Jonathan Melsic: At Your Leisure

(Courtesy of Melissa. I suppose my blogging is a major waste of time... ;)

At Your Leisure
Jonathan Melsic
Chronicle of Higher Education

Shouldn't you be getting back to work? I mean, reading this column isn't going to help you work more efficiently. It isn't going to teach you a new job skill. And it isn't going to help you get that job you're seeking elsewhere in this publication. Shouldn't you be spending this time doing something, you know, productive?

We all want to be productive. Academic departments want to hire job candidates who look like they will be productive, who will publish and give guest lectures and attract more and better students. So candidates like me have to prove, above all else, that we will be productive scholars. And of course, the best way to prove that is to be productive already.

We hear that requirements for tenure have increased in the past two decades, such that the professors who make tenure decisions today might not have been granted tenure if current standards had been in place when they were coming up. We hear that requirements for hiring tenure-track faculty members have similarly increased, as young scholars have to prove in graduate school that they are ready for the research demands they will face as faculty members.

At a forum on the academic job search during my first year as a doctoral student in religious studies, I heard a very accomplished professor say that "one or two well-placed publications" as a graduate student ought to get you hired. (Feel free to laugh; I did at the time, right before crying.)

How long before a publication record as an undergraduate is going to be required for acceptance into a Ph.D. program?

I'll grant that the profession gains something by demanding such levels of productivity -- more books and articles and lectures must mean that we collectively have more knowledge, right?

But we're losing something, too, and it isn't just sleep, as I fret over whether three conference presentations and a book review are enough. We're losing academic leisure, and if we continue to lose it, we will lose the soul of the profession itself.

The philosopher Josef Pieper went so far as to say that if people give up on leisure in favor of orienting everything in their lives toward work, we will destroy our entire culture, because the cultural activities that make life worth living -- religion, creating and appreciating art, conversation, thoughtful reflection -- depend on leisure for their existence.

Pieper feared that modern industry, economics, and ideology were conspiring to make people identify themselves strictly as workers, spelling the end of the life of the mind. An overworked populace literally does not have time to think. Pieper would be horror-struck by the thought of people like me clawing after that patent absurdity, the "academic job."

This year, supporting myself on up to 60 hours a week of doing nonacademic work, and then trying to concentrate for 15 or 20 hours a week on my scholarly work, I've had no leisure. I have largely failed to accomplish the goals of professional improvement I set for myself in my first column.

As an unpaid postdoc at a research center at the University of Virginia, I have a title and an office and my presence is tolerated, but I also envy the "real" postdocs there who get paid to have leisure, to think and discuss their thoughts and build up momentum on their projects, wishing that like them, I could be spending my time discovering my scholarly voice and learning more about the endlessly fascinating subject of my research.

Instead, I've worked mostly at jobs I could have done even before I graduated from college: I've been a sushi chef, a parking-lot attendant, a tutor, a waiter, a research assistant, and a columnist. I haven't been much of a scholar.

But by Pieper's account, neither are many of those who hold academic posts and crank out article after article.

Sheer volume of work is not the sole measure of an intellectual; we also "produce" with the insight accidentally made, the sudden glimpse of the big picture, the spark of a brand new idea that may or may not be completely ludicrous. We can't schedule those moments neatly in the hour between meeting with an advisee and entertaining a visiting lecturer. We can't know when they will strike, if at all, so the best we can do is be attentive to them, let them happen, and, when they do, realize their value.

Departments want to hire good intellectuals, and good intellectuals make the insights that most people cannot but that our culture needs in order to avoid stagnation. The trouble is that insightfulness does not show up on a CV, and it's very hard, in a 30-minute chat around a flimsy table in one of those tiny, curtained-off interview "rooms," to learn if a person is insightful enough to be worth hiring as an assistant professor.

So when I was interviewed at the American Academy of Religion meeting, I fell back on trying to convince my interviewers that I have been and will continue to be productive as a scholar. I stopping just short of declaring, "Chapter 4, I'll have you know, is forthcoming in the Journal of Unread Research Papers. Forthcoming! See? Productive! Me!"

I worry that by playing the productivity game, I am selling out. But I also need to admit that as I form my professional identity, I am still very much enthralled with the prospect of being one of those highly visible, highly productive academic superstars.

I wonder, then -- who is the better academic? The one with a dozen books to her name, who cancels class so she can be interviewed on NPR, and who, like a strung-out rock star standing onstage in the 17th city in 18 days, glances down at a crib note before telling the audience, "What a pleasure it is to be here at Our Lady of the Four-Four Teaching Load"? Or is it the academic who never got promoted past associate professor who works the backyard grill at the end of the spring term, asking the B-minus student what her favorite book is while rooting around in the cooler for another veggie burger?

We all know which of those two is paid more. But which one is living the life of the mind more authentically? Which one is doing more for our culture? Which one would you want as your colleague?

Despite my fantasy of being a Keynote Speaker or Guest Editor or Scholar in Residence, I also hope to be a colleague who won't tire of picking the brain of the extremely intelligent person in the office next door, not to get an idea for a class or an article, not to impress the department head, but just to learn more about something I don't know adequately.

What academics do in such leisured moments is our contribution to culture. The mere fact that we have the kinds of conversations that we do have every now and again, when we're not rushing off to scope out the new journals or make it to a committee meeting or schmooze with the dean, should be enough to justify our occupation and place in society.

And yes, I realize that I'm on very thin, elitist ice.

But we who (let's face it) are educational elites need to ensure that when those who work in the real world peer in at us, they don't just see more of what they already know -- people hunkered over computer keyboards, hoping the phone doesn't ring.

We in the humanities in particular like to complain about how students care only about getting a good job after graduation, and so they only care about getting a good grade in our classes, which they only take because they have to. We wonder (mostly among ourselves, but occasionally to the students' faces) where their intellectual curiosity went, whether they ever read Pascal or Austen or Whitman for fun (like we did).

But do we, in the way we approach our jobs, show students an alternative? Do we show them, rather than merely tell them, that devotion to the objects of our study is a worthwhile way to go through life, even if it means that we cannot point to our productivity on a pie chart?

I think we hold back out of fear of being laughed off. But when humanities professors try to defend their pursuits to those whose only criterion for judging anything is its immediate usefulness, then the game is already over. We lose by forfeiting the assumption sitting at the foundation of academe: that production and consumption, accomplishment and profit are not what life is ultimately for.

However long my CV is, I am going to try to measure myself as an academic by the insights I've made and told people about, the ideas others have bounced off me, and the number of business majors I've convinced to make Pascal's Pensées their bedtime reading. If I wanted instead to be measured by my quarterly billable hours, I would have sought a different degree.

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Jonathan Malesic earned his Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of Virginia. He is chronicling his search for a tenure-track job this academic year.