Vocational Bribery, Academic Blackmail

A former colleague of mine recently sent an e-mail lamenting his lack of summertime productivity and passed along an article that might help others in similar predicaments. The article — from Inside Higher Ed — is one of those dime-a-dozen, pathetic self-help columns with enumerated tips on how to be more “productive,” so on and so forth.

The e-mail and article were both addressing the sad fact that many mid-career academics find it hard to work without external incentive. In other words, after gaining tenure, many so-called “academics” cannot muster the energy to do their craft, to get their academic work done, lacking the bribe of tenure. This seems to be less of an issue concerning writing and productivity — which I’ve written about recently — and more of a sign of the broken, corrupt, and lazy academic culture that, as I noted in my final Chapel Talk, is bred on fear. (It also reveals one of the reasons I was unable, and ultimately unwilling, to stay at Wabash College.)

It also might be a signal that these struggling mid-career academics should contemplate another line of work. Perhaps their vocation has run its course. Maybe it’s time for an adventure.

If I ever reach the day when I cannot bring myself to do the work that is part of my vocational namesake, I must find other work to do. Believe me: I don’t really like to write, read, play music and the rest. I love it. This means that I am compelled to do it even when I don’t want to, when I don’t like it. My life depends on it. Sure, I’d rather watch TV all day and eat Big Macs, but I’d also be miserable. We are not fully alive when we do what we like, we can only live when we love.

Tenure, as far as I am concerned, is not to be worried about. If I love what I do, am good at it, and work to get better, then, I will do it as best I can, for the sake of the craft itself. If that gets me tenure, so be it. If it does not, then, whether I deserve it or not, I don’t want it. If tenure disappears from the academy, I’ll do my work anyway. You can share that with my dean or president or chair or whoever, wherever. In fact, it is precisely this reason why my work might, just might, be worthwhile. I am not doing this out of fear, motivated by vocational bribery or academic blackmail. I refuse to be enslaved on an academic plantation, however comfortable it may be.

I posted this (edited) comment on the Inside Higher Ed site:

Perhaps the fact that writing is difficult after getting tenure is more a sign that one didn’t really want to write in the first place? If I sweep and mop regularly at gunpoint but find it hard to sweep and mop when I am free to do as I please, it might say less about sweeping and mopping and more about the sad reality that I was not interested in doing that work to begin with. Maybe I once liked the idea of it, but I’m not serious anymore. Writers, serious writers, I know write compulsively, out of a sense of inner motivation, an irrational NEED to write. Tortured writing. They write to survive, to live. That academics don’t feel that burning desire to write might say less about the writing and more about them and their delusions that they are cut out to be doing this kind of work in the first place. It also might explain why so much of what we do write is such rubbish, from form to content.

SR