My Worst Career Move: An Excerpt from “An Honest Living”

What follows is an excerpt from my new book, An Honest Living:  A Memoir of Peculiar Itineraries.  Told primarily from behind the wheel of a school bus—a vantage point from which I explore social anxiety, suburban architecture, political alienation, racial oppression, working-class solidarity, professional malfeasance, and the joy of chauffeuring children to and from school—An Honest Living describes a decade of turbulent post-professorial life and my recent return to the lectern.  The book is available here and here. 

With friends it’s fine to act like a fool.  Professional spaces are more tenuous.  Don’t get me wrong, you’re definitely allowed to act like a fool in professional spaces, but the foolishness needs to comply with a certain etiquette.  Ghosting colleagues and skipping social functions to smoke weed are a no-no.  The professionals prefer foolishness of a loutish or belligerent variety, not the kind that makes life more peaceful. 

Among friends, my aloofness was a source of frustrated amusement and an excuse to poke fun at me.  Professional colleagues didn’t view it as a quirk or a preference, though.  My inability to socialize—unwillingness, really, for I was capable of doing it if I had wanted to—was a legitimate concern.  They had a departmental culture to worry about.  And I had promotions to secure.  It did neither side any good if I insisted on making my existence in the department clumsy or standoffish. 

In grad school, this stuff didn’t matter much, but I wasn’t long on my first job, at a regional comprehensive in southern Wisconsin, before recognizing that “fit” was a critical (if vaguely articulated) part of the job. 

You start noticing certain looks and glances that are damn-near imperceptible but deeply momentous in what they aim to express:  a quick purse of the lips; a slow-motion nod; a suggestive eyebrow furl.  You become literate in the esoteric vocabularies of departmental and campus cultures:  we believe in this or that catholic ideal; we carry ourselves like an officially-licensed mascot; we practice a specific brand of courage and honor.  We’re Hokies, goddammit.  Sooners.  Highlanders.  Phoenix.  Fighting Illini.  We never give up.  We take one for the team.  We transcribe our identities in Latin. 

Wisconsin wasn’t so bad.  I was twenty-seven when I arrived, eager to please and barely a cynical synapse in my crystal-clear brain.  Everyone rightly saw me as a kid.  And they liked that I would do a lot of grunt work without complaint.  Besides, the faculty lived across a 100-mile range, so there wasn’t a ton of interaction off campus.  Most people chose a group of friends according to ideology or convenience and stuck to it. 

Virginia Tech, my second job, was different.  Almost everyone lived in or near Blacksburg, small even for a college town.  The place had a real rah-rah spirit.  English wasn’t simply a department, filled with workers of unequal status.  It was a community.  We weren’t supposed to pay mind to things that divide us; we were on a collective mission to bring close reading to the world.  And so you couldn’t keep out of the way.  I grew accustomed to colleagues passive-aggressively noting that I wasn’t at such-and-such soiree or making it clear that the end of semester department party wasn’t actually optional.  Decline somebody’s dinner invitation and watch that fucker vote down your tenure bid.  Nobody wants an asshole on the faculty, after all. 

Only after I was done with academe—or I suppose after academe was done with me—could I fully appreciate the interplay of competing impulses in the making of a college professor.  So many grad students and young scholars present as tormented, and for good reason:  they’re overworked and exploited and at the end of it there’s only a small chance they’ll earn a living in their areas of expertise.  But the condition extends to people who should have long ago outgrown early-career angst:  senior scholars, administrators, and visiting faculty, many famous or highly decorated. 

I have my suspicions, but know it’s not a great idea to do amateur psychoanalysis in writing.  (We all do it in our own minds, obviously.)  Let me then attempt to raise my discourse to the level of theory:  we’re all fucked up to some degree because it’s impossible to reconcile the ideals of academe with its reality.  The only happy people are the abusers, the bullies, and the sexual predators, and they’re all inherently miserable.  Many of us enter the field with dreams of a meaningful existence, of making a difference, and are then systematically ground down by the social and economic hardships of the profession. 

In these conditions, the ideological cliquishness within the profession begins to make sense.  It’s helped along by a power structure that rightly sees the self-professed scholar-activist as unthreatening.  Certain truisms and devotions prevail because they arise from an insidious pressure to conform.  If every professor you know seems to have the same take on Venezuela or Ukraine or China—the take that just so happens to align with State Department boilerplate—then it’s not a funny coincidence.  Those professors auditioned and were consequently selected for the task, just as they now select the younger generation to maintain a uniformity of thought that suits their class interests. 

I had no idea how ideologically stunted I was until leaving the profession.  Everything I took to be common wisdom was in fact a painstaking ritual of complaisance.  How eager I was to discourse about faraway places, about the proper way to run a government, about how the natives should conduct an insurrection.  A lot of academics are filled with unacknowledged messianism that looks grotesque once you learn to recognize it.  They won’t support any old revolution, any slapdash movement for Indigenous sovereignty, any third-rate anti-imperialist in the Global South.  They have standards.  And whose interests do those reverent standards end up serving?  Why, that’s entirely the wrong question. 

****

The two years I spent in Beirut were eventful.  I arrived with a good amount of fanfare and often ran into someone I knew while walking the streets of Hamra.  There’s a lot of poverty in Lebanon, along with a lot of refugees, so the romantic tributes to this remarkable country can be difficult to stomach.  Nevertheless, there’s no denying that Beirut is a magical city, one of those rare places that manages to breed nostalgia in the present. 

I remember during my first semester at AUB, the fall of 2015, Bernie-fever gripped the left in the United States (and beyond).  I was lukewarm about his candidacy being that I have limited interest in electoral politics.  Nevertheless, I observed the hoopla and occasionally joined the endless discussions about the Democratic Party primary that dominated social media.  I was content to mainly keep out of it. 

With time, I became unwilling to overlook what I viewed as Sanders’ subpar positions around Palestine.  I was less patient about the propensity of his supporters to delegitimize Palestine as an issue of concern.  My feeling, which will never change, is that no oppressed people should be expected to defer their liberation.  If Palestinian liberation doesn’t figure into an electoral platform lauded as revolutionary, then the platform is demanding exactly that kind of deferral. 

I wrote an essay explaining this point of view and immediately found myself in the middle of an imbroglio.  The essay was unpopular among everyone from progressives to communists (according to self-description).  I got called the usual names—purist, wrecker, ultraleftist, useful idiot—and gave a little attitude in return.  All in all an unpleasant few days, but pretty typical of electoral discourses, which rarely manage to be coherent.  (To be fair, neither do the actual elections.) 

A week or so after the essay was published and the ruckus had died down, I was meeting a group of colleagues for dinner in Hamra.  We gathered at the bottom of Jeanne d’Arc Street and made our way into the compact neighborhood.  Not a block into the journey, somebody demanded to know why I wasn’t supporting Bernie.  (I detested that first-name basis shit.  “Bernie.”  As if he’s your kindly old uncle and not a powerful man who votes on military appropriations.)  I explained that my position wasn’t really about supporting or rejecting Sanders, but about what becomes of the least powerful among us when we tacitly ratify their dispossession. 

“Okay, but you’re not voting for him, right?” somebody else piped up. 

“That’s kind of beside the point.” 

But it wasn’t.  The group peppered me with questions about my voting strategy.  I’m thinking of something other than voting strategy, I protested. 

And suddenly it occurred to me:  I was speaking an entirely alien political language.  My point just didn’t register.  The idea of not voting was inconceivable.  Worse, it was irresponsible and suspicious.  Voting was the lodestar, the totality of civic life.  Imagining other possibilities, even in the abstract, didn’t enter the calculus. 

As the chatter moved on to less acrimonious topics, I kept silent.  Soon I became rather angry, because there was a plain reality I couldn’t let go of:  their political language, not mine, was out of place in Beirut.  Had the discussion taken place in the United States, I would have been aggravated, no doubt, but in Beirut the conversation felt like an affront to the entire Middle East.  Here we had a group of Western professors, earning a very nice living in an Arab country—at a university that graduated hundreds of anti-Zionist revolutionaries, no less—who felt the need to castigate a Palestinian for refusing to abide any form of Zionism, no matter how progressive it tried to make itself sound.  Something about the whole scene felt profoundly unsettling.  Perhaps it was the realization that my group was mimicking the logic of colonization, zealously in thrall to a stubborn variety of U.S. exceptionalism. 

It was the same among the entire leftist academic class, besides maybe the minority for whom Sanders was a bit too spicy.  The usual rituals of conformity and recrimination ceased to be implicit or unspoken; suddenly the intellectual vanguard was dogpiling anyone impudent enough to dissent.  Adhering to the logic of electoralism is an unspoken prerequisite for an academic or media career.  Reject it and opportunities quickly dry up.  Electoralism is less a political litmus test than a character audition.  When an insurgency arises, the liberal elite needs to know that you’ll have a pragmatic reaction, that you’re available to lecture the riffraff about more responsible forms of protest.  They need to know that you’re inclined to conformity, that you care about access and upward mobility, that U.S. exceptionalism has adequately colonized your intuition, that you’re capable of radicalism only in theory.  Declining to support Bernie Sanders—or, put more accurately, refusing to abandon Palestine to a politician’s benefit—was the worst career move I’ve ever made.