40 Comments
May 16, 2023Liked by Joshua Doležal

Two comments on specific lines from another thoughtful essay:

"Most professionals know that advancing beyond an M.A. risks narrowing opportunity rather than expanding it." Yes, but almost zero undergrads and parents that I talk to know this. It's so diametrically opposed to the American mantra of "more education = more options and higher pay" that it just hasn't caught on with the wider public... yet. But it will.

"Colleges and universities are bad at managing talent because they recruit faculty with a mythology about passion and purpose that contradicts what those same institutions claim their graduates will receive as a return on their investment in tuition." I think that they are bad at managing talent simply because there is so much more supply than demand. Why train and manage talent when everyone's replaceable and expendable? Chronic Ph.D. overproduction allows for studied neglect at all levels; those who quit are assumed to have been fated to fail anyway. (Academia is one of the last redoubts of double predestination, although of the secular sophist variety.) The faculty's idealistic mythology is like Boxer the Horse's "I will work harder" mantra--it leads to the glue factory but isn't essential to the overall storyline, which would have been the same either way. It just all goes down more smoothly this way.

Expand full comment
May 16, 2023Liked by Joshua Doležal

So much of this rang true for me. Sitting in the middle of messy thoughts that seem to spill everywhere. Trying to write, while putting my only child through college, both of us incurring debt while pondering the choices my father made to leave a safe corporate job and move us into the mountains, and the consequences. I wonder about the seeds that stubbornness planted me and what the consequences will be.

Thanks for helping me feel seen as we ask the questions.

Expand full comment

Thank you for enriching my thinking life so regularly. (And for giving me excellent excuses for not turning back to my stack of final papers to grade). This is what Substack is meant for, at its best.

There's not going to be a permanent personal solution that works for someone as aware as you are of how his actions function within an inescapably exploitative system. But that doesn't mean you aren't helping make it better.

I kinda disagree about the wildness of the elk. etc. Inner life? Hmm. You have to know that you think in order to have thoughts. And why would that capability as such accrue only to animals in the wild?

Expand full comment

They’re all just chapters. I was a daughter, then I was a student who bartended, then I was a graduate with a degree I used for a while, then I was a stay at home mom who homeschooled, then I was an empty nester and farmer, now, well I’m working on that chapter. All have been very different, requiring different knowledge sets and compounded experience. I’m still a daughter, an engineer, a mom, a farmer. You never really “fit”. You just flip through the pages and chapters of life.

Expand full comment
May 16, 2023Liked by Joshua Doležal

Where you quote me on market exploitation ...

It might be worth pointing out that I teach that a lot, since that's much of my focus as a social ethicist. And I use the term "externality" as well, as our entire civilization is built on moral and economic externalities. What's interesting about the academic case is that it's usually not highly educated people who get externalized.

I once calculated that my wage slavery brought in over $120k a year for the college I worked for in Texas, and I only saw 10% of that a year. I then realized that I, my own life and time on this Earth, was subsidizing the education that most of them didn't really want anyway. They just wanted a good job, so ... bleeding my life for them became farcical. I still did it 'cause I had nowhere else to go, but also because I did deeply care about those few kids who "got it" and whose lives I utterly transformed.

Expand full comment
May 16, 2023Liked by Joshua Doležal

Josh,

I took a different track through undergrad, but I'm sure everyone's bored about me telling me story.

Instead, I just want to point out that as a first generation student I didn't "know that advancing beyond an M.A. risks narrowing opportunity." In fact, I was so good at philosophy that my professors assured my parents that I'd be fine, despite the odds. Only later did I realize that I was being mentored by a bunch of intergenerational upper class people who just didn't get how much of a handicap being first generation is ... just as I didn't know until later.

By the time I figured that out, years later, I also felt "like walking down a narrowing passageway through doors that lock behind you," as past opportunities disappeared. It's part of why I get angry when I hear the "sunk cost fallacy" thrown at graduate students and early career Ph.D.s. Well, for us humanities folks, the opportunity cost of a Ph.D. all but requires burning bridges with anything else, given the stigma against us.

I've seen studies on Ph.D.s that indicate that an ever greater proportion of them are coming from parent Ph.D.s and the upper class. I believe that it's a majority at this point, which the studies note that only the wealthy can afford the financial handicap anymore, as they chase after things other than money.

J

Expand full comment
May 16, 2023Liked by Joshua Doležal

Fabulous article. I'm a faculty brat, but my late father worked for low pay at a state university, but enough pay to buy a house on one salary and raise a family. In turn, some old alums from the University of Idaho (my dad's employer) were talking about how there used to be like less than 10 main admins on campus: president, provost, dean of students, head of financial aid, and a few others. That was it, and the university ran well, it was taught by many faculty (even at Idaho) with doctorates from Ivy League and Berkeley, the tuition was insanely low for in-state students, and things were good. At least that was my impression.

Flash forward to today's institutions rife with admins and staff, more than faculty, to keep students towards graduation when none of the metrics show that all these additional staffers have increased anything except tuition. The problem with everything in America is there's no going back. Not one admin or rich alum or state legislator, will wake up one morning and say, "You know what, the system is broken." Two big causes of skyrocketing tuition: reduced state support AND increased layering of 6-figure administrators. Colleges always bemoan the former and never speak of the latter.

Expand full comment

Oh my goodness, what a wonderful and piercing essay. I feel like you said so many of the things I’ve been struggling with myself. I think you are right where you should be . . . Writing these essays and building this community.

Expand full comment

Beautiful. One of your best essays yet. Very insightful. You really pull the curtain back on academia. Fascinating.

“Knowing thyself is hard. What is the arc of my professional past? It could be the story of a man who can’t stick to the plan. Always leaving. Never satisfied. A man whose childhood isolation creates self-fulfilling prophecies of rejection and marginality in adulthood. Or it could be the story of a self-respecting person who doesn’t want to waste his one wild and precious life. Who trusts the nausea when he feels it and keeps moving forward toward better opportunities, healthier environments. 

There are still days when I’m not sure which story is true.”

This is me as well. 100 💯

Expand full comment
Jan 26Liked by Joshua Doležal

Such a thought provoking piece, I can't wrap my own thoughts around it yet. Going to let it simmer, but as someone still in academia (but defeated in many ways), I see the truth in your words. I think the system is truly broken. And my husband, who is on the outside, thinks we're all crazy to put up with any of it.

Expand full comment

very well said. I wonder how much this is also a very American problem. As academic education has become so incredible commercialized. Big names stand like towers for best education when in fact they are just best in the branding game in the end. It is said to see for lovers of education and wisdom.

Thank you for a great piece!

Expand full comment

Personally, I love this piece because it parallels something I'm experiencing right now. I'm an English professor who then became a Dean for six years--a position I just left because of massive burnout and regular turnover at the higher admin level that found me working under new bosses 3 times. So I'm on a sabbatical right now as I transition back to the faculty ranks, but a lot of what you write here is where I am at mentally. Make the leap to something else? Bet on myself and an entrepreneurial path? Find a place in the work world where I am valued, yet I maintain my own outside/home-life identity because higher ed absolutely destroys that boundary and, by design, fills up every minute of your life that it can while making hollow calls for "self care." So now I am where you are/were: searching for not just the "why," but the "what."

Expand full comment

This refusal to be domesticated you mention may indeed manifest itself in academic life. I know if I were to pursue that career once my PhD is hanging on the wall, I know it would give me more reading time than other professions. And I would truly enjoy reading anything related to my California literature specialty apart from the absolute tripe. But this is also why Samuel Beckett walked out of Trinity College, Dublin after only a week. Perhaps the wildness you mention explains why Montana, against all odds, has produced enough literature to give it its own distinct tradition. (I also see what you meant earlier when you talked about being an "outsider," despite growing up there: Montana lit must be a truly experiential tradition) Now I really want to read more: this connection to "wildness" and the art of literature is something well worth exploring, and it only occurred to me reading this article: so I owe you a glass of good Ceske pivo in the future. It reminds me of Poland's beloved (for those in the know) Gypsy poetess, Papusza, who wrote in Polish-influenced Romany. You can only find English translations in sporadic publications online, but they capture both the horrors of war as well as that nomadic spirit of restlessness the Gypsies once took for granted. I never encountered anything like it in literature. http://longpoemmagazine.org.uk/issues/issue-three/the-library-beneath-the-harp/

I will check out that book Tomatoland. It's a relevant topic now that child labor has returned to the US. Another reason why I don't believe we live in normal times. (And why I write with that abnormality in mind) Although I suppose a cynic might argue that it's a return to the normalcy of people starting work as kids all throughout history, or the US simply becoming "normal" just like every other country.

Expand full comment