Philosophy.Com

Academia: it is a miserable place

I spent Sunday morning catching up with reading some of what has been written in the bogsphere whilst I was on holidays. A lot has been happening. In the blogs on academia I can only pick up on the traces of what has already been said and gone the way of yesterday's papers for an Australian audience. Maybe I can then point to a direction for the humanities.

I came across this post by Kenneth Mostern (courtesy of Easily Distracted) on academia. Kenneth says he once was committed to the academic institution, was someone who, having succeeded in getting the proverbial "good faculty job," and considered it his political responsibility to care about the institution. In short he accepted that academic life was a vocation----as did I. Both of us lived within the Marxist tradition within the liberal university.

And that's where the problem lies. As Kenneth says:

"Yet in a short period of time this caring, this emotional commitment, had apparently evaporated. Academia had gone from being my vocation to being the independent source of my most extreme alienation."

Kenneth then describes academic life to a T. I can only concur and affirm with what he has said in this essay about the academic vocation coming to an end. The essay has aroused various and insightful by fellow webloggers some of which are quite pertinent for those working in the humanities. A useful summary is offered here by Russell Arbern Fox over at Wäldchen vom Philosophenweg. What does the end of the academic vocation mean for those working in the humanities?

Kenneth says that the cause of his alienation from academic life was that he was in:

"...a department without an intellectual life, where once smart people did everything in their power to avoid a real conversation, looking forward only to the next time they had an excuse to leave the city.....no one in the department is talking to each other about scholarship. Faculty are socializing, going out, schmoozing all the time, and the ideas that supposedly drive the work they do are not being discussed.....The one conversation everyone is having incessantly is the one about the micropolitical maneuvers within the department. This conversation is, of course always done with armor on, with an eye toward alliances and enemies already made, with everyone watching to find out which camp the new faculty member will join."

My experiences exactly. Academia was no longer a haven from the heartless world of the markeplace: it had been deeply penetrated by the ethos of Hobbesian shopkeepers full of mutual antagonism and suspicion. This lack of conversation in the heartland of liberalism does not bode well for liberalism

Kenneth then says:

"While it remains true that the power differential between tenured and untenured faculty makes the ubiquity of fear particularly threatening to the careers of junior faculty members, the longer one stays the more one discovers that one's unhappiness is simply an example of the larger misery of faculty members. Senior faculty don't exactly help or support one another either. Tenure might lead to a sense of security; it surely does not breed happiness."

Academia is a miserable and unhappy place since "department life alienates people once committed to the life of the mind." Many academics are miserable, unhealthy and depressed. They continue to survive. But, as Hippo Dignity, says, there is life outside academia; it is an option to spending stressful, impoverished years "plugging away" in the hope that you just might "eventually" land that tenured job. This post by Hippo Dignity captures the tough reality of the academic job market in the humanities. In Australia there is little prospect.

Like Kenneth my leaving academia for a political life produced the sense that I could finally get on with the things that are genuinely important to me. I was time serving in academia, drying up as a human being, dying inside. Like Kenneth it fractured my romantic relationship with Suzanne; created conflicts about location; it lacked any sense of community; had little intellectual conversation; and very little by way of intellectual energy. My basic mode of being was a melancholic one of living a damaged life in a cruel authoritarian environment. Terror was inside the dreary teaching and research routines of the regional liberal university.

The essay was picked up by Timothy Burke over at Easily Distracted. He responded to it by addresssing what he says is the "puzzling vacuum at the heart of academic life." He loves academia, but he is acutley aware of that the vacuum at the heart of the university is the strange conversational silence about the link between academic work and the national conversation about the sort of society we want to live within. Timothy says the vacuum of 'we never talk anymore' is not because academics are too busy----that is the reason that is mostly commonly given. It has more to do with a way of life that has inculcated a fear of speaking plainly and feelings of shame, paranoia and wariness.

So true. That is why such a damaged life is more than the necessity for professional academics becoming specialists working on a narrow range of problems in a single area. Its not the specialization per se thats the problem; its the gap beween the ideal and reality in this mode of life.

Dump the illusions about academic life and what do you get? There are other ways to engage in intellectual practice. There are other forms of life that are more supportive. There are other conversations going on in civil society outside academia. What this points to is that the humanities have lost their way. To put it philosophically: the price of their liberty is their homelessness. Hence the deep sense of futility that is impossible to shake off coupled to the sense of nihilism that threatens to keel over into jaded disillusion that borders on despair. The humanities no longer feel at home in the world.

They have lost the justification for their existence----moral education, construction of new forms of subjectivity, civic virtue as counters to the anarchy of the marketplace. Moral education and civic virtue are old words that have lost their currency; but they once expressed the sense that there is more to social existence than naked self-interest and anarchy of the free market and the coercive law and power of the state. The humanities were once the elite legitimating forms of the liberal social order, but their traditional versions of subjectivity (unique, autonomous, self-realizing etc) are inadequate to our experience of deregulated market life. These old cultural forms are called into question by the very processes of the social system that we live, and this finds academic expression in phrases like 'death of the subject', 'death of the author' etc

Yep, that is a bit of old Marxist analysis. Crude, but sufficient for the job at hand, which is to figure out what all this means for the future of the humanities. What it suggests----and this is the whole point of the post---- is that we do not have the new words to express the public sense that naked/raw self-interest and the will to power are not all there is to human life. That old insight at the dawn of the liberal capitalist order still stands. We feel this public sense in our bodies and we know it in our emotions. We try to make do with the old empty, reified concepts because living life as defined by the free market ----as a gang of robber barons or having the hand in the till----is too unbearable. But the old words and cultural forms don't do the job anymore. So we feel stranded and live in a vacuum.

The vacuum in the public conversation is currently filled by the conservative discourse of God, family, freedom, national security and terrorism, and that gives liberal humanists the historical tremors. But they know that their own inadequate categories are adrift from their sensuous practice. Yet we---including old Marxists---- continue to desperately hang onto these old liberal words even though we know that they are but ghostly imprints of our history that mutely gesture to a better form of life.

My concern is with the humanities not the social sciences. The latter have largely become an instrumental reason that act to faciltate the governance of a population by the liberal state. (No doubt many sociologists would disagree. they would say that its right for economics but not sociology). However, it is the humanities that have been traditionally concerned with meaning, value and purpose of a common human life in a liberal social order.

Continental philosophers since Schiller have been concerned with these themes under the sign of the aesthetic (now culture). They have considered this concern to be a political project. Schiller, for instance, is remembered for the powerful passionate protest at the human devastation caused by the emergent liberal capitalist order in the name of the aesthetic education. That wrecking of human capacities has now spread to academia and so is no longer concentrated in factories and call centres.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at May 11, 2003 03:46 PM | TrackBack