How I made it in academia

 I had a successful academic career. I retired recently as a full professor at a flagship state school, published a number of books and numerous articles. I won the major research award in my university. I was nominated a few times by my department to be a Distinguished Professor, but I was not selected. I applied for other jobs once in a while at more prestigious universities, but I did not get them. I probably rose as high as I was meant to. Salaries stagnated in my institution while I was a tenured faculty member there, so I never made the same amount as other full professors made in my same department the year I was promoted. When I complained about my small salary bump, a prominent "feminist philosopher" who was associate dean at the time told me I was lucky to have a job at all. 

This is how I did it: 

I had long been fascinated by poetry. I was a voracious reader and wanted to be a poet. But my actual aptitude was for figuring out how poetry worked. I became a good student of literature simply because I had read more than most people had, even most people going into the field, and because I thought about literature more analytically than most people.  I essentially trained myself. Of course, I also studied for my courses, but I tended to learn more from my own reading and study than what others could teach me.  

I was also a second generation academic, so I had started to think like a college professor when I was a teenager. This is what we would call privilege, now.  Let's say, though, that starting early is an advantage, as in almost every other human endeavor. 

I switched my major from English to Comp Lit. and studied a year abroad in Madrid. I pursued a comp lit degree at Stanford, with the goal of being a specialist in Spanish and/or Latin American poetry. I realized that the Latin American field was too politicized for my taste, and that I could leverage my knowledge of Spanish poetry to become an expert. I read the secondary literature in my field, and assessed its quality. I saw that I could do at least as well as some of the experts in this field. 

My interest, for better or for worse, is how poetry works on its terms, a kind of poetry engineering, as it were. This could still be done in the 1980s, when I began. I am not opposed to politically driven research into literature and culture, but it is simply not my thing, not what I am good at.  

I wasn't interested in studying Spanish fiction. A lot of people did this, and the field was crowded while also being prone to plot summaries. It would be easy to distinguish myself in a smaller field. 

I realized that a lot of people going into Spanish were not literature nerds like me. Those people were going into English. I had an automatic advantage over people who were going into the field for other reasons. I could leverage my greater understanding and knowledge of literature and the privilege that came with being a second generation academic. 

I wrote a dissertation on major, but still only half-recognized poet, whose work had been ill-served by the critics, in my view. I wrote the dissertation to be my first book, with few revisions. I know people tell students now that the only important thing is finishing the dissertation, not how good it is, and that the first book project can be something different from the dissertation, but I thought I needed to start my career on a solid foundation.

Looking back on it, the dissertation and first book does not seem as intellectually deep as some of my later work. But if still stands up well in my own biased opinion. 

I determined what the top journals in my field were, and submitted articles to them, with success. I hedged my bets by also publishing in some second-tier journals. My first university, another flagship university in the midwest, was on a quarter system. I learned that you could teach a summer quarter, of shorter duration, and take one of the three other quarters off. I did this a lot and had time to write a second book, which is still one of my most cited works. 

I was recruited to another flagship university and got the job. There was a fallow period, in which I began projects without being able to finish them. I still published enough, so that there are not significant gaps in my cv unless you look very closely. 

Then I got an idea to write about the most canonical Spanish poetry, Federico García Lorca, in American literature and culture. Lorca was well-studied, but not from this angle. In a way, it was having the idea to right this book that was the most significant moment of my career. 

At around the same time, I completed work on another book on contemporary Spanish poetry. Two books appeared during, and I was promoted to Professor. I needed four books to accomplish this promotion, not the normal two, because I had not produced at a steady rhythm, and had not excelled in my service obligations to the university. (Later, I was able to figure out how to contribute to the department more productively.) I am also not a natural born teacher, and had difficulties until I was able to figure out how to do better there.  

The Lorca book brought me a lot of attention, since it was of interest to readers of American poetry as well. Also, working on a canonical author brings more rewards. People talk about the value of non-canonical authors, but their actions speak louder. When dealing with a canonical author, the interest of the audience is simply assumed: you don't have to argue for the importance of Lorca. The audience is automatically larger and more engaged. 

Through continued work on contemporary Spanish poetry, I became known in Spain as well, and was invited to lecture there with some frequency. I continued to work on Lorca, and became known and respected in this subfield. I began to specialize in musical settings of Lorca's work, another well-known but at the same time ill-studied subject. I have now retired, but still work on my research projects. 

This essay is not meant to be advice, because I don't know if my trajectory could be reproduced in today's academic climate. What I had going for me was an educated family background, a strong intellectual interest, set when I was very young, vast amounts of reading and thinking about literature, a strong competitive drive to be one of the best scholars in my own field, and the luck to be able to leverage these advantages in environments favorable to my scholarly temperament. I've only received two job offers in my entire career, at two flagships where I worked. If I hadn't been hired, then I would have had no academic career at all.

The massage therapist and the onion farmer

 I was hearing my niece and another middle aged guy discuss the value of bartering, exchanging things of value instead of using money.  Money is of no intrinsic value, and earning or exchanging money allows the government to tax.  

Later, I developed an idea about this. It is fairly obvious, but suppose an onion farmer wants to get a massage. She can go in and pay for it with 80 pounds of onions. But now the masseur has 80 pounds of onions. He has to figure out how to barter those with some other people, for other things. Nobody is going to want that many onions, maybe. So for every massage there will be too much of something else on hand. He will need a certain number of hours in the day to negotiate a lot of deals. A lot of people won't want to do regular business with the farmer, because they don't want that many onions at a time. 

Now, would you like $80, or $80 worth of onions? Money is fungible, so you don't have to worry about having too much of it on hand. Some barters are beneficial and easy, maybe, but as an overall system it isn't practical.  

Voracious

 Every high-level academic I have ever known is a voracious reader. We read, or have read, vast quantities. Just saying... Even low level academics are readers. 

Usually, you have to read in your own field, in the course of doing research, and also just to keep up generally with things.

Then, you usually have some side interests, as well, and a general knowledge of history, philosophy, etc... 

You will know a lot of things superficially, and a few things well. Breadth and depth. 

There is also maturity. I was smart when I was 28 and just got my PhD, but my depth is greater now.  My total score: depth, breadth, originality, and quickness of thought, is probably better now.   

Suspect

 Someone in Grad school, in David Halliburton's theory course my first semester, said that in a capitalist society scientific facts are generated in the same way that industrial products were, through a capitalist mode of production. I thought that was a strange idea, so I asked for an example, and the example offered to me floored me.  The person's example was a scientist who argued for genetic component in intelligence, on racist grounds. 

Now, this racism is despicable, but it had no bearing on the phenomenon of which it is supposedly an example. This has nothing to do with capitalism, etc... There wasn't some actual mode of production of scientific data infected by capitalism. It was simply science in the service of something bad. 

I could have protested, but instead I felt humiliated, in a strange way. I knew instinctively that I couldn't argue, because even if I knew I was right there was another part of the picture: I realized that there was a different standard for arguments in this academic milieu, which was Stanford's Modern Thought and Literature program. (I was in comp lit., but we both shared this theory seminar as our intro course.) If you could tie something to politics in a crude, inaccurate, handwaving kind of way, that is all you had to do to win an argument.  The reference to racism sealed the point, because those are magic words for winning an argument.  Of course, most science is not about heritability of intelligence, and most scientists reject that idea, in fact. How can this be typical or illustrative in any way?  

Strangely, the person in question is someone I personally like and still count as a friendonfacebook. 

Another friend from High School who I like posts cringe memes on Facebook, inspiring stories of achievement written by AI.  They are written in the dark and stormy night style. Other leftist friends post cringe worthy content as well. There is something wrong with me temperamentally, because I find this kind of thing unbearable.  

When I was a kid

 When I was a kid I was trying to figure out how poetry worked. I wasn't a gifted writer, but I was curious about how it worked, kind of like from an engineering perspective, though I would be a sorry excuse for an engineer. I studied it from a college textbook when I was 12, maybe, and then went through the whole Norton Anthology. I just tried to figure it out from the inside. I still wanted to be a poet. 

I went to school with certain poets, figuring them out, like William Blake, WCW. I've done this with Borges, Frank O'Hara. I still do this in music, with Monk. 

I found a place in academia where I could continue this, and rose near to the top of this world. I studied languages, became an expert in my own subfield. 

So if anyone else reading has done this, how can we place a value on work that does not reflect an equivalent level of dedication and training?  How can we say that it also deserves praise?  

Training

 Imagine, then, two people of the same aptitude.  

One reads voraciously, learns languages, trains himself to write, learns about a variety of other subjects, (history, art history) plays music, figures out how to succeed in academia, rises to the top of an academic field.

The other: pursues a non-academic career, does fine. Main hobby is watching sports, maybe.  

The variability is in two factors: the opportunity, usually provided by a certain amount of "privilege" growing up, and the drive to do actually do it. I had both. I could have easily had the same privilege and same aptitude, and done nothing with it. 

The training is about 90% of the academic's value. It is work: training oneself to do all these things at a top level, but also expanding the brain through music and language learning. The non-academic could have done it, but didn't.   

Only a reduced percentage of the population get a doctorate or equivalent.  Even for a smart person it is not easy. 

Of these people, only a few get to research jobs and publish. Of these, a certain percentage is more or less on the top. It is an elite proposition, and it takes a lot. This is why academia, structurally, is elitist. 

Disorientation

 Here in Barcelona I went to restaurant one Sunday soon after I arrived. It had one of those fixed menus and they advertised "jazz moodd todo el día."  [sic]  They had good music, perhaps some Sonny Rollins followed by Miles, etc... The food was a little salty but not too bad. 

A few days later I started to go to one of the outside terraces near where I live; did it several times, having some beer or wine and tapas in the past few weeks. Then yesterday, I went back to the "jazz moodd" place.  Not as many places were open, and I had the same food more or less, but sitting on the other side of the restaurant this time. I was starting the suspect something, so I exited from the other door, onto another street, and there I was, at the outdoor terrace I had been frequenting on several other nights. It was the exact same restaurant, just experienced somewhat differently: day vs. night, one street vs the other, outdoors or indoors. The wait staff was different during the say. 

 I hadn't really noticed the name the first time, so even though I knew the outside place was called "Ginger" I didn't really associate it with the "other" place at all until I had another daytime meal there.