Posted By BillHeise on May 22, 2010

I wanted to explain my ambiguous feelings about academia to my friend Amy, who asked. I had left academia and have not looked back. So I have been thinking and thinking about this, and I thought that the best thing I could do was to give an email exchange that I’d had with a student over ten years ago.

In 2000, I was out of graduate school and had transitioned into the business world, but I still retained my interest in academic affairs, so I subscribed to an academic mailing list which was run out of my alma mater (UIUC) and which I myself had once been put in charge of (Yea, me!). The list, which is called MEDTEXTL, was founded by one of my two best friends at UIUC, Jim Marchand. I still subscribe.

One day, somebody got on the list and asked a question. He had applied to graduate school and was asking about the best language to study for his upcoming experience: was it Latin or Old Norse? He also said that he had rung up $250,000 in debt in his undergraduate career.

This shocked me; hell, it shocked just about everyone. Some of my fellow scholars felt that he had mistyped and had meant $25,000. But no, he answered, $250,000 was correct. So my fellow scholars proceeded to answer his relevant question about which language to study. It seemed to me that they were being quite cavalier with this guy’s life. Having gotten out of academia and having found happiness there, I wrote the following response (I have exchanged the actual name of the student with the generic [Student] where applicable):

I, too, was a uniquely brilliant scholar once. And although I had a difficult time getting a job with a medieval doctorate, it was not impossible. I started as a temp, valued only for my typing skills. I managed to get a job as a secretary and finally got promoted based on intellectual merit and computer skills into a marketing job where I was the only one who didn’t have an MBA. Once I got in, I was able to take advantage of an incredible job market and have done very well for myself. But it’s fair to say that in business no one hands you a job because you’re smart or studied a noble subject. In fact, my education was in some ways a liability.

Humanities students are not well poised to compete in the job market. As a humanities major, ALL job training must be provided by an employer, except in fields like publishing, where our humanities skills have utilitarian value. An English major is unlikely to know anything about, say, marketing, though they may think that field is open to them because they wrote papers on Theodore Dreiser. There are lots of MBAs with 6 years of college behind them who know plenty about marketing and desperately want these jobs. Consequently, the humanities major costs more to hire and train. And it can be risky to hire them. Since they have never expressed an interest in marketing before, it is fair to say that they are not interested in a marketing career except as a means to getting a paycheck. This is not the kind of person most employers are looking for. In my case, it took a couple of years for me to convince people I was serious about having a business career and that I wouldn’t fly off to teach Medieval Literature at Harvard at the first opportunity. Indeed, many humanities-trained students won’t stay with such jobs. They have other interests and are not well-matched for the career. For instance, I know of one scholar who was fired from an auto assembly line because he was caught reading on the job. Employers know all about such shady characters.

For my part, I am not aware of any business advantage whatsoever from having my degree other than the prestige of the degree and a general sense that I must, in some mysterious way, be smarter than other secretaries. Business pays lip service to the humanities, but it doesn’t mean much in the end. Sometimes people ask me to correct memos, and that’s about it. The business world cannot distinguish between level of knowledge that comes from having a doctorate and the grammatical knowledge one should have after an introductory Freshman rhetoric course. I got jobs and promotions because I was able to master business tasks, because I assumed a leadership role in some critical business areas, and because I know a lot about programming a computer. The job market for people with computer skills, business skills, and communication skills (in that order) is really hot right now, so I built on my good luck with my innate opportunism.

It’s pretty easy to scorn the business world, which takes serious advice from ridiculous books like Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun and Shakespeare in Charge, while never thinking of picking up Shakespeare himself. Reading such trivial books, you get a sense of how culturally and intellectually limited the business mind really is. Nevertheless, I would also argue that the difficulty humanities students have in making the transition into the “real world” is not entirely accounted for by the trivial nature of the business mind that can’t appreciate us. I don’t think humanities scholars appreciate the complexities of business. More importantly, there are limitations in the humanities mind set. I’m writing to address these based on my Tiresian (?) experience in both worlds.

I see the distrust of and deliberate separation from business as a real failing of the academic humanities. The idea that there is or ought to be a distinction between the “real world” and the academic world of the humanities speaks to the latent (philosophical) idealism that governs the way the profession looks at itself. Humanities scholars frequently present themselves as members of a sort of vaguely defined sacred tradition. The world outside of hermetic academia is the “secular” world. An idealist distinction is captured in the idea that there is a difference between academia and the “real world.” At a conference a few years ago, I jokingly told a fellow scholar that one of my professors seemed worried about the state of my soul because I was working for a large corporation. She looked at me dead serious and gravely said, “She should be.” Implicit in such a judgment is the interesting notion that the world of work is somehow sinful, or at least corrupt in the Platonic sense, and that membership in the academic priesthood can remedy this fallen state. Despite everything they know about the sometimes brutal realities academic competition, many academics believe this to some extent.

As idealists in the Schiller vein, humanities students tend to see themselves on the “right” side of a perceived division between the contemplative, exemplified by noble scholarship, and the worldly, exemplified by greedy business and the quest for money. It’s not uncommon to hear academics express a distrust of filthy lucre as heartfelt as that of any cloistered medieval monk. But if the humanities are really the study of humanity, why should we exclude such a large area of human experience as economics from our area of interest?

Not being an idealist, I have never understood this and frame the question differently. Aristotle recognizes a distinction between the theoretical and the practical. We might posit that the academic world is theoretical, while the business world is practical, of course. But there are some difficult problems that arise from positioning ourselves thusly. For instance, among the practical sciences, Aristotle includes such things as

• ethics – - the study of how the individual ought to order himself
• economics – - the study of how the household and domestic life ought to be ordered

The identification of the humanities with the theoretical, which in my experience is systemic, has some distinct limitations when we consider what does not fall under the theoretical category. Although there is some justification in the intellectual tradition for placing the practical below the theoretical, how many scholars who hold such intellect-o-centric views are prepared to defend all the ramifications of this thesis? We are eager to distinguish ourselves from the morally suspect world of economics. But in our eagerness to identify ourselves with the more valuable theoretical, do we exclude the practical science of ethics from our domain? Probably not. Someone here has recently suggested that medieval studies is the heir of the Delphic quest for self knowledge. Is it? Or do we redefine ethics out of the realm of personal governance and social interaction into metaphysical speculation, the heir of delphic mystery rather than the inquiry into right personal conduct, in order to make it palatable to our sense that we rise above the mundane world? And is knowledge of medieval palaeography or Latin prosody really part of the quest for metaphysical self-knowledge? Or is this a tale told to make us feel good about ourselves while we pursue highly specialized technical training?

I think it’s a nice story to believe the humanities specially rise above the mundane. But I don’t think that many academics would follow out the implications of the argument that domestic life, or perhaps all practical life, might be ignored by humanities students because they pursue a purely theoretical or contemplative life. There are too many troubling problems raised by this stance. Take [Student]’s case. Gifted student or no, aren’t we losing track of our ethical responsibility to ourselves when we go to back graduate school and knowingly increase our quarter million dollar debt, even if it is to pursue something we love? Even if that something is something theoretical? Moreover, isn’t there some question whether it is ethical for any of us to encourage this? My cold-hearted lawyer would recommend that [Student] quit school and declare bankruptcy as soon as possible so that he can get past the subsequent difficulties, which will last for up to 15 years in the USA. Is my cold-hearted lawyer more ethical than an academic who encourages [Student] to move to England and continue studying because he can thus remain the heir of the Delphic tradition? Could be. At what point is our belief that the humanities have an infinite, supermundane value eclipsed by the practical realities of the economic and ethical imbalance here?

It is easy to tell ourselves that we are in the right, that we are noble, that we follow a superior course of life; and that the more powerful figures in the world around us misunderstand us and undervalue us. But every secretary in the world believes the same thing about their manager. It is human nature to dignify one’s station in life, not specially academic. [Student]’s story, and our reaction to it, suggests to me the ways that it is specially problematic to dignify the humanities with this particular story of theoretical preeminence. I think humanities scholars too readily fall back on the comforting tale that they are reaping the moral benefits of leading a theoretical or contemplative life, whatever the economic consequences of this may be. Even among those who may not really want to associate themselves with an intellectual elite, I don’t think humanities scholars necessarily have another good tale to fall back on outside of the idealist paradigm of good-contemplative-scholar and bad-greedy-world. Marxists, who place a good deal of emphasis on praxis and have therefore spawned a huge number of anti-intellectual scholars, are certainly eager to launch into any denunciation of capitalist greed. Yet even the anti-intellectual Marx-influenced scholar will frequently imply that they believe that they have moved out of the world of the ordinary into an intellectual stratosphere. This is why people like Stanley Fish and Cornell West give interviews in which they seem obsessed with convincing their public that are in contact with the common man because they can talk to the man on the street or because they play basketball and go to Yankees games.

Here’s how I think about the life of the mind. The true meaning of the examined life is not that we learn to live in a world apart, but that we attempt to move beyond comforting tales to hard realities. I confronted some hard realities when I left academia. When it came time, I did not pursue an academic job because I had a premature baby (now fine, thank you), and I felt a huge sense of responsibility to my new son. After a couple of years struggling to get a foothold in business, I couldn’t justify the pay cut; I couldn’t justify the probable move to a remote part of the country away from two supportive families; I couldn’t justify the risk that I wouldn’t get tenure and have to break into business all over again at 40; and quite frankly, in comparison with the dynamic nature of corporate organizations, I didn’t find the self sacrifice required to submit to life in the bureaucratic university as appealing as I once had. I do not think that placing such a high value on these domestic and economic concerns that it made me put aside the quest for an academic life makes me less of a scholar or less of a human being. Many scholars will agree, but this does not stop the looks of pity, the words of consolation, and anxiety for my immortal soul I get when informing working scholars that I was prevented from pursuing an academic career.

Jim has recently said that he gets paid for doing what he would do anyway. I do not get paid and I have to do a lot of other stuff, including talking to the cold-hearted lawyer, but I still study in my limited spare time. This state of affairs does not bother me much. My present goal is to quit my job and start a business of my own, a step I am on the verge of taking. I’m not taking this risk for the money, which might be better or worse than what I’m making now, although I wouldn’t be distraught if I made enough money to retire comfortably at the age of 45 to become a full-time scholar again. The reason I’m doing it is that I have come to prefer working for myself to working in unwieldy corporate and university organizations. Living outside academia hasn’t stopped me from writing or giving conference papers. I’ll be talking a Kzoo again this year. In my case, leaving academia has represented neither intellectual nor moral death.

In short, the relationship between academia and the business world is more complicated than the unsubtle idealist morality play in which Theoretical Good is put to flight by wicked Worldly Greed. I can’t imagine getting through life without Aristotle and Shakespeare, to whom I return again and again when confronted with theoretical and practical problems. This is because the humanities (not necessarily equivalent with professional academics) taught me how to think about my whole life, not just about its contemplative aspect. I think it’s too bad that so many humanities scholars misunderstand, and even scorn, the world outside academia. They have much more to offer the sea of people entering the business world than better memo writing and pity. But, very often, the business world doesn’t see that, and neither, I think, do humanities scholars.

Having established myself as the voice of the practically minded, I feel obligated to say that [Student] has more serious problems than whether he should learn Latin or Old Norse. He should straighten out his life before he destroys himself further and borrows more money he can’t repay. If he needs a lawyer, I’ll be happy to forward the number of the old cold-hearted.

Well, this response drew a number of favorable responses on the list itself, including this one:

Thanks for writing such a thoughtful message on the uneasy relationship between humanities majors and the business world. I’m going to save it for advisees who are thinking of advanced degrees in English. As graduate advisor for my institution’s M.A. in English program, I constantly find myself in the awkward situation of discouraging people from entering my program. (We were originally established to attract English teachers with bachelor’s level certification, but we seem to have exhausted that market and are now attracting people who dream of going on for a Ph.D.)

The hopelessly in-debt student wrote me back a private note, which I reprint here:

Wow. All I can say is…bravo. I wanted to respond to you about this off list because I am still concerned about offending someone on this list who may, 10 years from now, have his finger on the button of whether I get an associate professorship or not. Whether I take that route, however, has been put into doubt lately–and some of the frankly egotistical and spiteful emails (one man accused me of being a liar, another of being bitter and ignorant and not worth hire or attention–both of which had the “Professor” title) has put this question more in the forefront of my mind.

Your email has really moved me in a way I can only describe as sublime–what you say is so true and relevant, precisely what I wanted to say yet did not have the courage to, that I have to thank you fully and repeatedly for saying it. You are right–before I debate with myself which language I study, I have to debate whether going on to England, and deeper in debt, is the right course of action. In doing so I will be abandoning my parents, who helped me get the degree I have, and my grandparents, who did the same, and my recent Fiance, who is willing to help support me financially throughout my 7 year quest for the magical ph.d. I have continually asked myself–is it all worth it? Now that question has become less idle, after reading your email. The mystique behind academia has become less opaque due to this thread, and what I’ve seen behind that mystique is something large and hideous.

Yet the question remains–what to do? Should I remain here and, for example, go into computers, as that is one of my fervant hobbies? In that field I am almost guaranteed a comfortable position that would quickly eradicate my debt. In doing so I would be financially free, close to my family, able to marry, etc.–but I’d also be giving up on the dream of my life, to have my prestigious ph.d. and be, in essence, what those people on the list insulting me are.

You have really made me think, William, more than anyone else who has been supportive and understanding of me on this list. Thank you.

I wrote the student the following letter, in which I coined one of my favorite metaphors, that of ‘dentists of the mind’ (I think I use it in my Writing For People Who Hate Writing):

I thought I might have come off a little too harshly, but I did mean to be supportive in my own overly direct way. Thanks for seeing beyond that.

You are standing at a crossroads in your life. Like Frost confronting the two roads in the yellow wood, someday you’ll look back and say that the road you take now made all the difference. Most people read that poem to mean that there is an enormous virtue in trodding the esoteric path. But if you read that poem carefully, you’ll find that Frost tells you that the roads are exactly the same and that he will say in his old age that he took the road less traveled, even though he knows this isn’t true. The two roads before you aren’t as different as you might think. Each has its share of high and low points. If you don’t go down the academic road, you will still have a wonderful life. You say you’ll be abandoning your fiance and family, but I think you might also look at leaving academia as a means of recovering them. You’ll be nearer to your family if you leave, I suspect. And take a look at the divorce rates among faculty members. They’re high. Academic poverty takes a toll, and people feel their non-academic spouses don’t understand their calling.

This is not to say that academia isn’t a noble endeavor. But if you’re going to go down the academic road, then I think you should consider whether you are doing so under the impression that it is a pseudo-mystical pursuit that justifies any sacrifice. The point of my e-mail is that it is not. On the contrary, I’m afraid that it often leads to an unbalanced life. Remember, academics are like dentists. You go to the dentist every six months, but the dentist lives and breaths teeth. He thinks you should brush and floss your teeth six times a day, even after you eat peanuts out of the vending machine at 2:30. His sense of the relative importance of good tooth care has hypertrophied. For some people, like me, who recently had a root canal, hearing this sometimes can be good for us. But if I followed the advice of dentists, carpenters, computer guys, and all the other specialists I meet during the day, I’d never have time for myself. That’s what academics are: specialists who think that what they are doing is more important in the general scheme than it really is. It doesn’t mean it’s not important, either.

As for meanness, condescension, and egotism, you’ve got to learn to expect that in your academic future, but there are ways of dealing with that. The first semester I taught rhetoric, I got “caught” teaching grammar and was screamed at for 45 minutes straight (no exaggeration). I was told I was like a Nazi and so I’d better ship up or I wouldn’t be a graduate student for long. When I went to get my doctorate, I wanted to write about the Roman de la Rose. My first advisor, perhaps because he didn’t like the Roman de la Rose, told me I had no future as a scholar based on a paper that there is no evidence that he even read. I had to fire him and find someone else to chair my committee. It turned out to be a Renaissance scholar, so I had to spend an extra year preparing for two sets of oral exams, when everyone else had to take only one. Then I wrote a 450 page dissertation on a subject that spanned both periods. Since nobody on my committee knew exactly what I was doing, it wasn’t until the day (three years later) that I defended my dissertation that someone said, “Oh, now I get it.” I wrote on a controversial topic, so I’ve been told off at conferences. My wife has only seen me present once. When I did, the presenter who followed me told me my idea was a travesty and that I was the kind of scholar who was dragging down the profession. My wife never wanted to see that again. Another time, one of the most famous Dante scholars in the world told me that my whole worldview was shallow and that I would think differently when I finally grew up (I think I was 30 at the time). This doesn’t begin to span the harsh things academics have said and done to me.

Jim Marchand taught me how to deal with things like that. When I told him about the Dante scholar incident, he acted like it was something to be proud of. He seemed to think it was like a battle scar, something you showed friends and enemies as proof of your durability. After that, we traded battle stories, and I learned that he, too, had received a blunt rebuff from none other than Derrida himself. After that, the stories I just told you became some of the proudest moments in my academic career. It never stops, either. Two or three weeks ago Norm Hinton hammered me again on Medtextl for saying something about D. W. Robertson, Jr. being wrong about the Roman de la Rose. It’s not that big a deal after a while.

So it’s brutal, and you need to get used to that. One way of looking at it is to recognize that academia is neither especially profound nor pseudo-religious. It’s also not necessarily something more “large and hideous” than any other aspect of human life. In business, I’ve seen more than 100 people laid off at Christmas. So a thick skin is good to have in any walk of life. Mine has gotten so thick that I actually enjoyed telling the entire medieval community that they have a distorted worldview and an atrophied moral sense. And I actually feel good about myself at the end of the day for having done it. Anyway, that’s how I developed a thick skin. You’ll have to figure out a way to do the same.

Be forewarned: walking through life like that will make you egotistical. It has me. (Of course, I tell myself it’s self-confidence). For me, the challenge, both in graduate school and beyond, has been to keep all this (my egotism and that of others) in perspective. I do this by reading the same works I used to read professionally. The classics talk about the whole human experience, not just the mystical. If you do go down the academic path, then I would urge you to see yourself as a teacher that can show both the theoretical and practical aspect of literature and life to your students. Ask yourself what is in their best interests, not yours. Ask how you can help them to lead fuller lives. The tools acquired in a humanities education are good tools to have for life. Convince them of it. But don’t forget the relative worth of all this and become a self-centered dentist of the mind.

I wish you luck, and if there’s anything I can do to help you either within academia or outside, let me know.

In the end, the guy ignored my advice and went to graduate school. I was dejected for weeks. But the heart has reasons that the mind knows not of.

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