Failed Academic

Whenever I meet someone and conversation reveals that I have a doctorate in music, the other person says:

1. “Oh!”
2. [Furrows brow.]
3. “Are you… doing anything with that?”

The other person asks this because I’m not doing anything with that.  I mean, I am perpetually about to launch a band you will never hear about, but I work for food in something very unrelated to music.  I haven’t applied to any sort of teaching position – the natural work for those with post-grad academic training – in maybe a year.  The last time I did, I asked my old professors if they’d be willing to write a letter of recommendation, and one of them told me that there wasn’t much point, since if you’re not already in academia four years after your last degree, you are probably just not going to be in the club.  I don’t have the business card to prove it, but I have become that staple of sad-bastard literature: The Failed Academic.

(In case you’ve read any of that literature, I should be clear that I skipped the obligatory disturbing obsession with a student that rends careers and relationships and leads to a theatrical dismissal by the department head to pair with flamboyant sexual despair [I see you, Franzen!].  I just headed straight to the exit, politely.)

This note from my old professor wasn’t pleasant to read, but it made sense, and I couldn’t get too worked up about it since I wasn’t really sure if I wanted the job I was applying for.  That’s happened a lot – applying for academic jobs I’m not sure I want, until I don’t really apply at all.  Until, whatever I tell people vaguely about trying to get back into teaching, I have to admit to myself that I’m not really trying to get back into teaching.  Not right now, at least.

I think it might be worth it to explain why, because the answers might be useful to other aimless near-academics.

 

—

 

I should be clear that when I started grad school, I thought I was going to be a professor, and that the decision not to be a professor was not made wholly by me.  I made some bad decisions and tried some things that didn’t work out the way I hoped.  I had regular luck – not bad, by any means, but not the kind that can sometimes vault a person who has made bad decisions into a better station.  So it’s important not to frame this whole thing as my brave abandonment of academia – I tried to get into academia, and I didn’t.

I should also say that when I call myself a Failed Academic, I am using capital letters to explain to you that I am a joking person, who jokes.  I do this to avoid explaining that I absolutely feel that I have failed.  This is a normal human thing to feel, but also an abnormal, academically-trained person’s response to a course of events that doesn’t really have a moral weight.  If I thought I wanted to be in marketing but ended up doing private research, you would think, “Wow, that is a nuts crazy boring story.”  You would not think, “Look at this failed-ass marketer.”

Academically-trained people feel this way because what they do, often, doesn’t pay as well as private industry pays, even though their work is (often) more mentally taxing than private industry’s.  There’s a fragile balance of true, outrageously specific expertise; and drab paychecks.  An academic is, in many circles at least, a person with high social standing; while many people of similar social standing make a lot more cash.  And the way around this grim state of affairs is to rationalize the work of the academic as purer and better.

If you’re working very hard at something deeply, existentially important, watching someone who is not as bright make more money (and enjoy more free time) is more palatable.  The work that you’re doing has to be very important, and you must take it very seriously, and the people who are not doing such work must surely be avoiding this work because they are incapable of doing such important, serious things.

So when you find yourself on the outside looking in, you have become the incapable person: the person whose entire concept of themselves depends on the ability to do a job that you are not doing, and that nobody will let you do.  You are, in this frame, functionally worthless.

Academics are a goal-oriented people, and worthlessness is an unimaginable horror to them.  To avoid this horror, they will cling to academia long past the point it makes them happy, and sometimes past the point it appears they are actually good at it.  (Even in the high temples of learning, you can find a few novitiates who can’t seem to figure out how and when to light the incense.)

There are some good reasons to cling, too:  Whatever Republicans on the stump might aver, civilians also tend to think academics are smart and know stuff.  This is a monumental social advantage.  It’s like having a business card that reads, “Mystery-Knower,” and having people actually believe, “Well hell, this guy probably knows some mysteries!”  The mystery that I specifically know (or knew) is music, which is just fantastic – everyone knows what it is, but practically nobody knows much about it.  People straight lit up when I told them I was a doctoral student in music composition.  I didn’t have to prove anything – it was just assumed that I was probably amazing, until I talked some more.

Now I hear: “Are you… doing anything with that?”

I have to admit that I’m not, which means I have to admit that the all-nighters and seven-day work weeks and strange part-time jobs and dissertation defense and truly countless hours in headphones staring at sheet music were for nothing but the shame of not reaching the high court of intellectual achievement.  And because that stew of intellectual failure took a decade to boil, I have the work history of a dim 24-year-old.  I also make dim 24-year-old money, which is society’s way of explaining that I am not actually valuable to it, and maybe should try something else.  (“Have you thought about grad school?” asks Society, frowning thoughtfully.)

This is why I feel that I’ve failed.  It’s also why I have a strong reason to try to get back in: to tap the old reservoir of academic fanaticism, work myself sick, and start building up a resume with adjunct posts across the country.

So why don’t I?

 

—

 

You are looking for a job.  You’re a very skilled, well-trained worker with impeccable references.  You’re also young, and have a bit of wanderlust.  You see an ad for a post across the country.  The work hours are flexible, but there are a lot of them.  You will be expected to travel frequently.  You will be rotated from town to town, probably once every year or two – this is maybe not the best job to put down roots.  Still, the payoff – in the murky future – is something special: work as a sort of coordinator, directing the younger staff while still maintaining flexibility and considerable paid leave.

If this is a consulting gig, your starting salary will make eyes water, and you’ll be eating on the company dime for years.  Your soul might get ground to fine powder, but you’ll be – minimally – a homeowner for your trouble.

If this is an academic job in the humanities, you will have to pay for the flight for your own interview, pay for your own health insurance while you work, and pocket just enough to get on the next flight for the next interview a year later, in the next town, in the hope that one of these things eventually turns into a steady gig with the consultant’s starting pay when you’re over 40.  And there’s a fair chance that even then you will never – till death do you part – pay down the student debt you accrued for the high privilege of making a small salary with no benefits.

Academia is consulting with none of the hotel points.  (And without the mortgage down-payment.)

Of course, most people don’t want to have their soul crushed.  And money is not a serious motivation for an academic career.  Academia offers the exact opposite sense of self and lifestyle from a corporate desk: a world of the mind.  The endless pursuit of intellectual excellence and growth.  And in the end, it offers ludicrous job security for… let’s call them relaxed working hours.  (I am politically liberal to academic specification; but the conservative caricature of the tenured professor as a self-important louche in semi-retirement has more merit than I would like to admit.)

So, why not academia?  A slow financial start for a lifetime of learning – for a world of knowledge.  (And the first piece of knowledge is that the working hours decrease systematically as you age.)  What trade could be better than that?

For a lot of people, nothing.  It’s a dream for some – achieved and lived.  And I wouldn’t deny those people their victory.  I personally loved the idea of an academic life enough to accrue debt while working two or three part-time jobs during my doctorate.  It’s a real high, if you like libraries, and I like libraries.

But grad student life doesn’t comprise academia.  There’s a large infrastructure and a million and one different departments and some desperately pursued revenue sources.  (That last bit is why there’s also, sometimes, a minor-league football team on campus whose players have to pretend to go to class to justify their gross underpayment while their boss receives a salary equivalent to the arts and sciences budget.)  If you want to be an academic, you have to want to work in an academic system.  And not all of those are super.

I can’t speak for, say, the chemistry department or your school’s Famous Slaveowner College of Engineering.  But I can speak for music composition.  And the structure of music composition is interesting.

 

—

 

The goal of every academic composer is to get tenure as an academic composer.  This is because there’s not a very wide market for self-styled art music.  Sure, there are famous orchestras scattered across the world, but they play the classics at least half the time.  There just aren’t that many remaining slots after Beethoven and Mahler and (if the conductor is kind of hip) Ligeti, so the orchestras have their pick of new composers to try.  And even then, they might simply play recently created music – they might not pay a composer to write something new.  And when they do pay, that one check is probably not going to be enough to get through a year unless the orchestra is the Berlin Philharmonic or the opera company is the Met.

Granted, there are stars in every profession.  You can find a few composers out there living the life of the modern courtier, giving talks and performances and hearing their music premiered by the grand orchestras of the world.  But there are not that many of these people, and if you don’t have a high patron in a universe of Berlin rehearsals and Manhattan parties by the time you’re twenty-five, it’s almost certain that you are not one of these people either.  (Some things have not changed very much from the days when the royal court supported the composer.)

The remaining options are to fish in thinner streams – a string quartet commission here; a regional orchestra premiere there – and to teach at the college level.  And the way to really construct your life so that all you have to think about is writing and performing your own music is to get tenure.

This creates problems, though.  While there are many more professors than star, globe-trotting composers, there are not an infinite supply of academic posts.  In fields outside of STEM, there isn’t always incentive for institutions to create new posts, either.  So what you are really doing, if you are aiming at tenure, is kissing rolling hills of ass for a decade or so until somebody you probably know dies in the middle of a rant about Boulez.  (This is not a reference you are supposed to get, but trust me: it works.)  Then you get to apply for their job, along with literally a thousand other adjuncts with a photocopy of your work history and degrees.

I wouldn’t call this arrangement a pyramid scheme, but only because it requires a more elaborate skill than selling vitamin supplements.  (Also, violins are involved, and movies have taught me that violins signal high culture and hip gallery openings.)

There are other disturbing things about the structure of academic composition.  As a professor, you have access to an entire school of desperate cellists and pianists and percussionists raging against the dying of the musical light.  (What?  You think every single person with a degree in music performance walks into an orchestra upon graduation?)  If there’s no commission for you, and there’s no orchestra knocking on your door, it’s pretty easy to have the kids take a swing at your work.  And why shouldn’t they?  They’re learning!

They are: they are learning some very important lessons about capitalism.  Their performance of a professor’s music might be on campus – which can feel kind of heartwarming: everybody in a college town working together for a big show.  But the students’ efforts also get that professor a notch in his belt.  (I will stop you here: it’s overwhelmingly dudes in this world; related, there are also some very ugly belts.)  That notch is a world premiere – where there was no music, he created it with his mind!  And printed it neatly on his resume, next to the class he probably doesn’t enjoy teaching.

But maybe that world premiere isn’t on campus – maybe it’s at a different school’s campus, played by that school’s student wind ensemble.  In that case, the composer would have to travel to that other campus – on the school’s budget, of course – and give a few paid guest lectures in advance of the performance of his work.  And those students not involved in the production directly might be required to attend the concert – mandatory concert attendance up to something like five or ten shows a semester is a common feature of music school.  In the end, the composer-professor is getting paid to travel to a place where an orchestra will be ordered to rehearse and perform his masterwork at no extra charge, all while the composer flits about campus on the school dime (at the dinner parties with the local faculty, he will talk about how exhausted he is while sipping a red that everyone agrees is much better than it in fact is).

Listen: it’s still academic composition.  The digs any university provides will probably not be that hot.  There’s not that much money in it.  And music students really do like to play just about anything, so while there’s a foul there’s no terrible harm.

But it’s an uncomfortable setup: students are forced to realize the dreams of their professors to get their degrees.  The students become the performers for a loosely organized, rotating series of concerts across universities.  It’s a world in which a bunch of musicians justify their station by performing their music for each other on the backs of aspiring oboists at UW-Madison.  Which gets us to the biggest problem with academic composition: nobody wants to hear this shit.

The public at large is flatly disgusted by exposure to new concert music.  You sit down, get very quiet, listen to some trumpets skitter around each other for ten minutes, then clap.  It’s a niche art that prizes experimentation.  And it can be very, very cool – just good luck convincing consumers with access to Spotify.

Granted, in the world of academic composition, this lack of interest is the fault of the audience – they do not have music degrees, so they can’t understand the amazing work of the composers with music degrees.  If they had a music degree, they would get it – those inbred Philistines.  I was in music school for about ten years, and I was party to many long, intense discussions about the future of music composition and the ways a young composer could gain an audience.  Theories, strategies, and goals varied; but one consistent point of agreement was that academic composition should be prized by society and funded by governments, and it’s your fault – you in the audience – with your feeble peasant brain that our brilliant artwork is allowed to pass unworshipped.

Of course, outside of the hallowed chambers of knowledge, the system looks a little different:  You wouldn’t need to make students show up to the concert if they were excited to hear the music.  You wouldn’t need to get students to play the music for free if there was a real demand that sold concert tickets.  If you want to get really nuts, you can imagine a world in which people want to hear music so much that they pay enough to support a full, professional ensemble to play it for them.  And yeah, sometimes this approach yields Travis Scott, which is a war crime, but it also gives us Kendrick Lamar.  (Come at me with your pitchforks, peasants.)

For much smaller – like, so much smaller – financial reward, music comp weirdly structures itself like the football team:  The students perform unpaid labor to advance the careers of their leaders; who offer the chance to maybe – just maybe – reach the big leagues.  But the vast majority of the students don’t make it that far, and find themselves suddenly stripped of institutional support in their early-to-middle twenties, saddled with unique skills that are far more demanding than any job almost anyone they know will ever have, that are also economically useless.

 

—

 

Oh, but I miss it.

Of course I do.  It’s fun to burn it down, but even a failed academic has to believe devoutly to reach the point of apostasy.  I don’t think every piece of art should be easy – it’s fun to crack wise about the audience as consumer, but I don’t think they should be always consuming.  I entertain myself plenty, but I don’t think my goal in all things – even in the things I watch or listen to – should be simple entertainment.  I think some people, some of the time, would be better off as humans for hearing and understanding Thomas Adés – or for that matter, watching Terrance Malick or reading Alice Munro, with the phone turned off.  Art should exist for the sake of itself, and the pursuit of such art will of course result in absurd institutions with long waiting lists.

And it’s difficult to the point of impossibility to stick to that art without one of these oddball institutions and their morality-adjacent labor policies.  Writing music note by note for acoustic instruments – or, as the case may be, coding a software instrument – is a long slog.  You can tell yourself you’ll be a composer in your off hours, but only a few survive that lonely road.  Composition is astoundingly time-consuming, and requires concentration that gives headaches.  To spend all your hours on projects so involved, just so that nobody will hear them – let alone enjoy them – is too much without a small, steady paycheck and a society of aspiring artists to commiserate.  It might be a pyramid, but the view is great if you can keep from sliding off.

So I look sometimes – I still check out jobs on academic boards, and think about what I could do to apply here or there.  Maybe, I think, it’s worth the flier – just to see.  Maybe I’ll climb the pyramid again.

But then, I think about how thin my resume is these days, and how little time I spend actually making music anymore.  I think about my friends in the comp department being strong-armed into setting up and breaking down composition events, or picking up guest composers from the airport in a snowstorm, all without pay.  I think about lectures with grandiose dotards that I, as a composer, didn’t want to attend.  I think about the idiot music I composed that people liked for one summer, and the interesting stuff I wrote that even my dissertation committee didn’t want to hear.  I think about how bad so much of the music I heard actually was – and how I could never give an honest appraisal of that music because of the politics of the discipline.  I think about how nobody, on earth, is asking for more art music, or for one more dude to funnel student debt to his artistic pretensions.  I think about every friend I still have in the game – in music or humanities generally – who eats their nails every year wondering where they’re going to live next, and if they’ll get paid.  I think about the couples I’ve known – some married – who end up in different states during the academic year, because they have to chase the jobs that are available.

And I remember:  I don’t have to chase those jobs.  I don’t need to suffer through grading and office hours and peer review and musty seminars and existential panic.  I don’t need an institution to create music nobody wants to hear – I can do that whenever I want.  I don’t need the “Dr.” that’s theoretically in front of my name to ask the Big Questions about art and life and, like, rent.  I don’t even need the Dr. to be depressed by the answers.

And so I close the application.