Code Switching, or How to Leave Academe Without Really Trying

The literary scholar and author William Deresiewicz has published an essay on why he quit college teaching in 2008. It is well worth a read, but here’s a snippet:

I entered like an undergraduate, with an undergraduate’s idealism and naïveté. For me, graduate school, which I didn’t begin until four years after finishing college, was a way of finally doing that English major that I’d always wished I’d done. I went, in other words, because I wanted to read books: because I loved books; because I lived my deepest life in books; because art, particularly literary art, meant everything to me; because I wanted to put myself under the guidance of teachers who would inspire me and mentor me; because I hoped someday to be such a teacher myself.

Yeah, that sounds familiar.

Anyone in the academic humanities—anyone who’s gotten within smelling distance of the academic humanities these last 40 years—will see the problem. Loving books is not why people are supposed to become English professors, and it hasn’t been for a long time. Loving books is scoffed at (or would be, if anybody ever copped to it). The whole concept of literature—still more, of art—has been discredited. Novels, poems, stories, plays: these are “texts,” no different in kind from other texts. The purpose of studying them is not to appreciate or understand them; it is to “interrogate” them for their ideological investments (in patriarchy, in white supremacy, in Western imperialism and ethnocentrism), and then to unmask and debunk them, to drain them of their poisonous persuasive power. The passions that are meant to draw people to the profession of literary study, these last many years, are not aesthetic; they are political.

My old advisor back at the University of Florida warned me when I first entered graduate school for history warned me that the pursuits of modern academia might not be what I thought it was but I didn’t take the hint. It wasn’t really until I had already finished my PhD, and tried to publish a chapter of my dissertation as an article, that I finally understood what he was referring to. The rejection letter stated that they would publish it only if I rewrote the article to make it about an entirely different person who was not the subject of the article or my dissertation. I won’t go deep into the reasons they wanted me to do this, but rest assured they had to do with political ideology, not the quality of my research. I spent nearly five years writing my dissertation on this particular person, and had become an expert on that person’s life, but they wanted me to rewrite the entire article, with all the new research that entailed.

I think I realized right then and there that unless I agreed 100% with the politics of the editors to whom I was appealing, or at least pretended to, there was very little chance my concerns as an historian would be taken seriously (which are politically and culturally conservative). I sensed at that moment I probably wasn’t going to have much success in the academy, unless I was willing to hide my preferences pretty much nonstop until I achieved tenure. What you need to do, if you are not an ideologue, and don’t have connections that can shield you from being outed, is encode all of your writing in language that is acceptable to the powers that be, and pitch your work toward subjects they like, sneaking your own concerns in under the radar. This is the academic version of the linguistic phenomenon know as “code switching,” illustrated here by perhaps the greatest video every made:

Sufficed to say, I was not willing or able to do this. Just making it through graduate school exhausted me tremendously. About four years after this I was diagnosed with general anxiety disorder and depression and went on medication. (I went off the meds this summer but with the new semester in full swing, I am going to consult with my doctor about going back on.) But I think I gave any up real intention of trying to make my way in the academy at that moment. I received my degree from a land grant school, unlike Deresiewicz, who taught at Yale, and I have always been a painfully shy and awkward person, so I had few connections I could count on in the academy. I was certain my prospects were fucked, in other words. Probably I gave up too easily, and sometimes I regret this, but then I did not initially love teaching the way that he describes. I was more interested in learning for its own sake, and in that sense, my years in graduate school were not a waste at all. In any case, all these deficits combined with my emotional problems just made it too difficult for me to make the sacrifices I would have had to have made. But at least I didn’t waste as much time as he did trying to obtain jobs I had no chance of landing. It sounds like he tried much harder for much longer and didn’t fair any better. More:

But what disgusted me the most was not the intellectual corruption. It was the careerism. It was the sense that all of this—all the posturing, all the position-taking—was nothing more than a professional game. The goal was advancement, not truth. The worst mistake was to think for yourself. People said things that they obviously didn’t believe, or wouldn’t have believed if they had bothered to subject them to the test of their own experience—that language is incapable of making meaning, that the self is a construct—but that the climate forced them to avow. Students stuck their fingers in the air to see which way the theoretical winds were blowing, designing their dissertations to catch the swell of the latest trend.

I once remember reading a priest of the Church of England give a long paean to that institution, talking about its long and distinguished history, about how much it had contributed to the fabric of British society, and how therefore it would always exist as the nation itself would. But then he added: “as long as you understand it has nothing to do with truth.” This is pretty much where the academy is right now. I can’t really add much more to Deresiewicz’s essay, because his experience coincides so neatly with my own. I do disagree with his conclusion though:

Ultimately, the reason I left academia (since you’re wondering) is the same that many others have. My story is a personal disappointment; the larger story is a tragedy.

I had some personal travails during my time in academia, but I don’t really consider them disappointments. I overcame them, and believe I would have been completely miserable if I had somehow succeeded in finding a full time job. I began this journey with illusions, and surviving their loss, I see the world much more clearly than I did before. I consider this a gain, and a cause to be thankful. As for the “larger story” of academia, the only tragedy is that it has continued on long after its usefulness has ended. For what it’s worth, the modern university, born in the 19th century and turned into the bloated diploma-machine it is today during the Cold War, has already accomplished (more or less) its original purpose. It just isn’t fit for anything else, and only continues because it serves the interests of those who care nothing for that original purpose. Whenever it ceases to serve those interests, it will die. It happens. Institutions are not eternal, mostly. But those higher purposes for which they are (sometimes) constructed are more enduring, even in the absence of institutions to perpetuate them, which is why I have hope in spite of everything Deresiewicz describes and my own experiences: some elemental truths you just can’t kill, no matter how hard you try.