Can you be recovering and still be "in it"?

Resisting binary choices in academic life and beyond

Photo by Brendan Church on Unsplash

“Relax,” said the night man. 

“We are programmed to receive.

You can check out any time you like,

But you can never leave!”

— The Eagles

When my friend Erin Flanagan asked recently if she could be a recovering academic and still be “in it,” I thought of “Hotel California.” Some say the hit song is a metaphor for cocaine addiction or the headiness of celebrity, and in that way you might say it represents the grip the Academy holds on those who find their way into it. But I actually thought the reverse. The Hotel California is programmed to receive, but academe trains people to think that once they’ve been invited in, the decision to leave is forever. 

I remember thinking when I gave up tenure that I’d never have the chance to earn it again. This is what we typically call an ultimatum. And it’s largely this rigidity that I understand myself to be recovering from. 

The short answer to Erin is yes: recovery is a mindset that should be able to thrive anywhere. If I took a new faculty position tomorrow, I would approach my work differently, and I believe I’d be a better teacher and colleague for it. The long answer has me thinking about ultimatums: this or that, us or them. You are in or you are out. Recovering academics might be capable of flourishing within academic institutions, but is the reverse also true?

Ironically, academic life first liberated me from this kind of dogma. I grew up in the Pentecostal Church, which meant living as if every day of the year was Lent. Nothing but total sacrifice would suffice. Frank Peretti published his Christian thriller This Present Darkness in 1986, when I was eleven years old, and I read with both horror and fascination about demons and angels battling over the hearts and minds of ordinary people. There were no questers in that book, no spiritual pilgrims wrestling with unanswered questions. There was good and there was evil, and the characters had to choose between them. Have you heard the one about how many Pentecostals it takes to change a lightbulb? It takes ten. One to change it and nine to pray against the spirit of darkness.

During my childhood, circuit preachers traveled enormous distances through Canada and the Greater Northwest holding revival meetings. Their job was to get a congregation feeling so guilty that people were willing to fast for days and get up at ridiculous hours to pray, often for two or three hours at a time. The revival typically lasted for a week or so, and by the time the preacher hit the road everyone was so burned out that they’d fall back into their old routines. Which naturally made it easier for the preacher to make everyone feel worthless again when he rolled back into town a year or two later. 

My parents warned me that college might brainwash me. Make me worldly. But I saw, in Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave,” a welcome alternative to angry revival sermons. I could experience little breakthroughs without seeing the whole truth. I could spend my life having modest epiphanies without presuming to know where someone else stood in their journey from darkness into light. The very definitions of “darkness” and “light” were up for grabs. In place of arrogant certainty, college taught me the importance of humility, caution, and nuance.

William Cronon captures the idea in his famous essay “Only Connect,” which I’ve cited more times than I can count: 

“A liberal education is not something any of us ever achieve; it is not a state. Rather, it is a way of living in the face of our own ignorance, a way of groping toward wisdom in full recognition of our own folly, a way of educating ourselves without any illusion that our educations will ever be complete.”

How is it that the noun “academic,” and the identity that accompanies it, has come to mean something so foreign to Cronon’s idea of a liberally educated person? I’m not alone in asking this. Jonathan Malesic writes nakedly about how his vision of academic life set him up for despair. Eventually, the gap between his ideals and the reality of the work exhausted him so much that he felt his only option was to quit. While I have read Malesic’s The End of Burnout with interest and considerable sympathy, I find his message evangelistic. Malesic is not content with simply redefining his own relationship to work; he intends to revolutionize American work culture. This NY Times op-ed, inspired by Malesic’s own experience of burnout, uses a prescriptive “we” more than forty times.

My father once bought me a subscription to the creation science journal TJ, which now goes by Journal of Creation. The original title was short for Technical Journal, and it was perhaps the first attempt to replicate the academic peer review process in an evangelical context. I tried to explain to my father that TJ was not the equivalent of the academic journals where I published because there was never any disagreement among the articles on creation science. Authors might submit their essays anonymously, and submissions might go out to two readers who vetted them blindly, but the only criterion was whether the article offered a persuasive argument for creation science. There was no way to falsify anything published in TJ. And they would never have published anything by an evolutionary biologist. The entire point was consensus.

TJ was a cheap imitation of the real thing, the way Christian rock bands tried to sound like Mötley Crüe or Def Leppard in the 1980s. But it has become impossible to deny that versions of the TJ model exist in mainstream scholarship. In 1996, Alan Sokal shocked academics by publishing a parodic essay, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” in the journal Social Text. Sokal’s essay was heavy with jargon and was intended to be incoherent, thereby exposing the field of cultural studies as a sham. More recently, a trio of scholars pulled off a similar hoax, publishing not one but seven fake essays. This prank sought to expose journals supporting work in so-called “grievance studies” for following the TJ model of fostering consensus rather than meaningful debate among scholars.

Indeed, it can be difficult to find disagreement among academics who see their research as a form of activism. Emma Camp recently wrote a courageous op-ed in the NY Times about how debate — the very crucible of discovery that she hoped to find in college — is often quashed either by severe moderators or by self-censorship. Camp’s peers are daunted by the binary choices that some topics seem to offer and the public shaming that might ensue from dissent. Ibram Kendi, for instance, claims that there is no middle ground between racism and anti-racism. Conservative news outlets reported with considerable glee on a diversity event at Northwestern University, in which participants, including the acting dean of the law school, introduced themselves as racists. Even advocates for moderation seem to fall into these all-or-nothing rhetorical traps, as John McWhorter’s Woke Racism indicates. The language of advocacy sets up these binaries. What is the opposite of an ally? Which are you if your own stance is unclear? Are you in or are you out?

I’m not sure which came first, binary thinking in academia or the identity fundamentalism that we see in American politics. But I often find myself a man without an ideological home in such conversations.

Reader, I do not wish to write a manifesto for all. I have more questions than answers, and I prefer to live in the face of my own ignorance. When I began this week’s meditation, I intended to answer Erin’s question with a different metaphor. To suggest that being a recovering academic was a bit like healing from an abusive relationship. I meant to reflect on the ways that academic institutions often behave like controlling lovers, leveraging isolation, intimidation, and guilt to keep faculty from leaving or to silence those who have left.

But I suspect that such a metaphor is just another ultimatum, demanding total sympathy or rejection. There are direct incentives for doing so: controversy invites more digital traffic, which is how one builds a following these days. In fact, one of my primary reservations about joining Substack was that it would be yet another echo chamber. Another rehearsed consensus. Happily, I’ve found a supportive community here, but it is notably free of dissent, which makes me wonder.

College taught me that the alternative to a binary assertion is an open-ended question, and that might be the best way to conclude. What might it mean to be a recovering academic (or ____) and remain in the profession? If your profession (any profession) is not forgiving enough to welcome those who have left back into the fold, what gave rise to that rigidity? What, if anything, might soften it? I’d welcome your thoughts in the comments or in reply to this message, if you’re reading by email.