One of academia’s very favorite myths is that everything within it is based on merit. Only the best students are accepted to the graduate program. The best students get fellowships and scholarships. The best students get the best jobs. The best work gets published. The best candidates get tenure.
And then there’s the flip side: If you didn’t get in to the program of your choice, it’s because you weren’t good enough. If you didn’t get the assistance that would have enabled you to actually get through the program, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough or you weren’t smart enough. If you didn’t get a job, it’s because you weren’t savvy enough, weren’t skilled enough, didn’t publish enough or strategically, didn’t have the right people behind you. If you didn’t get published, it’s because either your work was crap or you weren’t persistent enough. If you didn’t get tenure, you’re clearly not cut out for this system.
Even when we choose to walk away, these stories of failure dog us. (In our own minds, if nowhere else.) Leave before tenure? It’s because you couldn’t hack it. Decided not to go on the job market because you didn’t want to stay in academia? You wouldn’t have gotten a job anyway. Decided not to finish graduate school because it’s making you hate the universe? You weren’t smart enough to finish.
Excuse my language, but this is all a fucking load of steaming crap.
Even a cursory look around the academic landscape will reveal dozens of people you know personally who are brilliant, savvy, hard-working, and persistent and who have not “succeeded” in all of the ways academia suggests they will, what with all of those meritorious traits.
Brilliant and well-published graduate students who can’t find a job to save their lives because the job market sucks.
Smart, interesting researchers who don’t get published because their work doesn’t quite fit the neat little boxes of disciplines and journals or because they aren’t in the middle of the latest hot topic or trend.
Fabulous researchers and teachers who didn’t get tenure because they got caught in the gender politics of service.
I’m not saying that merit has no place in academia. But I am saying that, by the time we’re even as far as graduate school, absent true outliers, the differences between the “best” and the “worst” are, in some ways, often too small to be meaningful. Academia has been winnowing the pool since kindergarten, after all.
I am saying that the myth of merit doesn’t do us any favors. It doesn’t make most of us feel expansive and energized — it makes us feel small and scared and clenched. It doesn’t motivate most of us — it makes us avoidant and procrastinating and miserable. It doesn’t build us up — it makes us live in fear that, any day now, someone is going to figure out that we aren’t as smart as they think we are, and then they’ll kick us out.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t see a lot of merit to that situation.
We need to be suspicious of the myth of merit. We need to pay attention to how much outright luck contributes to “success” and “failure” in academia. We need to cut ourselves some fucking slack and begin to imagine that we are, in fact, smart, capable, wonderful people who, for various reasons, had a certain set of experiences with academia, some of which we had something to do with and some of which we didn’t.
This is fantastic. Every grad student should print it out and tape it to her wall. So much luck plays a part in getting an academic gig. We all have to agree that getting a job is a matter of luck these days. I think advisors would serve their students better if they flat-out told their students that they should do their best but they should also be prepared if luck doesn’t go their way.
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Post Academic
Very true. Especially in a collapsing job market like the one we see now (and for the last few decades). So few jobs that personal connections become much more important than merit. Unfortunately, I have so many examples of this within the US as well as abroad.
Speaking with former academic colleagues that are now in the hi-tech industry and in finance, I was surprised to hear that while these places naturally have inner-politics (with varying levels depending on place), then they were relieved to see it is significantly less of a determining factor in job applications. How much money you make for the company (or any other measurable achievement is much more important than personal ties).
As one of them said: if you’re not good, personal ties won’t help you (from getting fired), and if you’re good, you don’t need personal ties.
Of course there are many companies with exceptions to that, but I couldn’t find one academic institute whose hiring policy contradicts this.
How foolish and arrogant I was in graduate school, thinking academic life is so pure… but as they say, graduate time is the time to be foolish 😉