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May 1, 2004
This post expresses very clearly why I left the academy for the political life.
Basically I could not stand the academic mode of life any more. The scholarly mode of life was dead. I was dead. My future was a slide into nothingness. Job security could not be obtained in philosophy: in a declining job market it just a was a life of part-time contracts, casual teaching and relentless deskilling. You reach a time when you realize that you have to get out
Like Lars, I found the relationships of the academic system vile, and I thought that academic careerism was evil. It pretty much destroyed you as a human being. It made you savage other people by turn on them with bitter hostility. The academic system was self-destructive as it increasingly turned to deskilled casual labour.
For a while I was thankful that I had a job after gaining a PhD, but I kept looking for an exit strategy from academia---mine was to take the valuable skills and training I had gained from a decade of academic life, and re-skill (on the job) so that I could work as a philosopher in the political life.
I read a lot of Marcus Aurelius (here and here to keep me sane.
That was several years ago. I've never looked back.
Just the other day Iwent back to my old university as a representative from Canberra for a seminar on the future of higher education in Australia. God! It was even more deathly than I remembered. The staff were older, fatter, more dishrevelled and bitter. More physically crippled.
I was sympathetrc to their plight. They had been overwhelmed by the violent reforms of the neo-liberal state. They had been beaten down by the violent reformers in Canberra. They'd given up trying to tear the academic being into the open from what was overwhelming and destroying them. They were living on borrowed time. They knew it. It was just so many years until the superannuation kicked in. They would go through the routines. They would hang in there.
Okay, so the old academics were stuck in their academic ways. You cannot hold that against them. It happens to the best of us. They were trying to hang onto scholarly values and academic traditons that were considered to be important and have been trashed by the neo-liberals.
But the academics were even more arrogant than I remembered. They theoretically knew more about Canberra than I tacitly did. I knew nothing, even though I had worked there for many a year and experienced it's energy, being and destructiveness from the inside. The academics knew everything. So they were not going to be open to anything different. I shrugged. They lived on hope that all would be right when the enlightened social democrats who had seen the error of their neo-liberal ways were returned to power (the ALP.) I shrugged after a debate turned into a 'I'm right you are wrong standoff.'
At that point no longer cared. I was just glad to be out of that world. I could leave after the forum and go and talk to the doctors about health.
Now that is another story.
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Spot on Gary! Careerism is death.