March 28, 2006
The Apparently Bearable Unhappiness of Academe
When I announced that I was leaving a tenured position at a good college you’ve likely heard of, the response that shocked me was not my colleagues’ surprise, not their anger, but their envy.
I wasn’t one of those unhappy academics, the kind who avoids campus, complains bitterly whenever she finds a drink in her hand, religiously attends her annual conference, slips out of town on mysterious weekday trips in February, and spends March on the verge of tears. I’m the pull-up-your- socks-and-make-the-best-of-things type, so I served on committees, had students over for dinner, redesigned my department’s curriculum, took my kids to see the women’s soccer team play in the championship, and quietly plotted my escape.
Because I’d kept my unhappiness secret, leaving became a triple betrayal: I was giving up on academia, I was abandoning the college, and I was revealing the gaps in my supposed intimacy with my colleagues. I expected hostility and rejection, but I got confession. Older professors told me they’d tried to leave and failed, or weighed the options and resigned themselves to staying. Junior colleagues whispered about covert job searches, late-night fights with spouses who demanded exit strategies, and fantasies of alternative careers.
This could be read as a negative comment on my institution except that I heard it everywhere. Academic friends across the country told me I was brave, even heroic. They said I was a role model and an inspiration. Just knowing that I had taken action made them feel better.
I know there are happy academics, because I grew up with two of them. Despite tenure battles, evil deans and weekends grading papers (which begat in me a highly realistic view of academia), both my parents ended up with jobs that suited them: my father doing cutting-edge research at a top private university; my mother teaching undereducated adults at a public alternative college; both in the desirable city where they went to graduate school.
So you could easily read my thoughts about unhappiness in academia as a generational psychodrama: I failed to equal my parents’ success; I was unhappy. But it’s more complicated than that.
Unlike my parents, who shot straight into graduate school and never considered any alternative, even in the scorching heat of tenure battles with the most evil of deans, I was ambivalent from the start. I meandered my way into graduate school via several years of nonprofit jobs and travel. I came up with a new exit strategy every semester. I vowed never again to go on the job market the week before I got a job. For years my husband and I spent every date night discussing whether we should stay or go.
Of course it wasn’t quite as miserable as all that. I loved my office. I loved my research, when I had time for it. I loved the classroom, when I didn’t hate it. I loved my summers off, except for the guilt at never writing enough, due to the odd belief that summer was a great time to take the kids to the pool. But when it came down to it, and my husband and I turned 40, we decided we did not want to spend the rest of our lives in a city we didn’t like enough, doing jobs we didn’t like enough, at places of employment we didn’t like enough, hundreds of miles away from a family we liked a lot.
My story, then, felt unique, until I heard everyone else’s stories. There are an awful lot of people out there who live their lives in a constant state of low-level despondence: They have too many papers to grade, their colleagues are not interested in their work, their colleges are in constant crisis, they didn’t get promoted, they live in the middle of nowhere, they can’t find a date in the middle of nowhere, their partners live hundreds of miles away.
These may sound like the complaints that make older faculty members tell us to pull up our bootstraps and remember that they didn’t even have boots to pull up when they walked 10 miles barefoot in the snow to MLA, but I wonder how many of those older faculty members have spent too long repressing the details of their own unhappiness. And then there are the people, like me, who don’t complain, but live their lives atop a constant undercurrent of despair.
Some of this unhappiness, I would suggest, is endemic — those repressed details — and some is particular to the conditions of academe at this moment in time — the job market, the decline in education funding, the increasingly corporate university. But what interests me is not just that academics are unhappy, but that so few of them do anything about it.
You could stop me here and argue that lots of people in many professions are unhappy, perhaps even most, and many do little about it. But I have a control group. My husband is a chef, and while we have lots of academic friends, we also have lots of friends who are are chefs, line cooks, and servers.
Restaurant people certainly complain: someone forgot to call in the fish order, a big table stayed for three hours and left 10 percent, the dishwasher didn’t show up, the manager is an ass. But the complaints are generally momentary: there’s a problem, it’s solved, life goes on. You rarely find endless streams of lament or quiet desperation behind the stove.
People work in restaurants because they love it, because they need the money, or because they need the money to do something else they love. Or, eventually, they stop working in restaurants. Restaurant people have few illusions as to the significance of their work or their own importance — unless they are celebrity chefs, who don’t do much actual restaurant work.
And here we reach the heart of the matter. We academics are deeply invested in our own significance. We were the smartest ones in the class. We believe the life of the mind is sacred and we are living it. Our ideas are our selves. When we come up against biased tenure committees or uncongenial locations or grinding teaching loads, we convince ourselves that this is the price we must pay for the greatness we are meant to achieve, and we suck it up, complaining all the way.
I do know happy academics of my generation. Some are wildly successful, living out the myth. Others have found niches in which they can happily do work that satisfies them, giving up the myth. But too many of us hang onto the myth and let go of satisfaction.
When people say I’m a brave role model, I have to laugh. I don’t feel very brave. Mainly I feel shell-shocked. Giving up the security of tenure and remaking one’s life at 41 is hard, so hard that sometimes I ask myself why I’m doing it. Is it an act of hubris, based on the continuing belief that I am great and only need to find the arena in which my greatness will be appreciated, or is it an act of submission, acquiescing to my own ordinariness? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know that no longer an academic, I’m a lot happier.