[ANPPOM-Lista] The Chronicle of Higher Education: How to Live Less Anxiously in Academe

[Carlos Palombini]

Artigo de *The Chronicle of Higher Education* (Washington, D.C.)
compartilhado por uma amiga que trocou uma universidade britânica por uma
faculdade particular na Tijuca.

How to Live Less Anxiously in Academe:4 steps toward an alternative
academic career

If it is still true that a university job is about teaching and writing,
then in this age of market fundamentalism, those two faculty roles have
attained a distinct nature. Successful researchers are what Christopher
Hitchens once called "micro-megalomaniacs." They have carved out a small
and distinct place for themselves, over which they rule uninhibitedly.
Their writing is unreadable as well as unread, neither of which is a
disadvantage, because, as Russell Jacoby reminds us, "if your work is
readable and is read and therefore considered journalistic — then that’s a
curse." And, he added: "If no one reads it, it’s certainly not held against
you."

The same goes for teaching. At least where we teach — in Britain and Sweden
— being a disengaged teacher is nothing to be ashamed of at a research
university. In that institutional sector, a yardstick for academic success
is the distance you can maintain between yourself and the students. We’ve
both received advice over the years to spend our time and effort on
research, not teaching.

Meanwhile, teaching or service aspirations — say, teaching something that
actually engages students, or writing something that is actually read — are
not rewarded.

But we already know this, and we know that this situation is not going to
change all of a sudden. So for those of you who have grown tired of this
futile moaning and wish to do something about it, we will suggest four
steps toward an alternative academic career.

These steps are not fast-track routes to scholarly excellence, but neither
are they suicidal, careerwise. We’re both living examples. True, we may not
be singled out as role models in our institutions; for starters, our
publication records are too short and too nonacademic in orientation. Yet
we’re largely left alone to pursue our broader interests, which is all we
ask for.

*Step No. 1: Kill your institutional aspirations.* There has always been a
tension between intellectual aspirations and institutional demands.

While aspiring intellectuals, such as ourselves, may never be entirely free
to do what we want to do, we can nonetheless develop a particular
orientation toward our university employers. Instead of becoming part of an
institution — filling in reports, sitting on committees, golfing with deans
— we can regard ourselves as merely residing in an institution, doing no
more bureaucratic work than what is required. Meanwhile, we can enjoy the
liberties that come with having relatively safe employment, with actual
weekends and holidays, which is something that has become an unattainable
luxury to the freelancer. As Mark Greif has put it in a 2015 essay on
public intellectuals
<http://www.chronicle.com/article/Whats-Wrong-With-Public/189921> in these
pages, "One must simultaneously differentiate oneself from the university
spiritually and embed oneself within it financially."

The trick is to navigate that fine line. Once you get an academic job, you
may want to keep a low profile, and just live up to the basic expectations.
Smile and nod, but don’t overdo it. Then gradually — without giving the
game away — cultivate an indifference and apathy toward institutional
demands. Little by little, you should distance yourself from the spirit of
the professional university.

What we suggest here is not new or revolutionary. In a letter to his
imaginary friend Tovarich, C. Wright Mills wrote that he was a "Wobbly"
professor. He lived, as he put it, "outside the whale" of academe.

But crucial here: Remaining spiritually outside academe does not mean we
should all recline on a couch, sleep through the days with our office-doors
locked, and cash in a regular salary. We should just use the time
differently. Spend it on meaningful intellectual activities. Which is what
the sociologist Gary T. Marx did after his rise and fall from professional
grace in the late 1960s. In a 1990 confessional essay
<http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/success.html>, he describes how he started
off as an academic supernova. But as he climbed the institutional ladder,
the responsibilities expanded and got heavier. He was offered editorial
positions, invited to give keynote speeches, and asked to take on senior
administrative roles. The paradox of academic success, Marx wrote, is that
it "brings less time to do the very thing for which you are now being
recognized."

Things started to go awry for Marx — "the sweet smell of success" he had
initially scented "turned slightly rancid." He grew disillusioned and
angry, no longer knowing what he was doing in academe. Eventually he was
denied tenure, and had to start over. So to avoid the same fate as Gary
Marx, kill your institutional aspirations.

*Step No. 2: Be an amateur.* When you’ve rid yourself of all institutional
aspirations you are ready to say it out loud: "I’m an amateur."

Both of us are amateurs. We were never trained to write; never trained to
teach. Well, one of us was forced into a term-long, teacher-training course
with a management consultant — which was about as helpful as a
mixed-martial-arts course run by a peace activist.

Being an amateur is nothing to be ashamed of. Edward Said embraced the term
<http://shifter-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/said-professionals-and-amateurs-copy.pdf>.
For him it was the mode of the intellectual. Amateurism, he said, is "the
desire to be moved not by profit or reward, but by love for an unquenchable
interest in the larger picture." It is a desire, he continued, that lies
"in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values
despite the restrictions of a profession."

As an amateur you are naturally anti-instrumental. You’re largely
indifferent to extrinsic rewards or status. When doing research, you’re not
interested in gaining an elevated position among your immediate academic
peers. You’re just interested in keeping your job, making sure not to get
fired.

After Gary Marx’s career crashed, he restyled himself as an academic with
broad intellectual interests and minimal professional aspirations. Of
course, that didn’t impress those who had "their hands on the reward
levers." He never made employee of the month. Even so, Marx notes, this
orientation "is likely to enhance the quality of the intellectual product"
and it "feels good and helps keep one fresh."

Embracing the spirit of the amateur is a reminder that, while you can call
yourself an academic, you aren’t the only person who can talk and write
about sociological matters. Mills was early to point out that journalists,
filmmakers, authors, and artists are doing social science, too. And their
work is by no means inferior. If you’ve ever watched *The Wire,* or read
Barbara Ehrenreich’s books, you know what we mean.

As amateurs we need to be open. And we need to experiment with different
outlets, and work on how we get our ideas across. Which brings us to ...

*Step No. 3: Stop writing badly.* Academics publish more today than ever
before. But the problem is not the volume. It’s the quality. With its
jargon and passive phrases, our academic articles are rarely a pleasure to
read. But who cares? Bad prose is not necessarily a disadvantage when
making an academic career. Strange as it may seem, we are actively
encouraged to write poorly, as Michael Billig explains in *Learn to Write
Badly.*

Sure, writing well is hard and takes time, and most of us will never become
great writers. But we can all try to stop writing badly. Or at least stop
actively trying to write badly. There are several useful guides out there,
which can help you on the way — such as Stephen King’s *On Writing* and
William Zinsser’s *On Writing Well.*

But as much as we need to ask *how* we write, we need to ask *what* we
write. Are we writing about topics worth caring about? Topics that move us?
Topics that move other people? All too often we seem to write about topics
that move no one and have no resonance to anyone, anywhere. Take Patricia
Wilner’s damning 1985 investigation into *The American Sociological Review.*
In "The Main Drift of Sociology Between 1936 and 1982," she looked at the
subjects covered by the journal during those years and found that key
social and political events were largely neglected. Up until the mid-1950s,
only a handful of articles (around 1 percent) dealt with the Cold War and
the McCarthy witch-hunts.

It doesn’t seem a lot better in our field of business management. According
to Dennis Tourish, a professor at Royal Holloway, University of London,
none of the leading journals in the field have published "a substantive
paper dealing with the 2008 banking meltdown."

*Step No. 4: Start teaching well. *Academics often don’t want to admit it,
but as teachers, we actually enjoy a considerable degree of freedom. And,
no, the students aren’t as utilitarian as we like to think. Believe it or
not, they often want an education. A few years ago, we interviewed about 40
juniors at a business school. You know what irritated them the most? When
teachers talked about them in the future tense, as tomorrow’s business
leaders and entrepreneurs, as though that was a dream they all shared. Not
only did they have other dreams; they also knew that — given the vast
numbers of business majors — not all of them could end up as managers.

For aspiring intellectuals, teaching offers a unique opportunity. When
writing for academic journals, you’re lucky to be read by more than a
handful of people. With teaching, however, it’s different. Not only can we
reach many more, but, as Russell Jacoby wrote in* The Last Intellectuals,*
we "have students who pass through and on to other things." And with
students passing through the university each year, you might have an impact
after all.

As an unapologetic amateur you should like to experiment with form. You’re
not scornful about television series and box sets or even commercials
because you understand and appreciate the craft behind those productions;
and you know, as Gerald Graff wrote in *Clueless in Academe: How Schooling
Obscures the Life of the Mind:* "If educational institutions hope to
compete with the media for students’ attention … they need to devote at
least as much serious thought to how they organize their representations as
do the media managers who produce a ninety-second TV commercial."

No, that doesn’t mean dumb things down or adopt an infantilized tone. Just
put in the same amount of care and attention as though we were working in
other media, such as television or radio.

Maybe we shouldn’t separate writing from teaching. They’re both forms of
productions, like a documentary film. The Italian philosopher Gianni
Vattimo says that, for him, "there is no difference between what I do when
I am teaching in the university, and what I do when I write a column for a
newspaper."

The same goes for Georg Simmel, the early 20th-century sociologist. For
him, teaching was the perfect way to test new ideas, which he would later
develop into books. His lectures became so popular that German newspapers
started to report on them. But he wasn’t born a public intellectual. He
gradually turned into one. Prior to 1900, 50 percent of his writings ended
up in scholarly journals, the other half in nonscholarly publications.
After 1900, 28 percent of his publications ended up in scholarly
publications, 72 percent in nonacademic ones.

But Simmel’s chosen career teaches us a sober lesson. His rejection of
professional orthodoxy sent him to the lowest ranks of the German academy.
He remained a tutor throughout his life, only reaching the heights of
full-fledged professor for a few years at the very end of his career.

He is by no means the only academic who’s been professionally marginalized
on account of writing and teaching for larger audiences. Many aspiring
intellectuals have put their professional careers at risk in favor of
something more meaningful. They’ve cared less about their careers — and
more about the world. Which, we think, is laudable. Remember Franz Kafka’s
words: "In the struggle between yourself and the world, back the world."

Carl Cederström is an associate professor of organization theory at
Stockholm University’s business school and Michael Marinetto is a lecturer
in business ethics at Cardiff University’s business school.

https://goo.gl/wgj9ss
-- 
carlos palombini, ph.d. (dunelm)
professor de musicologia ufmg
professor colaborador ppgm-unirio
www.proibidao.org
ufmg.academia.edu/CarlosPalombini <http://goo.gl/KMV98I>
www.researchgate.net/profile/Carlos_Palombini2
scholar.google.com.br/citations?user=YLmXN7AAAAAJ