Healing Academic Wounds

In a recent Inside Higher Ed article, Lee Bessette discussed the struggles of attaining a tenured-track job and the challenges of being a woman in higher education. I have read Dr. Bessette’s articles for a while and they resonate with me and my own experiences in and out of higher education (minus being a woman).

For myself, I have written a few articles about my struggles with higher education and not getting a tenured-track job;  My Complete Failure, What to do with my Humanities Degree?and Advice for Getting a Job in the Real-World. I was only able to write these articles after I had fully transitioned from tenured seeking academic to academic working a nine-to-five in the ‘real world’. By that time I had already gone through the realization and acceptance that I would not be getting a tenured-track job that I had worked for well over a decade to get. This realization and acceptance takes time and is extremely difficult for many academics; each individual works through this transformation differently and at their own pace.

Back to Dr. Bessette’s article; one of the threads throughout her article, and other articles is about negative reader comments. She has not been writing much lately because some of these comments she describes as attacks on her, her opinions, and, who she is. This is unfortunate because she is a good writer and has a valid perspective to share and yet because of the nature of the internet, jerks and trolls have the ability to write any stupid thing that comes to their mind; anytime, anywhere and because of this she has pulled back.  

When you publish an article, especially on one of the higher education website, there will be a percentage of responses that will be highly critical and negative. Some of these will be comments by people who work in higher education; they might have tenure, might not, and fancy themselves smart, insightful, having put in ‘the time’, and are often geniuses waiting to be discovered or validated (so their opinions are always spot-on). Some of these comments are just plain stupid, mean, or asinine because the people writing them are mean and asinine (I can’t say stupid because they are geniuses). Finally a handful of posts will be written by trolls who write crap just to make people upset (crap is the technical term).

So what do you do? My only advice for Dr. Bessette, and this comes from the title of her article is yes, be less sensitive. If you are not comfortable reading through comments don’t, or have your friends do it for you. Don’t post a response or defend your article when it is just a troll; everyone passes over those comments anyways.

One part of the article that I honestly cannot relate to is the part about being a woman. I am a male; I was born this way, I had no choice. With that said I understand that my reality, the reality I see through my eyes and the interactions I experience because of who I am, is different than other people’s reality.

Do women experience a different reality than I do? Yes. Do minorities in higher education or the culture at-large experience a different reality than I do? Yes. As someone who is male I need to have the self-understanding that my reality is not standard; it is not universal and when typing away comments on other people’s articles, I cannot view their experiences through my filter. I have to have empathy, I have to understand their perspective, and most importantly, I have to approach every word with humility (if ‘geniuses’ and trolls had humility they would never cause problems).

Moving forward, I feel for Dr. Bessette and her past experiences; as president of the Graduate Students’ Association, her experience when writing articles, and the example she shared at the University of Ottawa. These are unfortunate and no one should never have to go through such negative experiences, but they do. The choice you have to make is does this keep you from living your life? Do these experiences stop you from creating and writing or do they make you mad and inspire you to write even better articles?

To finish my article, I will reference a quote from the first paragraph of Dr. Bessette’s article, “not to mention the fading dream of ever attaining a tenure-track job.” I understand, my dream faded in my early 30s but I woke-up, got out of bed, and started living my life. I look at a tenure-track job as the dream of the 18-year me; at that time I so badly wanted to emulate the people I looked up to, my teachers and professors. But as I aged and my life went down a completely different path before and after I completed by doctorate, I had to adjust.

Ask yourself: do I want to wake-up every day with regret; letting one of my life ‘failure’ affect my present or do I want to live my life? Will I use the skills I learned during my graduate studies to help and further my new non-academic career? Will I let people’s negativity stop me from writing or will I use this negativity to inspire me to write more?

It is your choice.