So sorry for the radio silence, everyone. We were attending to a family crisis, which is now in limbo. Fun times!
In any case, I just wanted to post a wee note telling you what was up. Regular blogging resumes Monday!
The myth of merit
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.
There is no One True Calling
We have a lot of baggage around the idea of a calling, we people of this century.
Sometimes, the whole enterprise seems, well, self-indulgent and stupid. My mother’s father, for example, wouldn’t have recognized the question. He fought in WWII and sent money home to his family, he worked in the quarry, he volunteered at the fire department and the police station and the water station, he raised three girls with a wife he loved, and when they retired, he dragged my grandmother all over the country on special elder-tours. By all accounts he was satisfied with, even pleased with, his life, without ever engaging the idea that he needed to live out a special mission.
Sometimes people take it too far. I’ve watched more than one college near-graduate refuse to take a job on the grounds that it wasn’t inherently fulfilling to them, blithely neglecting to remember that the only way that works is if someone else, who isn’t necessarily thrilled with every moment of their job, either, subsidizes the project. (I suspect this is rarer now than it once was, the economy being what it is.)
And sometimes it sounds just a bit too religious for our intellectual, post-humanist selves.
Most of us, however, end up somewhere in the middle — longing for a sense of meaning, connection, and purpose while simultaneously not being convinced that anything we’re running up against is It.
It’s like we believe that what we need to do is just find our (avocational) soulmate, and then everything will be fine, everything will unfold after that, but this avocation has a bad sense of humor, and that one is too uptight about money.
This is why leaving academia can feel like divorce, right down to the question of who keeps which friends. We found our One True Love, but what happens when the shine is off that particular rose? Does that mean we’ve failed? Does that mean we’re doomed to marginal happiness ever after?
Just like there’s probably not one person in the whole world who will automatically make you happy forever, there’s no one calling that will make you happy forever. Rather, there’s no simple conception of your calling that will make you happy forever.
Your calling, just like your marriage, your relationships, your life, and you yourself, is always growing and evolving. You’re always learning more about it. New possibilities are always opening up. And that means that what was right five years ago isn’t necessarily right now, and what’s right now isn’t necessarily what will be right five or ten or twenty years down the road.
Because so many of us experienced our fields and our work as a calling, it can be brutally troubling to run up against dissatisfaction. Because we felt called to academia, realizing that call is no longer there is painful.
I don’t want to suggest that those losses shouldn’t be mourned if you’re experiencing grief. I do want to suggest that you open up your conception of yourself to see what you’re being called to now.
Parker Palmer talks about your calling as the place where your deepest desires meet the needs of the world. In other words, while there are any number of things you’re probably good at, and while there are infinite problems in the world to solve, the particular configuration of your heart and this moment illuminate what you’re being called to now.
What are you being called to now? How well does that calling work within the structures of academia?