Academic support
The academy is often a very lonely place. The work can be grueling, the odds of success long, the competition ferocious, the hours punishing, the pay insufficient, the rewards minuscule, the expectations inhuman, the atmosphere inhumane. Often as not you’re alone with a book or a laptop for hours on end, moved by some inner fire to keep chipping away at an insuperable task, secure in the knowledge that what you are doing will be of almost no significance to anyone, ever, living or unborn. Yet chip chip chip, you press on, pounding the proverbial rock.
I have been fortunate—no, the only word is blessed—to have had a uniformly positive experience in the academy. Four years in undergrad, three years in a Master’s program, six years for the doctorate, and now in my fifth year teaching as a professor. In all that time I don’t know that I can point to a single capital-B Bad experience. Not only did I love the work I was doing, the content I was learning, the classes I was taking, the books I was reading. The programs themselves were all healthy environments for a student to inhabit; or at least, to the extent that they contained dysfunction, the dysfunction was no more pronounced than anywhere else, and rarely if ever affected me.
Indeed I think I can say honestly, without an asterisk or whispered anecdotal aside, that I’ve never knowingly been caught up in, or even mildly been touched by, controversy of the typical academic sort that marks and mars so many institutions of higher education. I might even be able to say that I’ve not yet earned an enemy (or a frenemy?) in the academy. I can think of one or two candidates, but that’s probably projection on my part. No doubt my relative lack of enemies—at least who’ve made themselves known to me!—has much more to do with cowardice and a desire to please than any virtue on my part. (If you Enneagram-diagnose me from afar I swear I will cut you down where you stand.) Further, too, at least a partial explanation for this happy state of affairs is my approach to my studies: put your head down, do the work, get out as fast as you can. But mostly I ascribe it to the institutions of which I was a part. The people one learns from and the people one learns alongside make all the difference.
Nevertheless, even the most blissful academic life includes the ordinary challenges that invariably attend it. One of those is the deafening silence, the dark void, that awaits that momentous day when, after years of work, you release something into the world. That something may be a mere review; it may be an essay or an article; occasionally it is a book. And we all know, wherever we find ourselves on the map or continuum of publication-generation, that there’s nothing quite like the long labor of birthing a little, or not so little, intellectual offspring and stepping forward to share it with the world only to hear … nothing. Not a word. Not a peep. Zilch. Nada. Silence.
Even more than bad reviews, it’s being ignored that crouches in the back of your mind, grinning and holding hands with that other ever-lurking demon of academe, imposter syndrome. It’s why academics go to Twitter like moth to a flame: not only because they’re on screens all day with time to kill (and work to avoid), but because proper scholarship usually takes years to produce and still more years to generate feedback. That sweet, sweet dopamine hit of a like or a retweet or a reply is a lot more rewarding than the alternative.
Apart from a general response to one’s work, critical or laudatory or in between, the other thing we academics desperately yearn for but rarely receive is a wide network of support. Or maybe I shouldn’t put it that way. Many friends and colleagues I know do have such networks, though often at great cost, beyond the campus, and as a result of their own intentional efforts. What I mean to say is that specifically academic networks aren’t in general built for emotional and psychological encouragement. They’re more like one long intellectual boot camp. Your drill sergeant has a purpose, and you’re happy (maybe) that he made you who you are; you couldn’t have done it without him. But you don’t go to him when you need a hug.
This is all a lengthy and circuitous prelude to a very small thing I want to share. My first book was published two weeks ago. Along with book #2 (due next April), it was years in the making. In a very real sense I’ve been working toward this finish line since August of 2003. But initially, when the book came in the mail, it felt anticlimactic. There was no link yet on Amazon, no one in the world knew it existed, and certainly no one else had it in their hands (as I did). I wrote the book for others, not myself. Moreover, if we couldn’t throw a party to celebrate, given the pandemic, and if no one online knew about the thing, and it’s not like it’s a trade book meant to fly off the shelves of the local Barnes and Noble—then what to do? How to make the thing feel real, as a shared or social fact and not my own little private achievement?
So in addition to tweeting about the book once the Amazon link came online, I decided to email blast the world, or at least my world. I emailed news about the publication to—I’m not exaggerating—every friend, every extended family member, every church aunt and grandmother who helped raise me, every colleague and academic acquaintance, and every single former teacher (going back 17 years) whose contact info I happened to still have in my Gmail account. I even added scholars who have influenced me through their writing, but whom I have not met in person, or even online. I left out not a soul.
The response was overwhelming. I won’t get into all the details. But suffice it to say that people I haven’t seen or spoken to in over a decade replied with the warmest, sweetest words you can imagine, and certainly more than I was hoping for. And I’m more than willing to own what I was doing: not so much fishing for compliments as wanting quite literally to share in the occasion with others. I wasn’t surprised when my uncle texted to say he’d bought seven copies to give to friends in Dothan, Alabama. I was surprised when this, that, or another laconic, brainy, preternaturally non-emotive senior scholar gushed in congratulations. A lot of “ah, I remember the first one” and “feels like a birth, no?” and “don’t apologize, this calls for celebration!”
What I’m trying to say, what I keep circling around and not quite landing on, is simply this. It was what I needed. And when it came, I wasn’t prepared for it. The bottom fell out, and what I fell into was bottomless gratitude. It’s a wonderful thing, and wonderful in part because of how rare it is, to have people in this bemusing bizarro world of scholarship on one’s side, popping the cork right alongside you. Like your old drill sergeant giving you a bear hug in a crowded restaurant and lifting you off your feet.
The high wears off. You get back to the grindstone. But for a few days there, I was flying.
