Dear Academics in Suspended Adolescence,

Letter Thirty-Eight

Dear Soft Academia,

My parents are both out of academia, but a lot of their friends are still professors and lecturers, med school and liberal arts alike.

Whenever I hear them talk there is a sense of cliqueness if that's the word. They talk about their coworkers very similar to how I used to talk about people in middle school - rivalries and groups and social hierarchies. They hold grudges that seem even to me rather childish. Popularity comparisons to boot.

It's very interesting but it feels like their teenage years were somehow frozen in amber in academia. Do you think it has to do with the extended time spent in college and university? Or isn’t this as universal and is just my parents friends?

Signed,

Academics Suspended in Adolescence

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Dear Academics Suspended in Adolescence,

What an interesting observation! I have never thought about how the location of an academic’s job may impact their social development like that until reading this.

I was pondering this response at a cafe by a college campus this week, watching college students of all ages cycle in and out and work on study guides, coding, essays, and emails.

And I started to consider that it may be less about the consistent interactions they have with younger people who may be working through adolescent behavior patterns and developing their frontal lobe that is impacting them, and more about the conditions of the job that are showing the blind spots of their own healing and growing up because of the little reprieve academics get from getting beat down.

The life of an academic, whether you are in a liberal arts subject, medicine, or beyond, is rife with rejections, being underpaid, cruel comments disguised as feedback, a manufactured sense of urgency, and an instability for funding, for courses, for tenure, for location.

I can’t say those conditions bring out the best in anyone.

In fact, one could say, those are conditions that activate people’s fight/flight/freeze systems and color the world as less safe and the people around them as more dangerous. And what happens when people don’t feel safe and the world feels dangerous? The answer is certainly not know how to navigate relationships, power, and repair with a sense of maturity, kindness, and accountability.

Since I am not with you to hear about the rivalries, hierarchies, and grudges, I am curious if they would match or relate to the power/ the position of each person within the academic ecosystem. Is the adjunct professor holding a grudge against a department head that favors another person? Is the rivalry between people fighting for the same grants and funding? Are the hierarchies mirroring the values of society that people learned in high school through movies, songs, and the behaviors they saw?

This also has me thinking a lot about competition, how much of academia is competitive, and where we, over the course of our lives, really begin to learn how to handle competition. With siblings, in organized sports, over game night, at school.

Competition within the landscape of universities may bring out the reactions, behaviors, and emotions from the last time these people felt competition in a similar way: high school. Think about standardized tests, sport try-outs, GPA rankings, sport tournaments, college acceptances, and so on.

There is a seeking out of competition in undergrad too but I have been thinking about how much stress and competition exist in high school and the age in which a lot of people begin to solidify how they as an individual, rather than the patterns of their family of origin, respond to competition and the stress of it.

Which led me to considering Erikson’s psychological stage characterized of this time period (12-18), identity vs. role.

Now there’s a lot of appropriate criticism for the psychological stage's to be presented as linear and time bound and consecutive, so I am arriving to this connection not as objective Truth, but as a curiosity about how ones professional setting might ‘freeze’ them in social development.

Does the academic landscape confuse people about what decisions to make, leave them feeling uncertain about their future, and keep people from forming accurate understandings of where they fit into the world?

Is it possible to form good peer relationships, the factor that folks who study the development of teens says helps the most in this ‘stage’, in such a place of competition, uncertainty, and stress?

Neither is to say it can never happen, just that it seems worth it to be curious about how the day-in-day-out experience of working in such a place may be causing the behavior of the group of academics you know.

I think many of us are familiar with a student mental health and wellbeing conversation than we are about the mental health and wellbeing conversation about professors, lecturers, and university research/teaching staff, and this has me wondering about the systems change that might be needed for folks to be able to come out of an exhausting system and be able to practice responding differently to their peers and co-workers.

How can the funding systems shift in a more sustainable way? Is there a better way besides competition for conference acceptance talks? Can cross-disciplinary collaboration be rewarded in a compelling way that changes how people consider their legacy as academics? How can peer reviewers become trained and paid for their time to provide clearer and kinder feedback? What does mental health support look like for professors and lecturers, and what would be an improvement?

I don’t think this is a symptom of the friendship group of your parents, that they happen to collect a wide range of petty, popularity obsessed, immature, or ‘frozen’ academics. I think you may have noticed a pattern of symptoms of the academic landscape that are impacting their relationships so much that it’s a frequent topic of conversation at get togethers. I think you may be witnessing the ways the system fails those in the ivory tower on the other side of the podiums, too.

Til next Sunday,

Sydney

Send your letters to: softacademiawithsydney@gmail.com

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