I have found that as a person who has taken a somewhat circuitous path through life for my whole life, people have always been really eager to tell me how to get back on the straight path, as if the reason I’m doing what I’m doing is because I am lost or aimless. It’s irritating when people offer me extremely pat advice that is based not on what is true about my life but instead based on caricature-ish misapprehensions of it. People who hold such misapprehensions are always the most likely to Advise in such a way, especially when I don’t ask for it. I appreciate that these people are Trying To Help. I’m very sick of this nonetheless. Even as I expect this to happen, I am not inured to it. And I have to keep a straight face and pleasant expression, have to Hear Them Out. It’s not very polite to tell someone that you’ve heard what they’re saying 100 times before. If I respect my interlocutor and expect they’ll have the ears to hear, sometimes I’ll try to explain a little bit about why I’m doing what I’m doing and why their advice is orthogonal to my actual circumstances—but this is rare, because rarely do such Advisers have the ears to hear.
A friend was talking to me the other day about how I’ve been thinking about trying to think about the idea of trying to enter academia, and how I am very ambivalent about this. I think he doesn’t see or accurately understand the various valences of my ambivalence, but that’s ok; few who have taken the Traditional path do. He really wanted to offer me some Advice anyway, though; the same Advice, as he told me, that he used to offer his middle school students, so naturally it was very applicable to my life as a 28 year old woman.
Anyway, this friend did say something that I found useful. He told me that when realtors show a house, they consider it a bad sign when people do nothing but politely comment on the floors or windows or whatever. It’s considered a much better sign when people say things like, “oh that whole wall would have to be torn out” or “those cabinets are an eyesore”, because people who say things like this are actually picturing themselves living inside the house. He said that my ambivalence about academics is like that. I think that’s true. I’d take it further; I’d say that it is my habit to show respect for something by engaging with it critically. If I have bad things to say about something, it’s usually because I have expended energy on taking it seriously. I am not lightly engaging the question of whether to enter academics. That’s why the shallow advice on the subject upsets me.
And why, you might ask, would I even entertain the idea of academics? It’s complicated. Basically, it’s because I want to talk to more people about more things. I have a pretty satisfying intellectual life, but it could be more immersive. I have to work a physically demanding job for a living, and then design my own curriculum, and then read my own curriculum, and then find people to talk to who are willing to engage with me in any depth concerning the things that are in my curriculum. And then sometimes I post about it on substack and just hope that someone who thinks deeply will talk to me about what I’ve written, which does happen, more often than I thought it would. But I want more. I want a higher concentration of curious people to talk to. I want to be in seminars all day.
They would have you believe that the university in the only place to find this kind of thing. My experience, though, is that the concentration of curious people is not higher in university. I almost said the concentration of “smart” people isn’t higher in university, but that’s not true. At the university in my town, there is a much higher density of people who can like do really smart calculus or whatever than the average population, there’s lots of people coming from or going to the smart people schools Stanford or Oxford or Yale or what the fuck ever. This does not translate to a higher density of people who think clearly, flexibly, curiously, or interestingly. It translates to a high density of people who are very good at doing what they’re told and thinking the way they were trained to, people who Know The Canon. Which is all well and good for, say, medical school, or engineering. But damned it some of the humanities grad students in this town aren’t the most boring, vapid people I’ve ever met. There’s also a very high density of people who have gone through life being told/believing that they are the smartest person in the room and being grievously, un-self-aware-ly wrong about that. There is also a high density of callous, amoral people who just want their degree so they can go make a lot of money at Lockheed.
Actually, I should probably just tell you what university I’m talking about; my feelings and thoughts about What A University Is will make a lot more sense: It’s University of Michigan. I live in Ann Arbor. Which might also help you understand why I feel the way I do about The Rich Liberals.
All this said, there are plenty of interesting people affiliated with U of M. Good old Phil, of course, and many others, too. I have not met any of these people in their professional capacity. I have met them through mutual friends, or at church, or at the slightly-above-dive bar at which I do my nightly reading, or otherwise out in the world. I would not have cause to meet any of these people in their professional capacity even if I were a student. I have the same amount of ease finding my intellectual kin from my position outside the academy as I would have from inside the academy, and I’m not having to jump through insane hoops while I do it.
I hated school and was a terrible student basically my whole school career. I hate makework. I hate having to prove myself to people whose opinions I deeply don’t care about. I have always loved thinking and learning and shooting the shit, though. For a long time I fell for the Lucy and the football trick that teachers would always pull on me. “Sure, middle school is hard for you, but high school will be better; you’ll have a lot more freedom.” “Sure, high school was tough for you, but it’s tough for everyone. College will be a much better fit.” I’m wondering what is giving me the inkling that trying to jump straight to grad school would be remotely different.
There’s one more thing, too: I don’t have any money. I have never made more than $22k in a year, which makes for a scanty lifestyle here in Ann Arbor, where the average rent is $1.6k/month. There are quite a few financial resources for Nontraditional Students (read:older than 22 and working class) in Michigan, which we are very fortunate to have and I don’t take it for granted; I could make good use of these if I wanted to. I think I would still likely have to go into crippling debt, though.
I think the thing I am looking for doesn’t exist yet. I think I might have to build it.
I had similar feelings about academia and my solution was, for a long time, to live at its outer edge - working odd jobs near university towns, so I would have access to libraries and events and a few like-minded people, but would have no obligation to take on its values and sensibilities. A few years ago I crossed over - by accident, it seemed - and am surprised I've lasted so long. As it turns out, academia might need people like us to survive.
“people who Know The Canon”— I agree with this as long as we make a big distinction between knowing the canon and actually reading it. In my experience, a lot of the vapidity comes from people knowing what opinions you’re supposed to have about books but not really paying attention to what the books say. Knowing reputations but not doing the reading! I feel like that’s 2/3 of literary discussion everywhere you go,and sadly that includes self-consciously counter-institutional spaces like sub stack!