The other day I outed myself as working in higher ed.

Gasp! Shock! Horror!

It’s not like working in higher ed gives one leprosy or anything, but I often feel like I’m betraying my own inner convictions by working in this field. (Also, lepers get leprosy? Just when you think the English language harbours no more surprises….)

I still remember reading to Antifragile for the first time and coming across Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s turn of phrase “lecturing birds how to fly.” It is the perfect descriptor for much of what goes on in academia (the other would be an eternal debate on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin*).

The current incarnation of the ideal of the university has been corrupted by pseudo-market forces. There is an attempt to define, commodify, and quantify “learning,” but the overreach of the government into the educational system (via Federal financial aid, research funding, and other mechanisms) has created an utterly monstrous system that is divorced from any existing free marketplace of ideas.

It has taken way more time that it should have for the scales to fall from my eyes in regards to the corruption of academia, and yet inertia keeps me in academically related jobs. (The fact that academia is a funhouse-mirror parallel to business doesn’t help either–writing a resume that translates academicese into business-speak is a challenge that I’m only starting to get the hang of.)

All this is to preamble the fact that I’m in the running for yet another academic job, one that is farther inside the dense thicket of academic administration. Like, this one is basically the operations manager of the heart of darkness. It’s a job where no matter how many people would like me as a person, they’d all hate me because of my role.

This is one of those instances where doing a good job is supporting a lot of philosophies and social forces that I don’t believe in, and don’t believe are good for anyone. My unofficial motto right now is “data has no soul” and I would essentially be doing the opposite of that, in addition to materially supporting the life of the university system as we currently know it.

Realistically though, I’m actively doing those things now in my current position. I don’t actively practice what I believe — which makes me a hypocritical wagecuck and part of the reason that the self-help industry is still alive and well and aimed squarely at the alt-thinking crowd.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about this situation, but I do know that other factors might make the decision for me. There are other things I can change to make my life better and more compatible with my beliefs that don’t involve changing my immediate industry.

In fact, I may even get a better view of just how jacked up the university system is. I’m trying to leverage my experience and observations in a way that will be helpful to others, so an additional angle of approach might be helpful. Deep undercover, me.

In the meantime, I’ll to continue to work at making myself antifragile. Despite the answer I give in interviews, I do not see myself in a management position in five years. I see myself living in a little house surrounded by a meadow, publishing books for a living.

 

* And yet, if you reference that phrase, people will not understand what you mean. Classical education, bah!