There’s an old movie called Gaslight. In it, the husband attempts to convince his wife and the people around them that she’s crazy by changing small things in her environment and then telling her she’s imagining them.
Gaslighting has become a colloquialism for any situation in which someone is attempting to manipulate someone else’s sense of what is really happening.
The more I work with people who are unhappy in academia, the more I’m convinced that academic culture gaslights us as a matter of course.
A few examples
Jo Van Every and I cover some of this in our free Myths and Mismatches e-course, but there are a lot of stories academia tells itself that aren’t necessarily reflected in reality.
It’s about the Life of the Mind — but you’ll spend most of your time wrangling undergraduates and fighting with colleagues over very small things.
It provides an unparalleled opportunity for work / life balance — so long as “balance” means “you work at all hours and most holidays,” even if you can take your car in for an oil change at 2pm on a Thursday.
It’s a meritocracy — but who you know matters and thousands of qualified, passionate, excellent scholars can’t find work.
I’m overworked and miserable — but this is the best possible job in the whole world.
There are so many places where the story is different from the reality and calling out the reality is tantamount to saying the Emperor is showing his backside.
This isn’t deliberate
I’m not arguing that academia is deliberatly trying to make people insane. That would be going too far. But like every other relational system, it regulates itself by ensuring that everyone plays their role. Part of that includes people who are committed to academia defending it and justifying it to those of you who are unhappy or for whom the job just hasn’t materialized.
Sometimes we can see the gap between the story and the reality and, without discounting the reality, live inside the contradiction.
But when we’re in conflict with the system for whatever reason, we tend to doubt our own experience of reality.
I’m miserable, but maybe I’m just paying my dues and it will get better. There don’t seem to be any jobs, but maybe that’s just me being defeatist and I need to keep applying. I don’t think I like the work of being a professor, but what if this really is the best job in the world and everything else will suck even more?
When we hit that space of doubting our lived experience, it can feel impossible to get out of. We’re so trained to rely on experts — and we so rarely feel like an expert ourselves — that we can believe the stories are true.
This, right here, is one of the hardest parts about leaving: legitimizing your own experience and judgment and seeing the stories for what they are.
No one knows better than you do
No one knows your values better than you do. No one knows your limits better than you do. No one knows your preferences and desires better than you do. No one knows your satisfactions better than you do. No one knows your bottom line needs better than you do.
No one knows what you should do better than you do. And no one knows what you are and have been experiencing better than you do. It’s just not possible.
If you’re feeling really muddled and unsure, try articulating your experience without judgment. This happened and then this happened and then this happened. Write it down. Seeing it written down can give you enough distance to believe it, in a sense. And that makes it easier to see the stories as stories that may or may not explain your experience.
And don’t even get me started on racial issues, which officially “don’t exist” in the “meritocratic, color-blind” academy. It is SHOCKING to see still abysmally white, both male and female, faculties even as numbers of non-white PhDs are increasing. Coincidence? “Me thinks not.” And, oh boy, if I could only articulate the names and the discrimination I’ve seen committed by “wise, liberal, white” scholars.Furthermore, it is exhausting to consider how much mediocre scholarship gets celebrated as exceptional because of “academic economies.”
Sigh. At the end of the day it’s the students who suffer the most.
Nice post and website. I only recently discovering this ex-academic community. I left academics in 2007. I started writing about it recently when inspired by a similar story of a former baseball player who’s experience in the minors reminded me of my mindset in academics. His book was called “The Bullpen Gospels”. So I called the series of posts I’ve been writing “The Grad School Gospels”. I never intended for it to be a series, but I just kept finding more bits of inspiration as I read his book, and then would occasionally think of more ideas for posts – e.g., how could grad students – people who tend to pride themselves on being good thinkers and researchers – fail to do their research into and critical evaluate grad school as a life choice? I focused on this on the 4th entry.
Anyhow, here’s the first one (it has links to the rest of the series): http://deathbytrolley.wordpress.com/2012/12/22/the-grad-school-gospels-on-professional-baseball-academia-and-my-shared-experience-with-dirk-hayhurst/
Ron Brown´s last blog post ..Society is handcuffed in the Prisoner’s Dilemma: How fear, distrust and a lack of organization continually does us in
YES! This is another big one. Oppression rewritten as an intellectualized, anti-identity-politics liberalism. Bah!
It is the students who suffer most, although faculty of color are right behind them.
I never thought of the baseball minors / grad school parallel, but it’s really apt. And of course puts Bull Durham in a whole new light.
Grad students: Academics minor leaguers, Minor leaguers: Baseballs grad students 🙂
Ron Brown´s last blog post ..Society is handcuffed in the Prisoner’s Dilemma: How fear, distrust and a lack of organization continually does us in
This is a great post. I really appreciate that you highlight the fact that ‘only you know’ so many things about yourself. When you start seeing academia more critically, colleagues will come up with reasons why things are the way they are, or why you should stick it out. While you can consider their comments, always remember that in the end it’s you who decides exactly what you must do. Not them! You hit the nail on the head – repeatedly. 🙂