Timothy Burke has a really good new post that starts with a mention of the weird Rhodes Scholar revocation scandal, and then expands out to a broader indictment of elite college admissions and other similarly cutthroat processes:
I don’t really have a strong opinion on the Rhodes thing; I skim-read one of the mid-to-late stories in the cycle (maybe the one in the Chronicle?), and it had a lot of the “You people deserve each other” vibe common to NYT magazine profiles. This did not inspire me to learn more.
The admissions stuff speaks to me more directly, though, and the resonance is particularly strong right at the moment because we’re in the middle of doing interviews for a tenure-track faculty position, which is yet another version of these kinds of problematically hyper-competitive processes. And, of course, SteelyKid will be starting high school next year, so I’m acutely aware that I’ll get to go through this from the parental side in the distressingly near future.
Burke links to an April piece in the Chronicle by Matt Feeney about “The Abiding Scandal of College Admissions” that’s pretty scathing about the way the “holistic” admissions process is distorting the high school experience by encouraging the production of “authentic” essays that play up personal trauma. My only quibbles are that I’m not sure this is restricted to college, or really a new development. Back when I was applying to college, toward the end of the last century, I was basically ordered to re-write my own essay to give it more of an edge in more or less this manner. I trashed my parents’ basement in the process, but produced something with enough authentic emotional weight that it got me into a bunch of top schools (not Princeton, though; their letter wait-listing me was taped to the back of my bedroom door for decades as a reminder not to get too cocky).
And, of course, “authentic” essays about personal trauma are the stock in trade of a vast swathe of the sort of elite media that publish essays at all. There are long stretches where social media feels like an endless barrage of links to people baring their souls in polished prose, leavened with reported pieces plumbing secondhand trauma through interviews with the principals of some lurid dispute (who mostly deserve each other). We’re swimming in this stuff.
I suspect this has a corrosive effect extending well beyond academia, to the detriment of our collective equilibrium— I don’t want to say “mental health,” because that feels too much like playing along— by making it seem like everyone is working through Some Heavy Shit. And I really, truly, don’t believe that— I think most people are basically pretty okay, and that encouraging them to frame every bummer as a trauma isn’t doing any of us any good.
I do agree that this seems particularly acute within academia, though, and that the hyper-competitive processes of admissions, hiring, and professional advancement make this a whole lot worse. The other piece Burke links is from Lisa Duggan on the “Academic Affect,” which at its worst creates “Anxiety leading to paralysis, isolation leading to depression, arrogance and contempt leading to withering condescension.” This infects all manner of discourse within academia, to the point where many faculty seem to be completely oblivious to their own casual cruelty. (At least, that’s the charitable interpretation of their actions— a more cynical person might say it’s a form of passive aggression, which Duggan also rightly calls out…)
I feel somewhat fortunate in that the STEM fields seem a bit less prone to the worst excesses of toxic academic discourse, probably because we can always fall back on empirical observations as the ultimate arbiter for our research disputes. (Well, except for the string theorists…) This doesn’t provide much relief in the other areas of professional academic life— scientists and engineers can be incredibly bitchy about issues around teaching and service— but there’s at least some refuge in research on objective reality. The few glimpses I’ve had into evaluative processes in other parts of academia seem… less constrained, let’s say.
Unfortunately, as with far too many discussions of the problems of academic careers, I’m left in the position of having nothing useful to suggest by way of solutions. The ultimate cause of this toxicity is, as is so often the case, the huge disparity between the number of people who want to be in academia and the number of spots available for them. Barring some wildly implausible infusion of flipping great wodges of cash leading to a huge spike in demand for new tenure-track faculty, it’s not at all clear how we could reduce the competitive pressures that are at the root of all this bad behavior. About the only thing we can do at present is to be a little more conscious of the ambient level of anxiety and toxicity, and choose our words and actions in ways that at least don’t add more thoughtless dickishness to the mix.
That’s kind of a downer note on which to end the week, but, you know, I work with what I’ve got. Here are some buttons:
and if you have a brilliant solution to suggest, please, by all means, put it in the comments.
One thing that I think can be done is being more honest with graduate students about the job market in academia, and doing much more work to prepare people for work in industry.