The Racket

As the students stream through the gates on the other side of town I have the opportunity to provide you with my favourite generic job description for faculty at a university. As the provider, I acknowledge that I was not successful as an academic and am likely to be charged with being  ‘envious’ by those who were. Who wouldn’t be? I will also quickly add that I know many faculty who work very hard.

The author of the piece that follows was a member of the academy and for years, the editor of The American Scholar. He has produced many books, including one on Envy and one with the great title, Fabulous Small Jews. While he was a faculty member for many years and should know what it was like to have such a job, you may also want to keep in mind that he was probably on the wrong side in all of the culture wars being waged. As well, this description is probably a little dated since one suspects that things are much grimmer these days and that faculty members everywhere do now have real reasons to be unhappy.

    “I had a friend, now long dead, named Walter B. Scott, a professor at Northwestern University whose specialty was theatrical literature, who never referred to university teaching as other than a--or sometimes the--"racket." What Walter, a notably unambitious man, meant was that it was an unconscionably easy way to make a living, a soft touch, as they used to say. Working under conditions of complete freedom, having to show up in the classroom an impressively small number of hours each week, with the remainder of one's time chiefly left to cultivate one's own intellectual garden, at a job from which one could never be fired and which (if one adds up the capacious vacation time) amounted to fewer than six months work a year for pay that is very far from miserable--yes, I'd say "a racket" just about gets it.

     And yet, as someone who came late to university teaching, I used to wonder why so many people in the racket were so obviously disappointed, depressed, and generally demoralized. Granted, until one achieves that Valhalla for scholars known as tenure--which really means lifetime security, obtainable on no other job that I know--an element of tension is entailed, but then so is it in every other job. As a young instructor, one is often assigned dogsbody work, teaching what is thought to be dull fare: surveys, composition courses, and the rest. But the unhappier academics, in my experience, are not those still struggling to gain a seat at the table, but those who have already grown dour from having been there for a long while."

    So far as I know, no one has ever done a study of the unhappiness of academics. Who might be assigned to the job? Business-school professors specializing in industrial psychology and employer/employee relations would botch it. Disaffected sociologists would blame it all on society and knock off for the rest of the semester. My own preference would be anthropologists, using methods long ago devised for investigating a culture from the outside in. The closest thing we have to these ideal anthropologists have been novelists writing academic novels, and their lucubrations, while not as precise as one would like on the reasons for the unhappiness of academics, do show a strong and continuing propensity on the part of academics intrepidly to make the worst of what ought to be a perfectly delightful situation.”

Source: “Civilization and Its Malcontents: Or, Why Are Academics So Unhappy,” Joseph Epstein, The Weekly Standard, May 9, 2005. Read the rest of the essay which is a long review of Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents, by Elaine Showalter.