This one’s from my archive at home. Mind the changes.

On 1 January 2014, Lulu Miller’s “Editing Your Life’s Stories Can Create Happier Endings” appeared on NPR.org. In the piece, Miller reports findings by Tim Wilson of the University of Virginia that suggest one of the ways in which people negotiate trauma and disappointment is to rewrite the narratives of such events, in essence refashioning the stories of their lives into forms easier to handle. Miller introduces by way of an anecdote of her nephew (to which she returns to conclude the piece), bridging from the story of his triumph over his having been startled by a statue of the Frankenstein monster into Wilson’s comments. She also notes Wilson’s assertion that having people physically write new narratives allows for the kind of effects normally seen only after years of therapy, if in smaller measure; an hour of writing time divided among four daily sessions can produce sufficient change of perspective on a specific event to greatly ease anxiety and enhance self-image.

Given that Miller is reporting decades of academic study for a general audience, there is necessarily some simplification of the topic; it is doubtlessly more complex than she remarks in her online piece. This can be potentially problematic, as the oversimplification may well lead to the adoption by persons in need of significant therapeutic intervention by a dumbed-down version of the technique in the absence of any psychological or psychiatric oversight, creating a situation not unlike self-medication. While the rewriting exercise is not likely to be as dangerous to the unguided user as the unsupervised use of pharmaceuticals, it is possible that the exercises, if done without an outside reader available, will lead to the reinforcement of the same negative attitudes they are meant to deflect. Miller does not offer the caution, and she does not offer a statement from Wilson offering that caution, which is a point against the piece.

Even so, the piece is written well, overall, and it offers a point in support of the value of writing as an activity. Miller’s use of an introductory anecdote humanizes her already-human topic, lending it an immediacy that serves as a pathos appeal to its audience. Her return to it in the end of the piece serves to unify the piece as a cohesive unit, lending it a sense of completion that makes it more authoritative through; if it is completed, there is an implication that there is nothing more to be said, that Miller’s is the final word on the matter. Also, the use of a young child as the focal character in the anecdote implies that the phenomenon is more natural than trained, given the relatively little time the child would have had to learn the behavior. Situating the phenomenon as one “naturally” part of human experience helps to universalize it, making it—and the piece discussing it–more accessible to the audience.

The identification of the therapeutic value of focused writing activities also valorizes writing as an activity in itself. While Miller’s audience is not likely to devalue writing, many other people are, as those whose jobs involve the teaching of writing are well aware. Indeed, the article makes some motion toward the resistant in noting Wilson’s work with those who assert that they are “bad at school.” Teachers of writing and teachers whose classes require writing often must contend with assertions that writing has no value, that it is an outdated practice irrelevant to the world in which students live; there is a prevailing opinion that “real life” has no need for the written word. Miller’s piece, and Wilson’s research upon which it is based, assert that writing has value outside the classroom and for more people than those who style themselves writers of one sort or another. The clear implication is that everyone benefits from targeted writing activities, making writing instruction all the more important.

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On 29 June 2018, Allison Schrager’s “The Modern Education System Was Designed to Teach Future Factory Workers to Be ‘Punctual, Docile, and Sober'” appeared on Quartz.com. In the article, Schrager asserts a need to rethink current educational structures in the US–and to have that rethinking driven by corporate leadership. She glosses the history of public education from the viewpoint of industrialists invested in having a workforce habituated to factory shift-work standards, noting the unease of transition from self-directed home-based work to boss-commanded factory work. She also calls upon current business leaders to consider and push for changes to educational systems.

Schrager is, in her core assertion, correct; the educational system/s in the United States were set up in large part to respond to circumstances that are no longer in place. Manufacturing is an increasingly small part of the professional environment, so having systems of schools set up to supply manufacturing workers with ready-to-go employees is not wise. (Whether it ever was is another question entirely, one worth considering, but not one I’m going to go too deeply into here at present.) She is correct, too, in noting the sociocultural shifts that accompanied the economic shift from home-based work to factory-based. And there is some sense to the idea with which Schrager concludes, that those who will complain about the mismatch of graduates’ abilities and their own interests would do well to work to change schooling.

But.

Corporate and business interests leading changes to education is what has produced the putative problems identified in the article–as well as the many, many other problems identified in other places. Testing companies are easy examples to find, certainly, but there are others; calculator manufacturers and textbook producers (when separate from the testing companies) are also prominent, and there is a long-standing comment about the economic utility of a workforce smart enough to run machines but not critical enough to ask why they need running. Any changes to schooling need to be made with a clear idea in mind of what the point of schooling is–and I am not a fan of the idea that school ought to be a place where a person learns how to have a job.

As I write this, it is my daughter’s 100th day in school. She was excited at the prospect, certainly, and I am glad she was; it’s good to see her enthusiastic about being with people her age and forming relationships that may well last for decades. (I’m still in contact with a very few people I knew when I was that age, and I am aware of the relative lack of such connections I have; living in a smaller town tends to point out who all stuck around and who didn’t.) It did prompt a bit of reflection on my own educational experience, some of which was at the very school my daughter now attends. Certainly, things have changed–and largely for the better. Her school environment is immensely more nurturing than I remember mine being, which I think good. (I admit I approached school with a bad attitude–not disdainful of learning, but dismissive of my fellow students’ intelligence; it did not make for a good time, and I do not wonder much at my lack of connection to people in my hometown.) There seem to be more opportunities available to her than were to me, as well, and that is to the good. And what I have seen of the curriculum so far seems generally fine, though I have some specific disagreements–but that’s always true.

I know that I am not in line with many prevailing thoughts when I express my worry about education-as-job-preparation. I’ve been at the front of too many classrooms whose students viewed their degrees only as credentials for work to be sanguine about the prospect of the same thing happening to my daughter. And, yes, I have chafed at times at the mismatch of my own academic training and the professional circumstances towards which it was aimed; I do not know that I will ever be over the bitterness of it. But I also know that that training and the system in which I was reared (and how applicable “system” is to something that has emerged out of no unified plan, even if it does tend to favor particular sets of people consistently, is an open question worth discussion–in another place and time) are products of that same impetus Schrager describes. I do not necessarily share her ideas about the best way to amend things, but I very much agree with her that changes are needed.

Change is always needed. Everything can always be better, and it cannot become better while remaining as it is.

I don’t claim to know what the changes would look like that would make things better. I imagine they would have to destabilize the current systems to a great degree, which would cause difficulties; while testing companies and many other corporate interests in education are decidedly problematic, many or most of the people I’ve known who’ve gone into teaching do so to help people, and they would be displaced by such structural shifts. So I acknowledge that change is likely to be slow and that it is certain to be fraught. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t need doing–or that it’s not worth the effort.

Help support the ongoing betterment of my being out of academe!

On 5 January 2017, a revision of Sara Holbrook’s “I Can’t Answer These Texas Standardized Test Questions about My Own Poems” appeared in the online Huffington Post. In the article, Holbrook discusses the misuse of her poetry by the authors of the 2013 and 2014 Texas standard middle-school assessments. She does so first by noting that one of the poems used by the test is distinctly inappropriate for middle-school readers; she then remarks on the for-profit nature of standard test production and apologizes for the authors’ oversights. Holbrook moves on to note the unfair demands on teachers tasked with test-prep, citing one teacher who had emailed her with questions. She then points out the folly of the test questions and of the tests themselves, noting a study that asserts demography is as predictive of “student achievement” as the tests used to assess it. After comes a screed against reliance on the tests, followed by a parsing of the questions asked by the test about her own poetry.

I read the article from the vantage of being a product of Texas’s public education, being one of the “test run” for the assessment culture that has grown up (I do not apologize for the pun), being a former teacher, having been one of those paid to write exam questions (although for college rather than high- or middle-school students), and being (at least in my own mind, through with some outside evidence) a poet; as might be thought, I have a fair bit to say about it and about the broader circumstances that surround it. As might also be thought, little of it is favorable. Some of it even includes naughty words; they are the right ones, I think.

As someone who came through public education in Texas–I graduated from the local high school in 2000–I got to have a fair bit of experience with the rites and rituals that mark moving through the grades, though they have since grown more strict and ossified, constraining more people more tightly in their stony grip. Grades mattered, yes, but not so much as the tests; however high a GPA, a bad day during testing week meant make-up work or worse. I am fortunate in that I take tests well by simple virtue of practice, but being accustomed to testing rather than to more authentic, organic ways of demonstrating proficiency or mastery, I have suffered since; I was taught to test in school, and even in graduate school, I spent more time worrying about completing assessments and passing benchmarks than about what I ought to have been. It’s part of why I don’t have an academic job. Clearly, I’m not going to be too happy looking back upon it.

I think I am part of the groundwork for the assessment culture that has grown up in education since the early 2000s. In school, I was part of the gifted-and-talented program; the idea is that students deemed to be academically exceptional are placed into more challenging, accelerated coursework so that they can more fully develop their intellectual faculties. But what it was for me was more a series of tests that seemed never to end than anything else; I recall being pulled from music and gym classes to take standardized test after standardized test, something like “Let’s see how much we can push the smart kids and dial back slightly from that.” While my later school years did offer me coursework that helped me in college, I feel I missed out on a lot of what I would have otherwise gotten. My brother felt similarly; when he had the opportunity to get into gifted-and-talented work, he refused it, citing my example. When, therefore, Holbrook comments about what is lost to students when they are obliged to focus on test prep, I cannot help but think she is right, that standardized testing is wrong.

I know I have made much of not having secured a full-time continuing teaching position; that I have made much of it comes from having long, long wanted to teach as a career. I trained for it, and no small amount of that training had me working in classrooms with students–which meant I got to help with test prep for a fair bit of the time, and I got to help proctor exams during my student-teaching semester. The kind of nervousness betrayed in the email Holbrook presents was common among the teachers with whom I worked, and no wonder, given that their already-insufficiently-compensated work was imperiled by students having a bad day (or coordinating efforts, which I know happens; I’ve been part of it in other circumstances), and I have to wonder if they knew then as I know now that years of work in the classroom looks to folks hiring like no work at all. (I’ve said it before, but I do not tire of it: fuck George Bernard Shaw.) And test-prep is a time-suck for all involved; it does get in the way of having teachers who enjoy the job and are driven to excel at it no less than it does the students’ love of learning. Neither is a good thing; both are reasons to get rid of the droning dull exam.

I do have to say, though, that working on writing exams was a generally pleasant experience. I made a fair bit of money doing it when I needed a fair bit of money; I benefited from exams being for-profit concerns, though not nearly so much as did the people in charge of such companies as I contracted for. And I was able to put my experience taking so damned many exams to good use; I had and have a developed sense of what questions are “supposed” to look like, how answer-sets should function. As such a professional, then, I quail at the kinds of questions Holbrook reports; the answers are inane, and there are answer-sets in which no one answer appears as best, which is the supposed standard used to determine whether or not a student has answered “correctly.” I held my PhD when I wrote tests; I believe I can claim some expertise with the subject matter. Like Holbrook, I cannot settle easily upon an answer; I can hardly think that seventh- and eighth-graders would do better–unless they have been carefully directed to approach poetry in exactly and only one way, and that a way that those of us who do or have done the work of looking at literature do not. It’s not an argument in favor of the kind of test Texan students take.

And that last bit scares me as someone who has some interest in “creative” writing. Here, I disagree with Holbrook to some extent; I do not think that I have the sole and definitive answer about a poem’s meaning, even when I’ve written the poem, and I do not think that my statements about intent are necessarily authoritative (again, I do not apologize for the pun). Wimsatt and Beardsley have the right of it; authorial intent is a faulty standard to apply, in part because it is outside the text, and in part because it cannot be accurately ascertained. I do not necessarily recall what I was thinking when I wrote a given piece, and even if I do, what I remember may not be what was. Yes, the tests ask about authorial intent rather than narratorial motion (which is shitty test-writing), but even asking the author–as Holbrook calls for–is not necessarily enough to get the “right” answer. Nor, again, is it the case that there is one “true” reading of a poem; indeed, one of the things I sought to stress to my literature students is that the very thing that keeps a piece of literature under study is that it sustains multiple interpretations. But that runs counter to multiple-choice exams, which is why it doesn’t get the support it ought to–and which is another reason why the damned tests, as written, are so fucking bad.

None of this is to say there should not be standards. It’s also not to say there shouldn’t be some standardization; there are reasons a nation-state might want to insist on such things, and some of them are even good ones. It’s clear to me, though, that the standardization that is in place is not aimed at serving such ends as might be thought of as worth having; rather, it’s a means of control and punishment, a means to bring others to heel–and for certain select groups to take money from the public purse as they do it. It’s a load of bullshit, somewhere between the Frankfurtian and the Fredalian, and it stinks, indeed.

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On 6 November 2017, Mark Celeste’s “Dungeons & Dragons & Graduate School” appeared in the online Chronicle of Higher Education. The article is, in essence, a comparison between Celeste’s experience of a graduate English program and playing the primary example of tabletop roleplaying games, and Celeste’s points are generally correct. That does not mean, of course, that there are no points of concern, but there are comments made that are well worth considering–and repeating.

As far as points of concern go, perhaps the most prominent is that the comparison between graduate study in English and D&D is that of trivialization. To be fair, I’ve spent a great deal of time playing roleplaying games, including D&D, and I pulled from that experience while I was teaching (which I note), so it is with some sense of irony that I make such a comment. But D&D is a game, and it is one with a particular history of regard–not only the “bunch of guys and gals sitting around in their mom’s basement drinking Mountain Dew, eating Cheetos, and telling warlock jokes” Celeste mentions to lampshade the issue, but also one that has engendered (admittedly undeserved) fear and revulsion. (An older piece by one arkelias comes to mind as having explanatory power.) While it is the case that views are largely changing (as witness the fact that my high school has a D&D club now, whereas having dice on campus was actionable when I was a student), they are not wholly changed; some will still view D&D and games like it as iterations of evil, while others will take the comparison between English graduate study and gaming as yet one more indicator of the uselessness of that study. And while it is not the case that Celeste’s article appears directed toward arguing to outside readers that English graduate study is worthwhile, it is also not the case that the article will be used only for its “intended” purposes.

Again, however, there is quite a bit of good in the article. For one, as noted, Celeste’s points of comparison are generally correct; the identified parallels are, in my experience and in the experiences of others with whom I’ve discussed the matter, well, parallel. (Yes, I know “the plural of anecdote is not data” and all, and I’d be happy to see a citation to “more rigorous” scholarship on the matter, but until I see something that disproves my prior understanding, I’m going to continue with it.) I might also add that I, and no few others (again, going from discussions I’ve had with others), come to their chosen discipline through D&D and similar games, at least in part, so it makes sense that there would be connections to be found–aside from those, such as Daniel Mackay and Gary Alan Fine, who make formal academic study of such things.

For another, and more important, there is Celeste’s assertion that he doesn’t “think you can get through grad school without a dedicated hobby or two.” I’ve known people who have done so, certainly, but they have not been happy people, even if they have perhaps been more likely to land one of the few and coveted tenure-line jobs with which graduate students continue to be teased despite the ongoing contraction of that particular area of employment. Graduate work, particularly in the humanities, is traditionally isolating, breeding myopia that accounts in large part for the oft-cited chasm between town and gown, and getting outside that work, having a reminder that there is more to the world than the project being pursued, is helpful. For me, the reminders were judo and, yes, tabletop roleplaying games. For others, the reminder’s been visual art, or music, or something else entirely. (Sometimes, it’s less good.) The medium matters less than the message, though; finding the outside interest and engaging in it is helpful to getting through graduate school–and many other things, beside. And it may be the case that the connections formed through those outside activities come to bear when, at length, the search for tenure-track work fails, as it does for far, far more than succeed in such seeking.

Did I bring you as much pleasure as rolling a handful of dice? Could you kick in a bit for me so that I can keep doing it? Click here, then, and thanks!

On 27 March 2019, Herb Childress’s “This Is How You Kill a Profession” appeared in the online Chronicle Review. In the article, Childress presents parts of his experience in academe to depict the incremental cruelties of academic contingency. After a series of assertions about how college faculty have been devalued through redefinition, he notes his wife’s career in academe–dissertation in 1982, thirty-year series of adjunct and similar teaching jobs–before working through his own at greater length. Interspersed with it are a number of editorial comments, some of which are startlingly resonant, that bring out the irrationality inherent to community and the peculiarities of the academic community and express some of the more curious aspects of continued alignment with academe by those who have been denied full placement within it.

Given many of the things that I have posted to this webspace (for some examples, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this), it should come as no surprise that Childress’s article attracted my attention. As I read it that attention was justified; I read Childress’s account with no small sympathy, though my life in academe has been far briefer and still lingers. And I feel a strange mixture of defeatism and relief; if he, who did as much as he did, could not land a tenure-line position, then I never really had any chance–but I, at least, recognized that and got largely away from it before the efforts could undermine my physical health and my marriage. (My mental health is perhaps a different issue, though the health of any mind that seeks to enter academe is suspect.)

Some specific comments in the article deserve consideration, as well. The assertion that adjunctification is not bad only because of “how badly adjuncts are paid” and “the inadequate opportunities for our students to build enduring relationships,” but “also about fear, despair, surrender, shame,” emotional tolls paid most by those least able to carry such burdens. There is a significant investment in time and resources in becoming an academic, and for those of us who do not have family histories of such things, the failure to achieve the intended goals after so much effort is no small injury. As others have noted, we give up much of the identities and communities in which we are reared to make the attempt, and without admission to the putative community we have striven to enter, we are left uprooted and adrift. Even I, who am back again where I grew up, feel the distance and separation, and I know I can never bridge it.

Childress’s comments likening academic life to addiction are also telling. Even for those who manage to extricate themselves, the temptation to return is always present, and indulging it is always destructive. Again, it is a thing I understand. I see, day to day, people who have tried to beat addictions and failed for the moment, trying program after program after program in the hopes that one will finally let them get clear of their problem and in a place from which they can maintain a watch against it. I see some succeed, to be certain, but I see no few fail in the attempt; I see them relapse and slide back into the grips of indulged addiction, and it seems to be worse for them every time they do. It is a chronic thing even for those who succeed, and there is no program of support for those who fight against academe in such ways. Nor is there likely to be; even more than against drug addicts, there is a prevailing animus against academics, and there is less cohesive a community of those in recovery from academe to offer support in more than sporadic and anecdotal fashion.

Perhaps most resonant for me is Childress’s comment that “we [contingent academics] are refugees from a nation that would not have us. We have found our way to innumerable continents, but still hold that lost home in our hearts. We still, many of us, in quiet moments, mourn the loss of our community as we make our scattered way across diverse lands.” It is perhaps not so quietly that we mourn, as my own posts and the works of others to which my posts respond attest; we may not parade about weeping and gnashing our teeth, tearing our hair and rending our clothes, but we do not close ourselves away, either. But of more moment is that, well, I’ve made the connection before. I’m not accusing Childress of cribbing my work, of course; there’s little reason to expect that he read my writing (I know the limits of my fame), and there’s less reason to think that I am the first person to have had the notion to make the metaphor. But because I did make the connection, seeing it again spoke to me. There is some comfort in knowing that someone else sees something I do, even if we should both emulate Hoccleve in our questioning; having the company helps.

Help me purchase the burial plot?

I recently read Matt Giles’s March 2019 piece on Longreads, “Is It Ever Too Late to Pursue a Dream?” The piece focuses on a forty-something Canadian college basketball player, Dan Stoddard, and his efforts to make a professional athletic career for himself after decades in the regular workforce. In the engaging read, Giles makes a sympathetic portrait of his subject, using him to illustrate the idea that even remote dreams can be pursued at most any age–albeit not without cost. In all, the piece comes off as valedictory of Stoddard–and those whom Stoddard represents.

There are problems in the piece, to be sure. Stoddard is presented as a synecdoche for the presumed readership of the piece (which is done well, I think–I expect I’m part of that presumed readership, and I found myself carried along), and there is some tension in that. There’s also some tension in the notion that a middle-aged white guy can come into a field whose other participants have been training for most of their lives to enter; even the leading image from the article, which I use to help link mine to it, points out the difference. Stoddard has clearly worked hard to participate, but it is still not the most comfortable image in the current sociopolitical climate.

There is a large part of me that wants to identify the general hopefulness of the article as a problem, as well. Stoddard makes great progress towards his goal, though he does so with no small effort and with no small strain on himself and his family. But he is in a position to be supported as he does so, which is not something that many or most can count on having. For the great many who are still in the position Stoddard had previously occupied–and, again, I am not contesting that he is working exceptionally hard to undertake his goal, nor yet that Giles presents the struggle compellingly–are not necessarily as lucky; they do not have such support, or they lack the luxury of using that support for themselves. The hope presented, then, is not one that most can act upon; it is not available to them. And that is not much hope at all.

I know I should not be quite so cynical as all that. For many people, there is hope that sufficient drive and action upon that drive can offer what appears to be an honest shot at a goal. Even now, I might make an attempt to return to academe, and I might be lucky enough to find my way back in in a serious fashion, rather than the tangential relationship with it that I currently have (and enjoy; I’m not about to make the attempt). But I cannot shake from my mind that I would do so at costs I am not willing to pay, costs that I would not be alone in bearing. And I think that is where there is some falsehood in the hope. Who of us would be alone in taking such a risk?

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On 9 January 2018, Christian Smith’s “Higher Education Is Drowning in BS” appeared in the online Chronicle of Higher Education. In the article, Smith rails against the various forms of bullshit that pervade contemporary academia; the piece lists a number of definitions of the term, some of which read as progressive, some of which read as reactionary. Smith identifies his own areas of privilege before continuing to inveigh against bullshit in academe and the effects on prevailing culture that he perceives as proceeding from that bullshit. He relates a disillusionment with the putative mission of academe against the systemic constraints upon it and the ultimate ineffectiveness of efforts to change them at local levels. Any change to come will likely be troubling for those who have to undergo it, Smith asserts, and, while he sees things as likely to resolve well, he anticipates having to deal with quite a bit of bullshit in the interim.

I found myself interested in the article for the scatological reason: it treats bullshit, and I have some pseudo-scholarly interest in the topic. Indeed, I’ve written on the subject in presented work and in one blog post or another. And I was not displeased to find the wide-ranging definition of bullshit Smith advances in the article; I do not necessarily agree with it, but I appreciate seeing the attempt to clarify the term further than Frankfurt, Hardcastle & Reisch, and Fredal have done–even if it is unsuccessful. (It is too grounded in the concrete examples provided, of which there are many, and does not move to extrapolate from them. It also does not make reference to the earlier works in what might be called taurascatology, which seems a lamentable lack from a senior scholar.)

I was not as happy to see the reactionary tenor of Smith’s argument, though, as he hammers away at the various issues he decries. Many of them read as the same kind of talking points reiterated by informational outlets towards which he himself directs ire for their putative corruption of the nobler aspects of American life. (Really, the only change is in the level of affected politeness in the things ostensibly abjured; they’ve always been done, they’ve just been done in nicer clothing and with more forks on the table previously than now–but more forks cost more money, and maximizing profit is the thing to do.) Again, it reads as something that a senior scholar ostensibly invested in the “higher” aspirations of traditional liberal arts curricula ought to take more care to avoid; it smacks to me of the kind of sloppy thinking being abjured in the article.

But what do I know? I’m one of the second-rate PhD students trained by mediocre graduate programs at third-tier universities whose expensive sports programs drain money away from academics, after all, and so far from worthy of commenting on such matters–or such is one of the implications I get from the article. After all, did I deserve it, I’d’ve gone to a top-ranked school with well funded programs that only admits the truly meritorious, right? Not the kind where the parents of uncaring students fraudulently pad resumes to ensure they get in. Because that’s not the kind of bullshit in which academe is smothered at all…

Help me pay for a shovel.

On 8 January 2019, Erin Bartram’s “How PhDs Romanticize the ‘Regular’ Job Market” appeared in the online Chronicle of Higher Education. In the article, Bartram relates a facet of her experience transitioning out of academe, namely the common expectation of those moving into so-called alt-ac and post-ac careers that the job market in the world outside the ivory tower is better than that within it. She argues that the non-academic job market requires the same kind of clear vision academics are expected to have about their own fields and in-industry hiring practices. The article continues by listing factors to consider while engaged in the search for out-of-academe work: reflection’s limitations, prevailing labor competition, mismatches between credentials and requirements, employer uncertainties, and prevailing misunderstandings about academics. Bartram ends on a valedictory note, commenting that the difficulties of the labor market are not reflections on job-applicants’ character, that the success of one makes the success of another easier, and that those of us who have been forced into academic exile or expatriacy are working on a (perhaps romanticized) common cause.

This is hardly the first time I’ve written in response to what I’ve read from Bartram, as witness this, this, and this, at least. It seems to be something of a pattern for me to do so, and I have to wonder how it reads, partly to her (if she is aware of being so discussed) and partly to my own readers, who may or may not be tired of seeing me come back to the same ideas time and again. Then again, I’ve read a lot of novels that have had the same plot–and sell millions of copies. I may be forgiven, then, for coming back to a writer whose work I’ve treated before.

Of particular note to me are the fourth and fifth of the listed factors for consideration in the article: “Employers are not so sure about your ‘transferable skills'” and “Misperceptions about PhDs persist.” I’ve noted before that my own search for full-time work outside academe took some doing, and that, while I have a solid job with promotion prospects at the moment, I am not so far into it or so far removed from the frantic search that it does not still resonate with me. And that resonance is what makes the two points stand out; they are things I encountered repeatedly as I looked for work, and they came up–and come up–even with the job I currently have.

Regarding the former, the idea of transferable skills, I followed the advice I’d been given, both about making arguments in general and in applying for jobs, more specifically. I made the case that the things I had learned to do as I learned to be a scholar would help me to do the things I would need to do in the job. Poring over manuscripts and early editions of texts taught me attention to detail and record-keeping. Writing paper after paper after paper helped me develop a typing speed that is the envy of many a clerical worker. Training in several languages helped me learn better how to communicate with a variety of people. Working through courses and curricula helped me learn how to budget time effectively to address short- and long-term goals, and to do so with minimal oversight and direction.

Making that case did not help me much against automated HR systems that regard coursework–and teaching–as things other than the skills required for the job and so discard such resumes as mine out of hand. And it did not much help with employers who felt similarly, or who saw coursework as a pale imitation of experience (which it is, in many ways, though there are things that individual experience teaches only at great pain) and thought that my lack of the latter made me less desirable than others. Even in my current job, there are times when what I have been trained to do that lines up with the stated job description for my present and presumptive positions only does so on paper; my ingrained reaction is the wrong one.

Such concerns interact with the latter of Bartram’s points, the idea of misconceptions and misunderstandings. One thing by which I’ve been struck in my time in my present position is the strange regard in which I am held. My coworkers look to me for guidance and insight because I have the credentials that I have, but they are not seldom inclined to disregard what I offer because it proceeds from a place of erudition; I still seem to them to be too pointy-headed for a lot of things I say to work, even when I untangle no few problems that they have. When I interviewed for the job, after having resigned myself to the loss of a long-time dream in terms of the academic job search (I was several years at it before the realization broke upon me), I got the question of why someone with a PhD would want to work the work I work now. And while more than a year at the job has allayed the idea that I am looking in earnest to get back into academe, I am certain it was in force then–and I suspect that it persists to some extent even now.

(For the record, while I do still work as a contingent academic, and I would not be averse to picking up a little more work in that regard, I have no intention of leaving my current agency. I doubt I’ll get a better offer than what I have now, at least for quite a while, and I see no reason to give up what I’ve managed to cobble together without damned good cause.)

I know that I am fortunate to have found an agency that was desperate enough to take a chance on me–and that is actually a pretty decent job. Sure, it could be better, but no job couldn’t. And I know I am fortunate because I know Bartram has the right of it; employers often look askance at PhDs, both because what academia does is seen as at odds with what the world outside it does and because those who have lived the life of the mind are looked at as longing to return to it. And there is longing for it on my part, to be sure, as I am certain is true for others. But I am equally certain that many of us who are now on the outside, or who are only in the lowest basements of the ivory tower, know well that we will never reach its higher floors and that it boots nothing to bloody our knuckles by knocking yet longer at the doors that lead to them. Those of us who seek outside work and who have it now want nothing more–or less–than to be able to support ourselves in line with what we have long been promised, and in as many words: if we work hard and do the right thing, we’ll have decent lives.

The situation persists–and so does the need for your help in addressing it!