In the past week or so it has begun to sink in: I'm once again surrounded by weirdo academics. I suppose that this shouldn't be shocking since, after all, I work at a university. But there's a air of arrogance and self-entitlement that many academics carry around that I had kind of forgotten about.
Sure, there are the big egos and big heads. And there are the eternally awkward conversations -- I recently met one of my colleagues who introduced himself as "very dynamic" before he talked at me for a solid five minutes. Whew. But the thing I had forgotten about is how many academics act like they have the most difficult and demanding jobs in the world, as if they're the only ones working more than forty hours per week.
Exhibit A: A piece published yesterday on Chronicle.com. The article is about how in "mixed couples" -- meaning one academic, one non-academic, lest you thought that academics and non-academics were the same species -- the non-academics might be preventing their academic partners from reaching their full potential.
The author, David Perlmutter*, gives a number of reasons why your non-academic partner might be "sinking your career," all of which revolve around not fully comprehending how academia works. From the arduous tenure process to having to work at home after 5pm, the academics have it so rough and the non-academics simply don't know how to help their partners succeed. Perlmutter's article reeks of academic martyrdom.
My favorite part is when Perlmutter coaches his colleague's non-academic spouse on "the particular nature of the sacrifices we need to make and that our loved ones need to accept." We all make sacrifices, and we all need to figure out how to support our partner's needs and goals. Aside from accepting that their academic husbands will probably start sleeping with their graduate students in a few years, academic sacrifices are completely unexceptional.
As I write this, my programmer (read: non-academic) boyfriend is working. It's 11:30pm, and he'll likely be up for another six hours, making this his second all-nighter this week.
My mother is a high school teacher who comes home every day after an eight hour day with a stack of poorly written essays to grade.
News flash! There are people working really hard outside of the Ivory Tower! In fact, roughly 30% of Americans work more than forty hours per week, and most of those people can't go home in the middle of the day and work from sun porches drinking iced tea.
I'm not sure why academics tend to feel like they're the only ones whose jobs are demanding. Perhaps they have to make themselves feel relevant somehow, since what they're so focused on so often isn't.
* Perlmutter is a dean at a journalism school, and yet he managed to write the worst piece I've ever read on Chronicle's website.
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5 comments:
This post is great to read and so true! I left academia after graduate school and am currently working at a non-profit. I grew up with 2 parents working for the federal government who worked 40 hrs/week and never brought work home. Through my graduate career, I longed for the "normal" person's 40-hr week, but the more I am out of academia the more I see that most "normal" people work over 40 hrs a week. I have found the people at my non-profit to be extremely hard-working and dedicated, and they often work well past 5 pm. We academics have it better than we realize!
I agree with you, that article was incredibly snide. I like the part about how our spouses need to understand that we need quiet, uninterupted time at home so we can work on the field that we have "devoted our life to study". Basically he's saying that your partner is secondary to your career, and that their primary purpose is to support you in your aspirations. What a jerk.
So let me guess, this guy is married to a doormat who washes his undies while he does "real work".
Fantastic post. And it was very kind of you to gloss over the fact that this guy is a professor of journalism, which is a joke. I deeply respect journalism as a craft, but almost by definition it should be conducted out in the world. It's just not an academic discipline.
I have only one small gripe: academic wives as well as husbands are prone to bed hoping. Not like any one group has a corner on the adultery market, but too many academics seem stuck in adolescence, probably because they've never left school.
Thank you for writing this. I always read about how hard it is, but no one ever comments on if these articles really ring true.
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