I talked about the notion of “selling out” with my most recent podcast guest, Julie Clarenbach. If you haven’t listened to it yet, I encourage you to do so. Julie was a great guest and shared a lot of valuable insights. I want to dwell on some of what she said about “selling out” and add my thoughts to the mix. She mentioned that “selling out is an ideology that keeps people accepting crappy working conditions and insane workloads.” In my experience, that’s absolutely true. It’s basically a guilt trip. The academy, which is portrayed as a virtuous vocation — complete with vows of poverty, it seems — is contrasted with the crass commercialism of the outside world. We should be willing to forsake this temptation and sacrifice everything in order to pursue our noble calling. I’ve commented before on the similarities between the academy and religious institutions, so I won’t retread that ground here. Nevertheless, we’re told that the humanities are something that we have to do out of “love of the discipline” or “for its own sake” and not *gasp* for the money. Sound familiar? Actually, some feminist commentators have pointed out that these are the same tactics that have been used historically to justify paying women little or nothing for the work that they do. It’s an interesting tack to pursue, but I’ll leave that to others. At the same time, however, humanities departments and students are preoccupied with applying for grant money and seeking funding from their institutions by trumpeting the ‘relevance’ of their discipline. Suffice it to say, that the humanities have an ambivalent relationship to money.
I think this problem afflicts philosophy more so than the other humanities. Part of the reason has to do with our founding mythology. Socrates lived simply and philosophized free of charge. It was the Sophists, those rhetoricians and hucksters, who charged money. But like any founding mythology — and it’s at least partly myth — we have to take it with a grain of salt. Also, Socrates isn’t our only example. Thales cornered the market on olive oil presses right before a bumper crop. Plato was certainly well off. Aristotle earned the equivalent of $20 million in gold from Philip of Macedon for tutoring his son, Alexander. I suspect that record still stands. So there’s no rule that says philosophers have to be broke. The academy, however, in order to continue its exploitation of cheap labor, has to perpetuate this myth.
Nobody goes into philosophy to get rich. I’m not a materialistic person deep down, but whether we like it or not, our society assigns value through money. When you’re not paid a fair wage for a job well done, you begin to feel worthless. It’s about more than the money; your self-worth as a person is effected, regardless of how hard you try to tell yourself that your self-worth isn’t defined by how much you make. It’s especially difficult when your peers start to pull away from you and achieve the comfortable middle class lifestyle that you want. You begin to feel disenfranchised. You may criticize the materialistic culture in which we live, and rightly so, but that doesn’t change the reality or help pay the bills. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be paid a decent wage for your efforts. This doesn’t make you a crass materialist; it just means you have a well-developed sense of fairness and self-worth.
So why don’t more grad students and junior academics recognize the injustice and “sell out” themselves? Why don’t they expose “selling out” for the academic myth that it is? Of course, it’s difficult to answer this question decisively, but I have a few thoughts. I owe the first one to William Pannapaker, aka Thomas Benton of “Just Don’t Go” fame. In a tweet, a while ago, he said that adjuncts are “paid in status capital.” Since he only had 140 characters, he didn’t elaborate that much, but I think I know what he meant. It’s gratifying to be called ‘professor’ — especially by attractive twenty-something women — and command the respect and admiration of your students. The satisfaction you get out of having the status — even if the pay is abysmal — is its own reward, at least for awhile. In my case, that luster wore off, but for others, it doesn’t.
Perhaps the promissory note of future success in the academy is enough to sustain some people. As you go about your professorial duties, you begin to think “I’m pretty good at this. I could see myself doing this for a living. It’s only a matter of time before all my hard work is rewarded with a full-time position. All I have to do is pay my dues for awhile.” This condition has been aptly dubbed ‘foot-in-the-door disease.’ This is another reason academia breeds low career satisfaction. We never really ‘arrive.’ We’re always looking toward the future — maybe after the PhD, or more post-doc work, or the next grant application, etc. — there’s a delay of career satisfaction well in to our thirties and even forties. It’s all about the promise of tomorrow, a promise that may never come to fruition. In the meantime, we’re expected to sustain ourselves on the gratification we get from our status and all the ‘valuable work’ that we’re doing. Don’t get me wrong. The work is valuable. It’s certainly valuable to the university in terms of dollars. It’s just a shame that its value in dollars is never passed along to us.
So, under the circumstances I’ve described, can anybody be blamed for “selling out”? I don’t think so. It’s not that we never deserved to be in academia; many of us have nothing more to prove. It’s just a personal decision. We’re tired of waiting to be rewarded for a decade or more of hard work. We’re tired of singing along with Little Orphan Annie about the promise of tomorrow. We’re interested in finding people and institutions that are willing to reward us for our talents and skills today. We want the means to build good lives for ourselves. As Julie said, it’s not selling out to want the means to buy a house, raise a family, go on a vacation, or donate to charity. As an adjunct, I just couldn’t see that anywhere in my future. Being poor, moving from place to place, giving up friends and relationships in the process — these are not the ingredients of a fulfilling life. If wanting a fulfilling life makes me a sell-out, then a sell-out am I.
You reflect on the continued decline in American academia. It shadows the decay of the nation holistically and to some extent the Capitalist extreme meritocracy which has supplanted social planning across government. However, I would imagine a more lucrative future awaits some young grads willing to move to China or Saudi Arabia and teach in those cultures which still hold the humanities in an elite standing (other skewed perspectives aside). It is a game for youth and one I would consider had I the spring in my legs and the color in my hair of old.
The universities have certainly embraced capitalism (despite being the last bastion of the left in North American culture). I’m fond of quoting Robert Koons who said that the institution to which the Marxist categories of bourgeoisie and proletariat most apply is the academy itself. Although I tend to lean to the right of the academic mainstream, I have no interest in defending ‘capitalism.’ I think markets are good, but ‘capitalism’ has become something propped up by big government and other forces I don’t like.
I keep hearing that all the opportunities are in China or Dubai or Turkey. I have no desire to live in those places. For that matter, I have no desire to live in certain places in Canada. I think it’s legitimate to choose a career based on where you want to live. The problem with an academic career, is that you have to live where the work happens to be. That can have it’s rewards, but the transitory nature of that life takes its toll.
I fully agree and I can again confirm this is true for other disciplines are well. Paraphrasing a quote from my favorite physics careers forum: “In the real world you are a rock star if you earn a decent amount of money. In academia you are a rock star if you can manage to get a permanent job at all.”
Do you think that artists face the same issues (live your passion or earn money), and is there any meaningful conclusion one could come to from comparing different disciplines or professions that might be subject to the same dilemma?
What is the root cause? Is it as simple as blaiming protestant work ethic? “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food” … which morphed into the modern way of money as compensation for immaterial damage such as the burnout of the top manager or the physical pains of the worker in the steel? (Opposed to the stress-free life of academics
Yes, I am aware of the most recent Forbes article on this)
I resonate with that quote. Perhaps artists face the same issues. In my case, I’m not sure it’s an either/or between living your passion and earning money. For example, I don’t think I’m any less passionate about philosophy. If I succeed in getting a non-academic job, I’ll still think and write about philosophy on the side. I think one can carry that passion beyond the academy.
I’m not really qualified to comment on the broad social causes of the current global economic/labor situation. It probably does go back to the Protestant work ethic. Max Weber thought so. Marx, of course, had his own narrative. I don’t discount everything he said, but I’m not a Marxist. I think free markets make a lot of sense. I think, like Friedman, that economic freedom is a precursor to other important political freedoms. So I don’t think the current system is going anywhere.
Free markets depend upon consumers who must make livings sufficient to support economic expansion beyond population growth. When Labor is crippled by things like a weakening of unions or degradation of public education (seemingly for the benefit of a for-profit future) then free markets find growth problematic. Labor in academia is greatly represented by faculty. The trend toward cost-cutting, online mega-classes, overloads without pay, adjunct-dominant campuses, etc. speaks to the devolution of the industry in general. Accreditation has become an illusion for the public and therefore the future of accredited degrees’ value seems doomed partly because the free market and supply-side economics has only one real standard: growth. Where can a discussion of philosophy or literature find value in a product and service-driven environment? Notice how the STEM drive could easily have been a STEAM driven process but no one sees an economic reason to include the Arts and Humanities in the educational focus.
I agree with much of what you say about higher education. However, I’m skeptical that more public money or unionization will solve these problems. State accreditation keeps money in the hands of public institutions which insulates them from competition and causes them to stagnate. Simply demanding more tax dollars will do little to improve the quality of education under these circumstances. In addition, some campuses have adjunct faculty unions, but these haven’t led to liveable wage conditions. Maybe there are free market solutions to these problems, maybe not. Whether I’m right or wrong, however, is a moot point. I can’t overhaul the entire economic system — I’m pragmatic enough to know that — and even if I could, in the meantime, I’ve got to eat. So I’m focusing my efforts on making the case that philosophy does have value in terms of the current market.
Agreed and agreed, though somehow power to workers, things akin to profit sharing, must be feasible. If it is profit that rules decisions in the modern world, we need to seek protocols that will increase profit and thus be more appealing to bottom liners, especially in academia. In any event, you and I are powerless except for this potential insight: slant what we teach always toward its value in the commercial world. Lit Crit and Philosophy have pretty much become one and the same field since the Structuralists if not before. The trick is to figure out how they can be spun to play toward market manipulation and consumer influence. A philosophy stripped of its academic terminology and posited to produce viable results in a consumer world is a marketable field. It is PR and psychology wound deeply enough to perhaps move masses and make the field appealing as applied rather than a theoretical. The devil, of course, in the minutiae.
Well said. My next post will be along those lines.