As a PhD student, you spend about four years living in penury, indulging your every selfish and hermetic tendency. You lurch between terrifying delusions of grandeur and getting so wrought up over your unrelenting lack of profundity that your days rise and fall on the merest bit of praise or criticism. When criticism inevitably comes, you live in such a structureless bubble that, without the banal but effortlessly absorbing bureaucracy that pads out the bad days of most jobs, even the staunchest ascetic is reduced to the kind of flailing emotional wreck usually encountered in the morning methodone queue. Should you eventually, after years of competing for increasingly scarce jobs against your (decreasingly) close friends, by some chance happen upon success, the reward is yet more penury, the job security of your average dockworker and a dating pool of colleagues who are, at best, aesthetically maladapted.
The common conception of academics is that we lead a somewhat charmed existence. But despite the impression of working barely half the year, most of the holidays are spent grinding away slowly at the immiserating and all too lonely task of writing. And if the esteemed title of ‘Dr’ does, on occasion, render its bearer attractive beyond the endowments afforded by nature, most of us are only too aware that when your charm is purely structural – more directed at the office than at the individual – any transgression risks exposing us horrendously as the needy, insecure beta-people we know we already are.
So why do it, then? Trite but valid clichés about furthering knowledge and the reinvigorating enthusiasm of students aside, it’s a rare privilege to be able to say stuff you actually mean nowadays. Under the threat of being damned as depressed and incompetent if they dare to moan, people in the real world seem condemned to strive unconvincingly to persuade us all of their happiness, which manifests itself in the vacuous, aspirational rhetoric of ‘striving for excellence’ and just ‘loving being alive’. While universities aren’t entirely exempt from the prevailing culture of bland affirmation, some of us, at least, cling to the luxury of being entitled to our misery – by dressing it up in elaborate theories that feign to explain it. Long recognised as a haven for the disaffected, could it be that the ivory towers are, in fact, more real than the so-called ‘real world’? I’ll elaborate next week.
