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philosophical ponderage, if not epiphany
Saturday, 15 April 2006 01:08 pmI had a lovely lunch with The Best Supervisor In The World on Thursday, during the course of which we not only exchanged quantities of more or less scurrilous departmental gossip, but she idly enquired how much I was being paid for these encyclopedia entries. Then she choked on her chardonnay. Apparently I am doing a ridiculous amount of writing with ridiculous degrees of conscientiousness ("How much research? Why don't you just fudge it?") for a ridiculously small payment, even in academic terms, whose notions of compensation make peanuts look like the sybaritic luxury of the idle rich. See how absolutely not surprised I am in any way at all, whatsoever. Exploitation? Count my deja vu.
Anyway. Said pleasantly drunken luncheon has caused me to arrive at a strange epiphany about this mug's game they call academia*. The whole system, which is only really as rotten to the core as any other system of our delirious age, revolves around the continual imposition of a whole series of hoops, mostly constructed around publication, through which the foolish academic continually has to jump. You have to have a PhD (hop!) and then you have to publish lots of papers (leap!) and then you have to get tenure (sproing!), but even with tenure you only get promotion or any respect if you keep on publishing, books as well as papers (bound!), but all of this has to be in fields considered academically Respectable and Serious (vault!) and in the Holy Grail of Accredited Journals (mad kangaroo impersonation!). And the low-down, dirty, inescapable Catch 22 to the whole circus is that it never stops!. By signing on to the process you effectively leap onto a monstrous roundabout that will go on and on and on making you leap through hoops for the rest of your life.
Now, a canny, political Starting Academic, such as I have never been, works out early in the process exactly what the hoops are made of, and how to elevate oneself through them with the minimum of fuss and effort. This doesn't work for me, because (a) hoops? what hoops? and (b) my massive natural streak of Bloody-Mindedness means that I am basically buggered if I'm going to spend my life in a career on anything other than my own terms, so I am not going to choose my interests in terms of Academically Respectable Topics in Accredited Journals, but in terms of what actually interests me. This means I spend a fair proportion of my life trotting up to the next hoop, giving it a dirty look and going "don't wanna!", which in turn means I'm not scaling the academic ladder in any particularly noticeable sense.
And, to bring this finally round to the whole point of the exercise, even despite the cussed refusal to compromise I am still continually putting off things I actually want to do because I feel I should be (guess what?) jumping through the bloody hoops. The mug's game of academia is that it always requires nothing less than all your attention all the time, because the hoops just keep on coming.
Both my natural cussedness and my actual dedication to the acadmic life (which is fairly considerable) dictate that I can't ignore the hoops: I will, by all the gods, make a go of this, in my own way and on my own terms. However, I have also decided that it's bloody ridiculous to keep on deferring things I really want to do until I come to the end of a process which is actually never going to end, see above. I stopped writing LARPs when I was finishing up my PhD, and I never went back because I was finishing that paper/that book/these encyclopedia entries, and you know what? Bugger that. I like writing LARPs. I shall write more LARPs. I shall try not to write excessive quantities of LARPs in a life-absorbing way, because there are still all these hoops, but I am also, by the extreme exercise of willpower, not going to allow the Academic Hoop Monster to make me feel guilty about an hour or two of LARP-writing in a day. Sod that. *kicks hoop-monster's butt angrily*
And, if you actually read all the way through that, thank you for your interest, and apologies for the rantage. The hoop-monster had it coming.
* Academia is still quite possibly the only game I really want to play, but it's probably a good thing that I'm finally starting to develop serious skill ranks in Suspicion, Cynicism, Self-Preservation and Political Finangling. I have been a very, very naive and idealistic bunny for far too long.
Anyway. Said pleasantly drunken luncheon has caused me to arrive at a strange epiphany about this mug's game they call academia*. The whole system, which is only really as rotten to the core as any other system of our delirious age, revolves around the continual imposition of a whole series of hoops, mostly constructed around publication, through which the foolish academic continually has to jump. You have to have a PhD (hop!) and then you have to publish lots of papers (leap!) and then you have to get tenure (sproing!), but even with tenure you only get promotion or any respect if you keep on publishing, books as well as papers (bound!), but all of this has to be in fields considered academically Respectable and Serious (vault!) and in the Holy Grail of Accredited Journals (mad kangaroo impersonation!). And the low-down, dirty, inescapable Catch 22 to the whole circus is that it never stops!. By signing on to the process you effectively leap onto a monstrous roundabout that will go on and on and on making you leap through hoops for the rest of your life.
Now, a canny, political Starting Academic, such as I have never been, works out early in the process exactly what the hoops are made of, and how to elevate oneself through them with the minimum of fuss and effort. This doesn't work for me, because (a) hoops? what hoops? and (b) my massive natural streak of Bloody-Mindedness means that I am basically buggered if I'm going to spend my life in a career on anything other than my own terms, so I am not going to choose my interests in terms of Academically Respectable Topics in Accredited Journals, but in terms of what actually interests me. This means I spend a fair proportion of my life trotting up to the next hoop, giving it a dirty look and going "don't wanna!", which in turn means I'm not scaling the academic ladder in any particularly noticeable sense.
And, to bring this finally round to the whole point of the exercise, even despite the cussed refusal to compromise I am still continually putting off things I actually want to do because I feel I should be (guess what?) jumping through the bloody hoops. The mug's game of academia is that it always requires nothing less than all your attention all the time, because the hoops just keep on coming.
Both my natural cussedness and my actual dedication to the acadmic life (which is fairly considerable) dictate that I can't ignore the hoops: I will, by all the gods, make a go of this, in my own way and on my own terms. However, I have also decided that it's bloody ridiculous to keep on deferring things I really want to do until I come to the end of a process which is actually never going to end, see above. I stopped writing LARPs when I was finishing up my PhD, and I never went back because I was finishing that paper/that book/these encyclopedia entries, and you know what? Bugger that. I like writing LARPs. I shall write more LARPs. I shall try not to write excessive quantities of LARPs in a life-absorbing way, because there are still all these hoops, but I am also, by the extreme exercise of willpower, not going to allow the Academic Hoop Monster to make me feel guilty about an hour or two of LARP-writing in a day. Sod that. *kicks hoop-monster's butt angrily*
And, if you actually read all the way through that, thank you for your interest, and apologies for the rantage. The hoop-monster had it coming.
* Academia is still quite possibly the only game I really want to play, but it's probably a good thing that I'm finally starting to develop serious skill ranks in Suspicion, Cynicism, Self-Preservation and Political Finangling. I have been a very, very naive and idealistic bunny for far too long.
