled to take me aside and counsel with a knowing wink that I should make more of an effort to “pump the fuds.” I nodded, but I really didn’t understand what he meant until years later. I thought he wanted me to ask the old-timers questions to learn what they knew, something I never did, because I felt, rather obnoxiously, that I was working on the cutting edge and they were not. But I didn’t realize that the cutting edge could cut both ways. In reality, he was telling me to play the game, make the “fuds” believe that I thought they were learned and wise and, more to the point, to acknowledge that I knew, above all, that they had the power to make me or break me.
What that colleague was trying to tell me was that in academe, as in the Mafia, honor, prestige, and reputation mattered perhaps as much as, if not more than, intellect. A don is still a don, whether Sicilian or Oxonian. While, at the time, I was leery of that cynical advice -- and still am -- I’ve come to at least respect my colleague’s attempt to wise me up. In Mob terms, I was no wise guy, and had to learn the hard way how to become a made man.
Academe may not have any unique claim to notions of honor and reputation, but those seem to play larger roles among professors than among, say, businesspeople. In the corporate world, you may hate or love your colleague, but all that ultimately counts is the bottom line. If someone rakes in the money or lands the big account, he or she can be rewarded with money. But in the world of academe, there is no end-of-the-year bonus.
And there is no sense that one person’s gain benefits the entire company. If someone writes the definitive book on the antebellum South, who profits? Certainly not one’s colleagues. The author may gain cultural capital but will often lose the goodwill of those around. Rival scholars threshing in the same field may think that a bigger sheaf for one means less to take home for them. Colleagues may feel diminished or passed by as merit raises and privileges fly over their heads and land at the feet of another. Indeed, the harvest in the groves of academe too often produces sour grapes and bitter whines.
Why should envy be crowned as one of the seven deadly sins when it is met every day on campus? Perhaps envy rises to the level of sin because it combines the purity of resentment with the complication of desire. We not only resent the good fortune of others, but we want that fortune for ourselves. In academe, envy gets an economic spin, stoked by the limits on resources and funds. Fame and honor are seen as the spoils of a zero-sum game in which there is not enough reward to go around. In colleges and universities, a new class war is being fought between those rich in cultural capital and those deprived of it. In the eyes of the impoverished, cultural capital only confirms, as the French anarchist Pierre Proudhon claimed, that “property is theft.”
The argument goes: If my colleague gets an award, I have been robbed of something. If someone publishes a book with a prestigious house, somehow all my books lose a bit of their luster. If another professor gets an offer from Harvard, then my remaining at a less prestigious institution now doubly stigmatizes me.
I remember a fellow graduate student who was up for the same job as I was. When the die was cast, and I got the position, he stopped talking to me and hasn’t said a word to me since. Although we had been office mates and friends, he apparently felt that I was somehow to blame for having succeeded, as if I had snatched the bone from his mouth or the laurel from his brow.
Life in the groves swings between envy and something else. The Germans have a word for that something else -- Schadenfreude: the feeling of joy upon hearing of the misfortune of one’s rivals. Even the most saintly among us has experienced that moment when we learn that someone -- preferably one whose work has challenged our own in some vicious way, or someone undeserving who has succeeded where we have failed -- has been turned down for a prestigious position, denied a success, or received a public humiliation. On the surface, we are all sorrow and consolation, clucking our tongues with our fellows, but, deep within, we experience a small sigh of relief, a glint of sunlight, a discreet triumphal fanfare. One feels the relief of survival, as if by this evil’s happening to another, it will not happen to us. For a moment, we subscribe in bad faith to the motto, “It’s not enough to succeed; one’s colleagues must also fail.” We draw in the sand the ancient line of self against other, like the old Jewish man who converted to Christianity on his deathbed. When his eldest son asked why, he replied, “Better one of them should die!”
No, this is not the best of what it means to be human. Rather, it is the fearful force that powers the malocchio, the evil eye; it is the superstition that suggests we spit twice to banish a curse or knock on wood to avoid disaster. Because, although academe is a secure place for those who have tenure, it is a dangerous place for those who do not. Even for those with tenure, it is a place of shifting sands and uncertain reputations. Those who live by reputations die by them. One is only as good as one’s last book, and one’s last book can be knocked off the shelf by someone else’s more recent book. So we plumb the depths of Darwinian struggle and shore up our fragility with the misfortunes of others.
Yet, despite my portrayal of the university as more of a snake pit than an ivory tower, I have found friendship, altruism, and compassion here. Maybe the swing of the pendulum from envy to triumph is not so base, but can actually teach us something new. At the very least, might not the baser emotions I have described drive us, paradoxically, to do better? Did Newton suspect himself to be a pipsqueak Jack, looking up at Galileo’s towering beanstalk, when he said that if he had seen farther than others, it was because he had stood on the shoulders of giants? Wasn’t Euripides spurred on when he realized that Sophocles and Aeschylus had won more play-writing competitions than he had? And Shakespeare didn’t close up shop after moaning that he desired “this man’s art, and that man’s scope.”
Indeed, envy may turn out to be the adrenaline of the academic world, lifting us above the apathy of passive admiration, and spurring us to see that the pen is mightiest when it has an edge.
Lennard J. Davis is a professor of English at the State University of New York at Binghamton and the author of My Sense of Silence: Memoir of a Childhood With Deafness, to be published in December by the University of Illinois Press.
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