Blogging Against The Forces Of Darkness

Let’s face it, academia is a poor choice of profession if you wish to, for instance, have a life. The model you get from your fabulously productive superiors in grad school is that you have to throw yourself at your work and produce scholarship in a frenzy, night and day, week in and week out, year in and year out, until you are old and eminent and they give you a Festschrift, in which case you get to stop working briefly for a celebratory dinner. My own PhD supervisor let slip that he read one non-academic book a year — the year I asked, it was "The Name of the Rose," and that hardly counts as non-academic, as it was medieval (his field) and he read it in the original, to practice his Italian — on Christmas Day! That's the model I was raised with. As another academic at my alma mater famously said, “At some universities they don’t believe you should knock yourself out and work night and day and never have any time for yourself and drive yourself crazy working. But at Cambridge, we have standards.” Actually, I think she was wrong — I don’t think there are any universities where they believe you shouldn’t knock yourself out and work night and day and never have any time for yourself and drive yourself crazy working. Standards or no, they believe that everywhere. And in the remaining slivers of free time, you should be serving on committees and crafting mission statements and attending symposia on race and gender and writing recommendations and drafting petitions to present to the university senate.

Academia is far from the only profession where people are squeezed for time, isn’t it? People are so busy that, as simplicity guru Cecile Andrews says, “It gets so the biggest favor you can do for people is to cancel something.” Probably at McDonald’s they’re urging workers to get together and brainstorm frying issues on their days off. (Of course I don’t really believe that. It’s okay, McDonald’s Corporation, you don’t have to e-mail me.) The galling thing is that academics do this for so little money. At least lawyers have the pleasure of watching the billing hours add up. At least stockbrokers get to throw the millions from one account to another as they stay late and skip dinner. Academics do it for diddly-squat! And then we subsidize our own publications!

All of this is going to change. I humbly volunteer to be your guinea pig in reclaiming an actual life. I am going to teach well, publish like crazy, enjoy being a single parent, and have a life. My goal is to be positively *indolent* for a substantial portion of the time. I am going to Do Less and Accomplish More. I am going to Take Back the Night, and actually sleep in it. I am going to go on vacation and leave the suitcase of books and the laptop at home. I am going to chronicle the umpteen (and I use that term with scientific exactness) pressures to Do More and Accomplish Less, and cast them into outer darkness. And I am going to do this all with prepackaged wisdom (none of that made-from-scratch wisdom for this time-saver) and judicious applications of chocolate.

Check back and let’s compare notes.