Bewildering & Unsettling

Since 2008 began, particularly this past month, several friends and acquaintances of mine from the world of academia have ended up either seriously contemplating a departure from academia or actually exiting. The stages they're in range from "almost ABD" to "tenured and sick of it". I am told by "them" that this isn't surprising given the attrition rate in social science Ph.D. programs. I have, however, no official stats on tenured professors deciding they've had just about more than they can take.

Cut to any of the critical points in the academic cycle i.e. completed coursework to ABD, ABD to PhD, Ph.D to tenure-track positions (often punctuated by postdocs and horribly underpaid adjuncting gigs), tenure-track to tenured (where the horrors of the process might favor the mediocre rather than the wonderfully accomplished), and so on and so forth.

That's when it seems to change perhaps - or is changing of late?

Of all the people I've spoken to are brilliant minds (no-one else really opts to pursue a PhD so that isn't at all surprising) and hardworking, dedicated souls and stellar scholars. The reasons I've heard have more to do with extenuating life circumstances. For example, the "almost ABD" who can no longer continue the program because his/her committee members failed to read his/her proposal when s/he submitted it a semester ago and s/he has no way of funding himself/herself through this process because of visa issues. The "ABD to PhD" who can't really rely on adjuncting to pay the bills while continuing to work on the dissertation. The "almost PhD" who has worked hard but languished in the program because of inaccessible/unsupportive committee members. The "tenure-track Ph.D" who is freaking out because she's having a particularly difficult pregnancy while her due date falls right bang in the middle of the fall semester and it seems that her employer is uninterested in pausing the tenure clock let alone work with her in case she can't be up and about in 2 weeks time after she has the baby. The "tenured Ph.D" who, for the last 16 years, has lived far away from family and is simply sick of being unable to have a regular family life. Or the "tenured Ph.D." who feels completely frazzled in between the demands of teaching and parenting none of which are 9-5, Monday-Friday commitments. And the list goes on...

Maybe this will sound incredibly naive on my part but it seems strange to me that the same reasons why one wants to pursue academic life aren't, at many times, enough to keep one there. It's mind-boggling to imagine that up until the MA/MS/MBA level society rewards individuals with better pay and more flexibility in terms of things like geography and being able to bring your life into more balance at some finite point if not right away but that your prospects are relatively (quite?) dim if your terminal degree is the Ph.D. Add to that factors like the reconceptualization of students as cash-paying customers that must be satisfied lest they become disgruntled and the organization lose money, the notion that college is more a vocational/technical training grounds than a place to be educated, etc and that pretty much saps a lot of (but luckily not all) fun out of the teaching experience. Maybe it's not that grim and maybe I've lately found myself interacting within a configuration where these challenges abound for whatever reason. After all, I just finished a visiting professor gig that was probably one of the most rewarding experiences ever in lots of ways. Of course it was challenging in ways I'd never thought about either - but that's all fodder for another (forthcoming?) blogpost.

For now, I just wanted to vent about what seems to me to be a trend within the larger community of which I'm a part because I find it, as the title suggests, bewildering. Did something happen over the past couple of years that this is the conversation I'm hearing more of whereas it was previously non-existent? Something tells me that might be the case. Or, perhaps, the people I got to know in academia are at critical points in what I call the 7 year academic cycle (tenure takes about 7 years, the average time to finish a social sciences PhD in the US is about the same) where they have to make bigger decisions like whether or not pursuing the PhD fits in with the rest of their life plans or whether their tenured life in NoWhereVille, USA is something they can keep doing until death do them part.

Irrespective, that these conversations are happening is surprising to me because these are not the things anyone raises when you inform them that you're considering the pursuit of a PhD and putting yourself on the path to that most-celebrated-of-all-things-holy-in-academia AKA a tenured professorship. At that juncture, it's all about the nobility of the profession in so far that you get to create knowledge and shape young minds. We're told it's like being in school - something most aspiring PhDs have a pretty good knack of thus far. Your grad advisors tell you how you're made for research and teaching. How your mind and curiosity ought not to be wasted and how this is the only space that affords you the ability to indulge what excites you. What nobody tells you - or at least nobody told me or anyone I know/know of - that there are all of these other things that perhaps ought to be part of this calculation. I'm sure these folks I've spoken to feel cheated. I would be livid if I was in their positions. Why? Because we're sold this dream of the nobility of the profession - it'd be nice if someone dialed it down a notch so that reality doesn't feel like it's biting your butt hard when the satisfaction of sitting around in seminars or at conferences connecting with and being challenged by brilliance is confronted by things like bills, education loan payments, moving to the boondocks far away from civilization let alone an emotional network, disciplinary boundaries you must pander to for the 14 or so years from when you start the PhD to when you get tenure presuming all of these happen without any breaks in-between, spoilt kids whom you have to indulge lest you bruise their egos and rights as cash-paying customers at the expense of creating a genuinely open learning environment, the fickleness of the world of academic employment where networks are often tie-breakers over merit, and, perhaps most importantly, everything we label as 'life outside academia.'

Nopes I'm not bitter...just unsettled by the unsavoriness of what I find around me. I think those other things that remain unspoken ought to be raised. Of course it doesn't make for very good advertising but at least it isn't false advertising. The former might mean you lose some folks but the latter avoids the disgruntledness and disillusionment that might accompany an individual's learning of the truth. Not to mention that this is a time-consuming process not only because it is lengthy but because it is emotionally draining and, often, soul-crushing. Knowing that's inevitable would leave folks better prepared to deal with a challenge. I know that I would've pursued this path because, as geeky as it sounds, I got into it given my love for learning even if someone had told me all of this but I wouldn't be feeling nearly as unsettled as I am right now.

Having said that it's back to the drawing (dissertation) board :-). Why? Not just because I see the light at the end of that tunnel but because I like what I've created.