Someone on facebook was surprised that there was a strong correlation between being a professor's child and becoming an academic one's self. I would say it is not surprising. 13 percent of people have advanced degrees (Master or PhD or equivalent). In 2000 is was half that. Wouldn't it be more likely for those with such parents to go into "the profession."
This is not to say that those without academic parents will not be academics, or that all academics will have academic children; it is simply a correlation.
It is an advantage: you know what academia is growing up. Your dad might have subscribed to the New York Review of Books, and had academic books around the house, or discussed his work with you. It is a form of privilege, in the traditional sense of the word as well as in the new sense (in which privilege is a bad thing because others do not have it). I know more because I started earlier. What I am is not just the product of my own education, but of my mother and father's too. My father might not have become academic either, without his mother filling the house with books.
4 comments:
Well, many people, including me, do what they have seen done.
But you have to have encouragement and despite this correlation, what I have observed is that the people who do the best had that, from somewhere.
I always felt coming from an academic family was a negative. You have too much exposure to people already disillusioned, too much awareness of how easy it is to fail, too much exposure to the stress and not enough to the intellectual aspect of things, discovery, pleasure, it seemed to me. You inherit too much of the trauma.
You have to live up to someone already accomplished in that area. My father was sociologist, but then became mostly administrator, something that I have avoided save for my brief time as senate president (not really administration). I would probably do even better if I didn't compare myself; even though I am more accomplished in scholarship, there is a burden I carry around.
The point about trauma is interesting.
Up or down? My father was mortally terrified of losing his job. His father had lost a good job in 1929, which in many ways ended his career (he did work again, but) and had them largely homeless for some years. His grandfather had lost a job, ruining a career, due to supporting desegregation in Maine, during Reconstruction. He was very shocked by this, surprised, didn't realize Christians did not follow Jesus, never recovered. Being on the tenure track while having a family including a disabled wife was more than he could take, really. He would not take ANY risks and kept saying that to keep yourself off the streets you should never say what you think, never teach in any kind of creative way, and never publish your true ideas, only say very safe and conservative things.
It was a very poor and unhappy example. My mother was also very upset about it, thought a professorship was a position and not a job, had not realized she had married a working man, and he was furthermore working with "Spics" and might be one himself secretly. Nothing intellectual could be mentioned at home and he kept having to say look, I don't like this job either, but it makes more money than other things I can do. I think he was actually interested in it, secretly, but it wasn't something he could afford to show.
My official reason for going into it was that everything was said to be impossible, but this I had seen and knew I could do. I didn't get the chance to think about whether or not I was interested. I even thought I must not be, when I got to these places I worked and didn't like them. I thought I couldn't overcome that because I wasn't interested enough. Now I think it's the opposite: had I not been as interested, I wouldn't have cared.
* * * also: I believe that as a class marker, you are supposed to say you didn't intend to do this, you just kind of fell into it. That way you don't admit that you worked hard, struggled, etc., so you are superior to everyone . . .
* * * and that narrative has similarities with that of first generation people who just kind of happened into it.
My father says he feels first generation, didn't know what he was doing. His own father had dropped out of 9th grade to work, and his mother had graduated from college at age 29. His grandfather had gone to divinity school. Great-grandfather studied under Wilhelm von Humboldt at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität. Still my father feels first generation. I guess he is the first Ph.D. ... He went to graduate school because he was in one of those while-I-think-about-my-future barista style jobs after college, where he'd majored in LAS and done at least half the credits at UNAM. Next door neighbor was a Spanish professor and they didn't have enough TAs so solicited him to come be a TA and go to graduate school.
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