As Requested, "Yes, an Ivy" Gets Reposted On Its Own For Easier Access.

Oh, I see. Mike's a LOSER. Mike didn't succeed like his buddies, so now he's changed the whole game. He didn't just move his cheese, he gave cheese up and is eating cardboard instead.

I don't buy for one moment that Mike is content at Soda Flop College, just like he wasn't satisfied at Rural Raccoon. But for whatever reason he's given up any real academic ambition because he's not made the grade. I see this in so many of my older colleagues. I tell them about my recent publication and they tell me about their family or their golf game. As if it's the same thing.

I'm not saying that Mike isn't worthwhile. Perhaps he's a fine teacher. But teaching is so low on my list of priorities, and was instilled upon me by my mentors all through grad school. (Yes, an Ivy.)

Perhaps I don't even mean Mike's a loser. He's just not playing the same game as his friend from MIT is. He certainly isn't playing the game - at the level- that I am either. His decision to accept his limitations, fall out of the game his buddies play, and call his mediocrity a success, is just a shell game.

Maxine from Muscatine Muses on The Ivy League Idiot.

Maybe it is all just a shell game. I'm glad that the writer of the last reply to Mike (the Ivy League Idiot) has his shiny Ivy League diploma and is happy with his career at the exceedingly high level that he's playing it.

Good for him.

Too bad there's more to life than research. But, wait, that's all just a shell game, right? It's impossible for academics to be "legitimate" if they don't forgo the family life or the golf game in order to pursue that higher level of the game. Academics aren't supposed to be human-- they're supposed to live the life of the mind and exist on a high plane that mere mortals. (Those silly little creatures who can talk to one another without mentioning some high level philosophical tract or dropping the name of the newest methodological theory. How could that possibly be worth anything at all?)

I'm glad that the writer has his shiny new publication to curl up with at night.

Too bad it's probably mediocre at best, because let's face it, people-- there are only a handful of academic superstars who will ever be remembered.

Too bad it probably will be read by exactly 8.6 people.

Too bad that in 5 or 10 years some new hot shot from the Ivies will come along and disprove his theory, or will completely ignore the article, because it was never that important to begin with.

But hey--and impressive CV, that's really what life's all about, right?? And teaching?!?! Pshaw--who would want to focus on anything like that when there's the "real" work of the University to be done.

I say good for Mike -- he's anything but a loser. He's human, and he seems to be pretty happy. And I say good luck to the Ivy Leaguer -- he's going to need it. A pile of articles aren't much to curl up with at night, and they certainly don't pay any attention to you when you're pissing your pants at a nursing home.

On Mid Career Mike and Shifting Ambitions.

Mid-Career Mike's last post on shifting ambition really caught me by surprise. I hadn't realized how much of my own energy has been spent worrying about the ambition and achievement of others - not just my grad school pals, but every single person alongside me at my uni.

Of course it's not to be expected that the accomplishments of others should be wholly ignored, but if one were to put all of that energy into accomplishing one's own goals, think how much healthier we'd all be.

[*]

Unlike Mike, I'm just about to apply for tenure so I'm not at the mid-career point quite yet. However, I like to read his posts as they offer a window into that future time.

In this last post about Ambition I'd like to offer another way to look at the situation. His buddy at MIT will have to work a tremendous amount just to keep MIT at its current level - it really isn't possible for a single professor to make MIT even better. But he - at his institution can put in a considerable amount of work and actually improve the university, the department, the students.

To me at least, it is more fulfilling to be at an institution (and department) that can be improved during my career as a direct result of my personal involvement. A major university is a behemoth that is slow to change, but Mike is more likely to make a difference at his school... plus the winters are better and there is the beach!

[*]

Oh, I see. Mike's a LOSER. Mike didn't succeed like his buddies, so now he's changed the whole game. He didn't just move his cheese, he gave cheese up and is eating cardboard instead.

I don't buy for one moment that Mike is content at Soda Flop College, just like he wasn't satisfied at Rural Raccoon. But for whatever reason he's given up any real academic ambition because he's not made the grade. I see this in so many of my older colleagues. I tell them about my recent publication and they tell me about their family or their golf game. As if it's the same thing.

I'm not saying that Mike isn't worthwhile. Perhaps he's a fine teacher. But teaching is so low on my list of priorities, and was instilled upon me by my mentors all through grad school. (Yes, an Ivy.)

Perhaps I don't even mean Mike's a loser. He's just not playing the same game as his friend from MIT is. He certainly isn't playing the game - at the level- that I am either. His decision to accept his limitations, fall out of the game his buddies play, and call his mediocrity a success, is just a shell game.

Some Random Thoughts on (Non) Academic Spousing.

PRO:
1. Having a spouse in the Real World is highly entertaining. Like Wise William and wife, my dear husband and I have hilarious conversations just by recounting our daily routines. Here's a typical exchange at our place:

Him: What did you do today?
Me: I sent that paper off to the journal, met with my TAs, and had my graduate seminar. And you?
Him: I morphed the armor I modelled yesterday to fit the dwarf.

2. A non-academic spouse gives you a much-needed sense of perspective. Unlike most of my colleagues (my field is pathologically incestuous), I don't get stomping-out-of-the-room mad when people don't fall into a swoon at the prospect of hearing about my research. My husband certainly doesn't.

3. One of the things I'm most proud of professionally is that even students who've earned C's and D's in my classes often stay in touch with me and are happy to see me on campus. My students know that I treat a D on an exam a reflection of their mastery of the material, not a reflection on their worth as human beings. This is in large part because I wake up every day beside a living reminder that it's actually possible to be a kind, intelligent, and hard-working person, yet have little or no aptitude or interest in my field.

CON:
1. Two words: Spousal appointment. These words make me retch. Let's face it: spousal appointments are a form of affirmative action for people whose only outstanding feature is having married another academic. I've lived apart from my husband for four years because he couldn't find work near where I was teaching. I've lost out in at least three job searches to spousal appointments whose qualifications weren't any better than mine. One of these was at a place where I was an adjunct for several years; the year of the search, everyone kept avoiding my gaze and saying "Well, the best person on paper isn't always the best one for the job. Sometimes, there are other intangible qualities." Like sleeping with someone else in the department, perhaps??

2. The gag-worthy assumption, rarely challenged, that paired-up academics must love their fields and their work more than people not married into the biz. May I propose that those of us who carry out the challenges of teaching, administration, and research with nothing but generic moral support on the home front are actually demonstrating MORE personal dedication and motivation than those who float along with the support of a live-in collaborator?

3. "Mixed" couples get no respect in academic culture. Pretty much every place I've taught or studied at has published sappy newsletter articles about various academic couples: "A Marriage of True Minds"! "Partners In Love and Work"! The subtext is that these couples' relationships share some deep spiritual and intellectual bond that mine lacks. As far as my colleagues are concerned, I'm just hanging with some dude who works in the video-game industry. Who's distracting me from my work.

It's enough to make me want to morph into a giant robot and kick some ass.

Wise William on Marrying Outside the Species.

I feel bad for Peaches from Petaluma, but I'd have to say part of her problem was marrying within the academic species.

It seems to me you covered this topic once, but I'd like to really focus on why it's best to marry a non-academic.

• First of all, have you ever spent the day with a bunch of professors. Good gravy. It's so nice to get away from all that introspection and snootiness (and I'm in the Humanities, so I know.)
• Secondly, who wants to talk shop when they're off duty? I have colleagues married to academics in the same department. Are you kidding me? I have to wrangle with Sophocles all day, and then the wife is going to beat me down with more of it over pasta?
• Thirdly, what about the delicious variety of those other professions. My wife works for one of those massive corporations. It's hilarious to hear about her profession's dweebs, wonks, and goons. We can light up a small city with the laughter that ensues when she says, "So, the HR guy comes in, and Tony, the policy guy says to him..."
• Fourth on my list is career advancement. Mine isn't in the hands of my wife. I can pursue my evil path to tenure without throwing my wife under the bus like my colleagues. "Well, sure, my Ted is a good scholar, but really, his last book got rejected 40 times, not just twice like he told you in his T&P portfolio."
• Fifth, academics dress badly. Me included. Unless you've got a spouse who works in a bowling alley or a laundromat, you benefit from the style points you get through marriage-osmosis.

Oh, I could go on. But then what your readers do for fun. Who's married to a non-academic. What do you find so delightful?

Coupling in the Academy. More Stories Post-Peaches.

My heart goes out to Petaluma Peaches. In my career I've seen:

A long-term couple break up because "she" got a slightly more prestigious post-doc than "he" did, and he literally flipped his sh*t.
I've seen the husband who emotionally *needed* (and academically deserved) to be the primary hire suffer while his wife (who hates research and would have been more content in the lower-pressure trailing position), got the job he wanted (ouch, but they're still together).
I know a man who adjuncted for almost 12 years while his wife moved up the ladder and only after she ended up in charge was he hired on tenure-track (a good plan if one spouse is ambitious and the other is patient enough to play the long game).
Lastly, I know one TT professor who quit because his department couldn't come up with a TT position for his wife -- the slight made her feel disrespected and miserable. She got hired TT at another U and he went along as the partner hire: he was perfectly okay with tagging along and she was simply not. They are now very happy.

[*]

I don't want to beat up Peaches - divorce is rough and she has my sympathy - but blaming her academic career for destroying her marriage is a cop-out. Their relationship failed to meet the challenge presented by her successful career and his lack of one. Peaches says there was no loss of love or attachment, and yet she couldn't stand to be in the same room with her depressed and self-loathing husband. If that's not a loss of love or attachment, it is a definite shift in priorities. Kevin chose self-loathing and depression over his love for Peaches. 

Her story is sad, but it isn't extraordinary, rare, pathetic, or even noteworthy. It is sad and I'm sorry for Peaches, but this far-fetched idea that marriage is somehow more challenging for professors than for the rest of the population is ridiculous.

[*]

I'd say Peaches is not alone. In my own adjunct/tenured relationship (guess which one I am), the pressure and tension has been very high. One of us basically has a career path firmly in place, a college job where one of us is valued highly, alongside a part-time teaching schedule that rarely tops 2 classes a semester and always includes a night or weekend class. 

One of us can't help but love the job; one hates everything about it. And as you probably know, your job can influence how you see the whole town, community, etc. One of us loves it here and wants to stay forever. One of us calls the place a "shithole" and scours out of town newspapers every weekend.

It's true that our marriage has taken some hits because of this. Like Peaches, no overt problems, but it's tough on the tenured one when the adjunct one feels taken advantage of, overlooked, etc. The tenured one has done what is reasonable to secure more and better employment. But those attempts have always been met by not so quiet skepticism by the rest. (Do they think one career is all a dual-career couple is really entitled to?)

So, I'm the adjunct. And I'd never leave my wife because of how her career has flourished and mine has stalled, but it's foolish to think we wouldn't be happier if I could ALSO feel like my career and work mattered.

Cynical Sid From the Sunshine Coast on Careers, Social Cohesion, and Why Earning a Degree and Getting a Job Are Seen As Synonymous.

I'm writing in response to your posting a couple of days ago about the student suing her college. And while I think the premise is a tad ludicrous, I think the mere fact that the lawsuit was launched says something about the way society is going.

In the 'Keynesian Compact' post you published for me a couple of years ago, I pointed out that the decreasing strength of the bonds that hold institutions together (such as loyalty from a university or employer to those who work within it, and the reciprocal loyalty extended by those workers to the institution employing them) has had implications for the way people view the fundamental relations of society. Instead of being built on highly-structured long-term commitments, many interpersonal relations are now more ephemeral and less permanent.

To bring this to the set of expectations university students have, one long-term implication of the breakdown of the Keynesian Compact and the sudden rise in the rather unrealistic replacement, that of university credentialism, has been to create a societal myth that, in some forms, is necessary to retain social cohesion.

It is a truism that many jobs are not so different from their 1950s counterparts and hardly require more than a high school education. However, because these people are no longer guaranteed lifetime employment in exchange for their commitment to jobs that leave relatively little room for advancement, the unrealistic goal is held out to young people that if they all flock en masse to college or university, this is the magic key that will unlock a $50,000 a year job and all the worldly possessions one can lay eyes upon.

So because a university degree is now connected in many peoples' minds as virtually equivalent to a job guarantee (and ironically, this equation turns out to be just as ethereal and misty as that of the new social relations that have replaced the older, 'cementier' ones, if you will), when people fail to achieve this, when they can't do the equivalent of snapping their fingers and getting a job, of course they're going to feel lied to.

And this rather understandable disillusionment, as much as the RYSers might rail against this symptom of 'snowflake syndrome', leads to expressions of resentment. Usually privately articulated, this lawsuit differs only in essence that it is, perhaps not the best articulated, a *public* expression of resentment over discovering that our society does not, unlike the myth that it often holds up, equate a university degree with easy access to jobs.

What Does It Cost? Peaches from Petaluma on Love in the Academy.

My divorce became final today. I know, I know, call the "WHAAAAAmbulance" for poor widdle me. But I think this topic is germane to what we talk about here.

I have nothing but academic friends, and many of them have pleasant and enchanting relationships. But not all of them. And not me. My own sob story started with the "trailing spouse" dynamic that seems so prevalent.

I got the big job; "Kevin" followed along. I moved up, got opportunities, and Kevin sunk lower and lower into an adjunct funk that he could not get himself out of. No infidelity, no loss of love, no loss of attachment. Kevin just got to the point where his self-worth was so low that we couldn't stand to be in the same room together.

I didn't want "more" than him; I didn't feel as though his career held me back. He just became so full of self-loathing and so depressed that we could not have a regular life together.

We went to a clinician for a while, and we even talked to my chair and her husband, a happily married couple of one tenured prof and one "happy" adjunct.

None of it worked and now I'm single, childless, facing tenure year alone, and missing my best friend.

Like I said, maybe you want to beat me up for being so pathetic, but this story of mine surely isn't so extraordinary or rare. I knew an academic life would cost something, money, prestige, sleep!, whatever. I didn't know it would cost me love.

Mid-Career Mike Checks In And Ruminates on Kinds of Ambition.

I don't know what it is, but ever since making the move south to Florida (and its impossibly wonderful climes and breezes along the water), I just can't get revved up like I once did about my career.

Don't get me wrong. I made a move this past year here to Soda-Pop College, and I'm glad I did. I've had a blast meeting and getting to know my new colleagues, and I definitely will be working on some classes and projects that are a step up from where I was.

But I also had one of those dreaded birthdays, you know, the ones that end in zeroes. And, shit, so it's a career, and I'm happy to have it. And I do a great job at it. But if my buddy Stewie Standout is at MIT and I'm not (and he is!), well who cares?

It used to bug the shit out of me. And Stewie was just one of my grad school pals who went HIGHER and FURTHER than me. It used to eat at me. I had such terrible envy that I skipped a little get-together the rest of them had one year. (What a pissy little toad I was.)

But now I've got this little place near the beach. My college is NOT MIT or anything like it, but who gives a shit? I met some students in a summer colloquium. They're great kids. They probably score 500 or so on the Math portion of the SAT (if the school's stats are right), but I'm going to teach them like a mofu this coming term, and they're going to make progress like you can't believe.

My buddy Stewie? Well he's about my age, too, and maybe he never did give a shit that he was at MIT and I was at Rural Raccoon College. That would make him a better man than me.

But the good news is I'm looking forward to the semester, glad to have the gig. My ambition is not to get out of here and up! My ambition is to do a great job at the place I call home.

What Cash Hath Wrought.

Look, everyone loves Compound Cash. He's just one lovable tokin' motherfucker. But the truth is he's gone and he swears he's not coming back. The "cult of Cash" we call it around here, because the page seemed to be as much about him as any damn snowflake you've ever had in a class. (And, he rarely showered, so all the couches and chairs smell like Matthew McConaughey.)

He single-handedly ruined the summer by posting 3 or 4 times more material than has been typical. That created an expectation in our readership, and then when he tired of the work, he split for a cabin or a mudhut or a hookah, and now we've got to explain that hiatus is REALLY starting today, and will continue until our full return on September 1.

It's important to note, however, that June and July 2009 were our biggest summer months ever, hitwise. That's terrific, and we're glad folks had a good time. But Cash got tired of the job because he read so much and did the page on his own every day over the first part of the summer. We who've been around here, know that it wears on you more than you imagine. Cash, in fact, admitted to us that the negative email that comes in just sapped his groovy vibe. (He didn't say "harshed my mellow," but that's what it sounded like.)

RYS is usually fun, but man, you have to have your head in the right space. You have to NOT care when writers write in every day telling you what a terrific asshole you are, and how come you don't like students, and it happens every day, scores of these things. And it wears at times because so many folks write us at the worst moment of the day! When do you seek RYS? When you've just realized what a soul-crusher the career is, right? And have you ever had a pissed-off colleague bend your ear? Well we get a lot of that. (And we love to provide the service, but it does make us reach for the Scotch a little more than is reasonable.)

We do, of course, get lots of positive emails and today's note is not a plea for more of that. We do the page because it's 78% fun and 22% misery. And we share the load among a number of moderators because it can get old in a real hurry. Cash would have made it had he taken it easy over the summer, perhaps a couple of days a week. But he got a kick out of it, got involved with an extraordinary amount of outside-the-page correspondence with RYS readers (seriously, he's gone, so you can send to his real email address if you have it), and burned out. It's silly, we know. But we all do it for free, and there are just times when you don't want to read 200 emails.

So, no worries. Cash WAS a cool guy, and we're glad to have met him (in the virtual compound sort of way), but it was more work than he imagined, and he was pretty clear about not wanting to do it any longer. We do have 2 new folks who are going to try out some short-term moderator spots for us starting Sept 1, and their absolutely nutty "compound" names will be revealed soon. (Though nothing will ever top Wicked Walt's facetious 'Compound Cankersore.')
Anyway, because Cash was quite the character, here are some of his best moments from the summer:

• Cash's Summer Rules.
• Cash Says "Hey!"
• "Dear Cash..."
• Cash Gets a Spanking. (But it didn't work.)
• "Dear Cash..." (issue #2)
• Cash is, Like, Gone.