Academia or Not Academia

It's a beautiful day today. Students are enjoying the sun. But what about their professors? It is rare to see a professor outside. Academic culture is one in which the modal academic almost never takes a break and, even when they pretend to take a break, they are usually working. Having come to academia from a range of other professions, including working in adult corrections, internal auditing of a mortgage securitization firm, as a partner in a business, a CEO of another business, an editorial director, a computer programmer, and director of the Jefferson High School financial Services Academy, and director of education and chief economist of the Urban League of Greater Portland, I think I can safely say that I've never seen a group of people who take as little genuine leisure time as the modal academic. This modal academic is always fretting that she or he isn't doing enough, should be working harder on that research paper(s), book, or other project, spends inordinate amounts of time in meetings, and still finds time to advise students, revise syllabi and notes, do book reviews, and an endless array of other projects and time eaters. And they still feel they are not doing enough. It isn't quite what I'd expected when I joined the "life of the mind." What happened to the contemplation? For the most part, I haven't seen a lot of contemplative moments. And, at least in this particular region of academic space, I haven't seen a lot of intellectual interchange, either (since I don't count all those endless talks by invited speakers as involving much in the way of intellectual (versus financial) interchange). It's a weird culture. I used to encourage students to become academics (when I was still young and naive) because I could think of nothing more noble than the "life of the mind," but I stopped making that recommendation. I realized the pay is very poor, given the intellectual capital invested, and most of my students who go to Wall Street (and I have a lot of former students on Wall Street) make considerably more than their former professors and work about the same amount, perhaps less (considering that they usually do take real breaks from work, at least a substantial number of them do, rather than pretending to take breaks while still sneaking those books into their luggage and perhaps even that laptop in order to get a few more pages cranked out or at least more notes). I guess the bottom line is that academia is a place that is critical to social transformation because it is where new ideas are most likely to be generated and when generated likely to be made readily available to all who might make use of them, where the pursuit of critique produces intellectual breakthroughs, corrections, rethinkings that can push society in new directions or help us avoid pitfalls or even provide us with new insights into ourselves and life. This is a noble pursuit. But it is also a lot of work and there is also a lot of drudgery and paper pushing and meetings, meetings, meetings. In other words, I'm not about to tell that student with her heart set of Goldman or Morgan or Deutche Bank or Barclays that going for that Ph.D. is a superior choice. It depends. For some, the possibility of the "life of the mind" is enough. For others, since it is no more work, opting for the money may be the optimal choice.