Ralph from Rutabaga Ranch Revels in Retirement. Recommends Against Restless Reaching.

I dare say I'm one of the older readers here, retired for 5 years now after 37 years as a professor, the last 25 at a large research university in NYC. I've left that behind now, and live on what you might call a "gentleman's farm" in upstate NY where I raise tomatoes, potatoes, rutabagas, and occasionally the finest squash in the colonies. I've not written to you before, but after having read this site and many other academic blogs, I couldn't help myself.

I believe I reached the top of my profession, articles, books, awards, and a certain notoriety in my field. I published 12 books during my academic career, 8 of them solo. The last one, the one we call the "BIG" one, was nominated for a national award. I only mention it so I can reveal this. It sold 412 copies over 5 years, and I daresay that many of those rest in libraries uncracked to this day.

Sometimes at conferences people would recognize me. Maybe one person would. My work was important in my own life, but hardly at all in anyone else's. I was ambitious, sought tenure and promotion, and found that there was no reward for either. I wanted to make a mark, but I discovered that a scholar has so little value in our culture, that my ambition was mostly wasted. I lived in an expensive and wonderful city for most of those years, and while my salary was large compared to the AAUP averages nationwide, I could barely afford to insure and park my car and get a dozen or so bottles of good port a month.

When I look back on the charging I did all those years, I just chuckle now. There's nothing up there, darlings, at the top of the ladder. Not if you're looking for acclaim or respect from without. It's true, what I did rewarded me personally, but that was not something I realized until I was nearly gone from the academy.

I read these academic blogs where the young scholars are looking for respect, notice, for their work to mean something. And I am wowed at their professionalism and achievement. In my day, one never heard of graduate students with publications and awards. Now it's commonplace. Even before I left the university I would sit in junior faculty offices and marvel at the tremendous new insight they brought to my tired old field. I think they should pursue their scholarship with vigor.

But I must tell you, unless you're studying celebrity culture or high finance, your work better fill you with pride, because nobody will ever care about it, not even one dram.

I don't say this to draw your wind, but to let you know that it makes sense to focus on the elements of the job that bring you personal happiness. Don't worry about what others think. The truth is that almost nobody will ever think of you, not even if you publish widely. Do it for yourself, and quit thinking about being ahead or behind of your peers - or even long-gone scholars like me.

I had a wonderful career, but too much of it was wasted worrying. While I was at a top drawer university, I always wondered if I should go somewhere else, to the west coast, or maybe the Midwest. I was wooed several times at a large school in Texas. The questions were with me my whole career. Will I get a good job. Will I impress my mentors. Will I publish the dissertation. Will I rise. Will I get tenure. Am I good enough. What about another book. Am I better than So-N-So.

It was for nothing. So-N-So had his own worries. Leave him and them to it. Do it for you, and quit frantically reaching for the top rungs of the ladder. What's waiting up there is not what you're chasing.

The Chiefiest of all Chief Correspondents - Weepy Wayne from Waterloo - Waxes On Why We're So Woeful!

Regarding the question of academic unhappiness. Without question, there are worse jobs out there. I know. I had one of them. I was at the bottom end of the construction trade for 10 years before working my up from a community college, to a state university, to a private college for my graduate degree. My grad experience was comprised of long hours, genuine poverty, sketchy urban housing, malnutrition, and a lack of genuine human contact. Having said that, I wouldn't trade that experience for anything. I sacrificed a great deal for something I considered worthwhile, and it showed me what I was made of.

After graduating at the top of my class, I arrived at the gates of academe, and was shunted into a janitor's closet as an adjunct. There I stayed, watching dedicated professors twice my age being drained of their vitality by an exploitative system that sold promises to tuition payers and larded administrative sinecures with pensioned hacks. In the classroom, I encountered students who were lazy, arrogant, and aggressively apathetic. They yawn at Dostoevsky, wince when confronted with a five page essay, and glare at me when I implore them to step it up for the challenges of that "Real World' they are so impatient to embrace.

Along the way I discovered how to make students succeed in spite of themselves. My reviews are often five-star. The best students who do care learn in spite their surroundings and make this all worthwhile. I am welcomed back to teach part-time every semester; however, despite my success teaching the "Big Kid" lecture classes in literature, I find that more and more I am offered "remedial" courses (i.e., Commas for Comas). These students I encounter are crassly materialistic and blithely delusional about the world beyond their dorm. As a result, my contact with buttercups who are openly hostile toward reading, thinking, and the possibilities of a university education has multiplied exponentially. Preparing them for the threshold of College Writing I is nothing short of draining. I find myself discussing TV shows I don't watch, and celebrities I couldn't identify on a dare. If I reach for Rimbaud, I will lose them. Instead, we deconstruct Britney Spears as I try to wedge in the Fisher King Myth.

In short, I left a brutal job, clawed my way up the hill, and found myself surrounded by the very people I wanted to escape when I was 20. There are many aspects of this job I enjoy, but I do understand when some of my colleagues feel cheated. We were never waved off by our English professors. Grad school happily took our money. And the current system is geared to exploit a glut of English majors. In a number of ways, I'm lucky to have this job. Hell, I could be installing insulation in a sub-zero crawlspace. But I'm not blind to the larger picture.

The Unhappiness Found on Academic Blogs.

I've been reading the academic blogosphere, including RYS, over the last few months, and I don't understand why everyone is so bitter about academia when it was their choice to enter.

I understand professors complaining about students anonymously. Students are incredibly aggravating, and that complaining doesn't mean professors aren't fulfilled in their jobs. But I'm puzzled by posts like "Is graduate school a fraud?" You're entitled to your opinion, naturally, but if you think so why do you go? There are so many more depressing things you could be doing.

So many academic blogs seem to be written by young professors complaining about how they don't want to do their research and how evil the tenure application process is and how unfair the profession is.

Aren't they at all happy about what they do? Aren't there other things to do on the Internet?

I have to admit that I am not in academia, but the statement "you're not in it and if you were you'd see how miserable it is" does not constitute an answer to my question. I don't see why people want to be unhappy with their lives.

Am I just missing the joke?

More Insane Faculty Demands Regarding Temperature and Perversion.

Dear Heads of Seriously Full of Itself University,

Would you mind terribly to turn on the lights and the air conditioning on the weekend? I realize you are desperately trying to prove yourselves to be saints -- that is to be highly ranked and carbon neutral -- but I would like to be able to do the research necessary to keep myself here on this hallowed holy campus. Unfortunately, I find that my type of research, the not-in-a-bazillion-dollar-laboratory-kind to be a touch difficult to complete when it is 48F in my office.

Of course, you could also open and police the library and I would happily go demonstrate to my students that I am a hard working individual by doing my research there, in their presence. I mean, you would have to open the library before 1 pm on Sunday and close it after 11 pm. And it would be wonderful if you could have more than 1 employee per floor to tell our precious tutioners to turn off their phones and get off of their girlfriends/ boyfriends.

I seriously could do research in the library if I weren't trying to tune out the sounds of undergraduate love-making and iPods.

See? People Love the Academic Haiku OR Short, Enigmatic Free Verse About Academic Matters, Occasionally Referencing Seasons, Nature, and Margaritas.

When we started the academic haiku feature last year, we never imagined the controversy, the alarm, the high drama of it all. Yes, we're familiar with what a haiku really is. No, we don't care. Academic haiku, at least here on RYS, are short-ish, somewhat enigmatic, focused on the academy, and usually a little silly or mean.

We've chosen some of the best and liveliest of the recent submissions, and present them below. Enjoy the flava, but don't miss earlier installments: Here, here, here, and here.

~~~~~~~~~~~


Leaves crunch underfoot.

Spanish moss sways in live oaks

Outside the window.

Still, we can not have

Lecture outdoors. Your whining

Face ruins my view.


~~~~~~~~~~~

Like the autumn leaves
your criticism tumbles --
Thanks, schmuck. What a putz.

Icy cold, your words
RYS exists to vent
"Real deal" or not -- ass.

Pale green, translucent
Leaves, like words, emerge fragile
Spring calls us to crab.

Bright summer sun shines
A beacon, RYS is!
Screw you, critic-boy.


~~~~~~~~~~~

"Hope you don't teach lit?"
Pretty funny, coming from
One who uses "ain't."

~~~~~~~~~~~

precious snowflakes come

summer's serenity gone

freshman infestation

~~~~~~~~~~~

In my office
The Monday before Thanksgiving –
Utter silence.

Stack of student papers
To grade over Thanksgiving.
Yeah, right. More wine?

I am thankful for
my students. No, really, I
need to pay the bills.

~~~~~~~~~~~

"Is teaching worth it?"

I look around and wonder.

Let me consider.

Publish or perish!

Rake in that grant cash, bitches!

Teaching gets short shrift.

Students wander in

Dead-eyed, dead-headed, lost.

"Do we have to read?"

Fuck it. The blender calls --

"Margaritas all around!"

Don't forget the salt.

Seriously, Academic Haiku Are Not Really Haiku At All. They're Enigmatic and Short Free Verse. And Usually People Hate Them. Watch for More Next Week!

Hey, RYS fools:
even your "real haiku" ain't
the real deal. Schlemiels.

True haiku are more
than five-seven-five. They must
focus on nature

Your webpage drabbles
are better called "senryu";
Hope you don't teach lit.

Where A Reader Charts A Course We're Considering Ourselves.

From what I can tell, a steady diet of arrogance, ignorance, and sense of entitlement makes your balls grow really big.

Huey the Student finally showed up today for an appointment to discuss his (non) thesis. When it becomes clear to me that Huey has in fact done nothing on the thesis, which is due in a month, I try as gently as possible to get Huey to admit that he needs to focus and buckle down.

Now here's the big surprise. Huey turns on me. In spite of my two decades of college teaching, teaching awards, publications, prestigious degree, etc., Huey says that I'm boring, unprepared, incompetent, under-qualified, and my class sounds like I'm reading the Wikipedia article on the subject aloud.

And it's not only me! Huey (and Dewie and Louie, the other majors) are skipping classes because the whole faculty of the department is incompetent and boring! And if we would just get our act together we wouldn't lose these sainted majors. It might shock you hear that Huey, Dewie and Louie do absolutely mediocre work and skip class liberally.

Honestly, if we live in a world where the "customer" is always right, then I just want to work in the mall.

It's Academic Haiku Time Again. Even Though We Can Barely Stand the Thought Of the Dismay We Will Feel When It Goes Poorly Again.

Today's academic haiku entry is not a haiku. We've discussed this on the site before. When we actually did publish some haiku, not a peep was heard from anyone. Nobody wrote to say, "Now. THAT'S a haiku!" Or: "Thank you for the REAL haiku!" (We really liked the one that started "There is no compound.")

Anyway, we thought academic haiku day would be big. We thought there'd be little parties all across the academy when a new academic haiku came out. But mostly we just heard from folks saying that they weren't real haiku. (And the underlying message always was: "You just aren't good enough. Daddy didn't love you. Mommy only tolerated you. That scar is never going to heal. Your face is too fat, and we don't like the slope of your forehead.")

So, you can tell how hard it has been. But, because we're gluttons for punishment (and margaritas, and Kit Kat bars, etc.) we offer another academic haiku below. Please feel free to crush our remaining trust and hope in humanity. This comes - as you will see - from a grad student trying to sort it all out. Please enjoy the flava:

~~~

graduate student,
sciences,
trying to decide between
academia or industry.

I like teaching,
won an award,
but this semester's students
have me reeling.

So, to you all,
junior professors,
tenured old timers,
and adjuncts:

is it
worth it?

Smart Women and The Feeling of Fraud.

I felt like a fraud for years. This feeling of defrauding the world, of not being as smart or together as everyone thought I was, became the most intense during the five years immediately following my undergraduate degree: during my master's program, my stint in industry, and two subsequent years I spent as an instructor, teaching in an area not quite within my expertise. I always felt like I had to work harder to compensate for the gap between what people thought of me and my own self-assessment. I also always berated myself for not working hard enough at this endeavor, fearing that someone would catch on to my inadequacies and expose me to the world for the fraud I knew I was.

Then, for reasons I don't recall, I read Barbara Kerr's Smart Girls, Gifted Women. And I had a paradigm shift. I saw myself in those pages. The pattern of being certain that I was less phenomenal than everyone thought I was, and working hard to compensate for it--there it was. Other women did the same thing! Kerr reported that the result of this effort to compensate resulted in women in this position actually doing fabulous work.

I passed the book along to my sister and some friends, and they reacted the same way. They had secretly felt like frauds all along, and were as surprised as I was that this was really a pattern among smart women, that it led to our success. I mean, come on. I was in a full-time teaching position at a nice private college with only a master's degree. Clearly, I was doing something right!

So I gave myself a break and took stock of my accomplishments. I was shocked to see how much I'd driven myself to do out of fear. And so I decided to go ahead, get that Ph.D., and choose a topic not out of concern for seeming good enough or smart enough, but just something that I would enjoy and find rewarding on a personal level. So I did,and I continue to make fantastic accomplishments (publications, cool speaking opportunities, and a tenure-track job)--but without all that fear and self-hating. I seriously think that reading that book at the right time saved me from what would have been years of therapy.

I still have to remind myself now and then that I'm okay, that I'm not defrauding anyone. I still teach things slightly outside of my field now and then, and I just tell myself that even though I'm not the world's foremost expert in Subject X, I still know WAY more about it than my students, and so it's all good.

So, to my peeps who feel like frauds: You're probably much more amazing than you realize. You rock!

"Oh, Deer."

Oh, I'm sorry, was it inconvenient of me to schedule class on the first day of hunting season? Right, I'm sorry, I didn't realize it was an "unofficial" state holiday. I'm just wondering, how can you expect to nail a deer in the woods when you can't seem to find your textbook in your car?

And those three days before thanksgiving too? It's totally inappropriate for me to have class then too? Oh... I see... your family is making you leave... dragging you to Disneyworld for Thanksgiving... wow, hardship. Oh, and all of your other instructors cancelled class? Absolutely, you're right. Let's cancel those days too - I didn't really have anything special planned.

And the first weeks of December? Oh... your work hours are increasing for the holiday season and so you can't really make it to class anymore. Will that be okay? Well, it's not like we do ever do anything important.

Tell you what, let me streamline this process for you. Next semester, just write me a check for the $1000 in tuition instead of my college, and I'll give you the same F, but I won't make you feel guilty for it by asking you to come to class or learn anything. It will just be an even trade.

Really, it will be less painful for both of us.