Why I'll Never Join the Academe

On Being Spurned and Jilted by the Professorial Class

by patrick clark

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Illustration by Elizabeth Hershey
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My first girlfriend, Emily, told me that she thought I should be a college professor. It was the summer before my senior year of high school and I was convinced that I was in love, so of course I agreed with her. When we broke up that winter, I realized that she wasn't right about everything. But I still thought she was onto something when she said I was bound for academia. The memories that defined our relationship had little in common with what popular culture told me should characterize high school love—we talked about Latin American politics on bus rides to cross country meets and she ignored me when I talked about literature while we canoed.

My 17-year-old self thought that these were things that boys predestined for academic tenure might do. Four years later, I sometimes wish we could've made out a little more behind football bleachers and ditched the intellectual pretense. She was right about a lot of things, but she was wrong about me. I'm not sure what I want to do, but I'm not going to be a professor. While I harbor no ambitions of national heroism, I want a career that is both personally satisfying and deeply socially relevant. Although professors' individual research interests are often generated by or wedded to pressing social issues, significance to a general audience is not a necessary criterion for academic research. When academics address the significance of their research, they must only speak to how their research pertains to their disciplinary community.

Me, Myself And The University

A year before, I was blindly and falsely in love with a girl who was always right. The fall of 2003 was the period of my naïve faith in academic culture. To some, universities are havens of sinful excess—I once heard James Carville say that his blood alcohol content was higher than his GPA when he graduated from Louisiana Sate University. To me, college was more; it validated my love of reading books as socially relevant. The sermon that universities preach—that higher education can help redress glaring societal inequalities, that learning is vitally important and that liberal education produces enlightened citizens—assured me that college truly and universally mattered. Scholars, by producing knowledge and transmitting it in the classroom, also mattered.

I still believe that college matters, but I question how many professors chose their profession because of its social relevance. There is something about academia that is intrinsically selfish; while universities as institutions may educate students in civic values, I doubt that professors consider "civic educator" their primary identity. Deep personal fascination generates research interests in such topics as animal behavior or Victorian literature. Writing a book or researching for an article is a tedious and onerous process that can only be sustained by enduring personal interest. The inherent selfishness of academic work is necessary to perpetuate the academy (I certainly hope that nobody would attend graduate school in the spirit of martyrdom), but it has given birth to such arcane sub-disciplines as "Cultural and Food Studies."

Free Love Or Intra-Disciplinary Incest?

Last fall, I bought all my academic books from amazon.com instead of taking the trip down Thayer St. to peruse the Brown University Bookstore. This provided me with an interesting case study in the limited market for academic books. Amazon, in a corporate attempt to be "user-friendly" (read: sell more books) created a feature called "users who bought this book also bought." This feature offers a list of approximately five other recommended titles that a customer should consider purchasing. I began my Amazon experience with my syllabus for AN0140: War and Culture. First on the list was: A Different Kind of War. After dropping the necessary $21.95, I moved down to the list of recommendations feature and clicked on the first link, which was also a book on the AN0140 syllabus. I continued this process until I had purchased every book on the syllabus. This experience told me two things: 1) very few people buy books about war-zone anthropology and 2) most of the people who buy such books probably do it for Professor Catherine Lutz's class.

This limited readership is typical in the academy. Another one of my professors once joked that she writes for an audience of about five peers and their students. While the specialized nature of intensive study automatically limits an audience—how many people want to or have the background knowledge to read about the liberalization of post-Soviet economic policy? —I can see professors becoming imprisoned by their academic disciplines. Peer reviewed journals, the standards of academic excellence, are little more than refined correspondence between friends with similarly narrow interests.

Perhaps more damning than arcane research interests is the exclusionary tone that pervades academic work. In his essay Scholars and Sound Bites: The Myth of Academic Difficulty, Gerald Graff offers a historical explanation for this—mass media and the modern academy emerged simultaneously, causing academic writing to define itself against popular writing. A certain level of inaccessibility, Graff argues, affirms scholars' egos: academic writing cannot be reduced to its essentials, academic writing cannot be understood by laypeople, and academic writing's difficulty expresses the conceptual difficulty of superior thought. There is a governing myth in the scholarly community that to reduce academic writing is to simplify ideas and compromise the work's integrity.

The recipe for an ideal academic paper—equal portions of opaque style and narrow scope—is fitting for a profession that primarily looks inward. As a doe-eyed freshman, I eagerly anticipated humanistic studies that were energized by regular contact with the world outside of academia. Anthropology, for example, is a discipline that touts itself for giving "voice" to "silenced" peoples—a task that can only be accomplished when professional anthropologists interact with the silenced people. This idea excited me: I loved the passionate purpose behind such work. But such disingenuous claims border on outrageous—anthropologists may give silenced people a voice in the academic literature (hidden somewhere between name-dropped theorists), but a voice in anthropological literature offers no guarantee of a say in cultural, social or political conversation. Although humanistic disciplines look outwards for inspiration, the scholarly output—the interpretation of this outside world—is directed back inwards toward an exclusive group of peers.

In order to reassert any claim that they have to wide social significance, academics must reengage in everyday life as public intellectuals. This might require that they tone down their specialized vernacular and sensitize their style to a popularized audience. Professor of Political Science James Morone made such an appeal in his latest title, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History. In an introductory polemic, he encouraged political scientists to reclaim their position as public intellectuals and cited his book as an attempt to do so. While his tone throughout the book is jocular and abstractions are supported by colorful anecdotes, the book's 592 pages will scare many readers away. Furthermore, Morone's admonition has not been heeded by his colleagues. Although academics occasionally write for The New Republic and other journals of opinion, they are rarely willing to translate their ideas into more accessible language or adapt their research to issues that matter outside of their sub-field.

This trend has been bucked in politicized disciplines that have captured the public interest. Brown's very own Professor of Biology Ken Miller has relished his role as a voice in the public debate on evolution, testifying before juries in Georgia and Pennsylvania and writing Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution, a popularized and personal meditation on the intersection of God and science. Meanwhile, other academic authors have entered the public debate through both the printed word and the blogosphere. Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, co-wrote the best-selling Freakonomics and writes a weekly column in The New York Times Magazine. Libertarian thinkers have reached out to the worldwide community with blogs such as The Marginal Revolution and Volokh Conspiracy.

Reactionary Ranting Of A Lover Spurned?

The university I imagined was a place of intellectual inclusion, an engine of social mobility, and a location that meshed my dual desires to learn for a living and do something that was explicitly beneficial to the larger community. Brown embodies much of this ideal; it provides a forum for intellectual debate and attracts activist students. While hiring and admissions practices are dedicated to inclusion, policies that advocate diversity within the academy do not necessarily make disciplinary discourses any less exclusive. The academic culture of "publish or perish" pressures junior faculty interested in tenure to privilege writing difficult "academic" texts over engaging in public debate or mentoring undergraduate students.

In short, the idea of a university with the primary objective of social relevance is as chimerical as the high school girlfriend who is never wrong. I don't regret dating Emily, but I wish that I saw her for what she was—an imperfect, occasionally selfish, but sincerely enjoyable girl. I am similarly ambivalent towards Brown and the American university system. It's not that I don't appreciate what Brown offers, but I'll attribute my erstwhile longing to stay here forever to youthful gullibility.

PATRICK CLARK B'07 would've perished if the Indy didn't publish this article.

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