Sphinx

I’m now somewhere in the middle – it’s slightly trickier than it used to be to determine the exact mid-point, as we’re working with a new academic calendar – of my nineteenth year in Bristol and my twentieth year in some sort of full-time academic employment. One couldn’t get much more mid-career than that – well, other than the likelihood that the notional retirement age will do a Zeno’s tortoise thing, retreating further into the distance however much progress one makes towards it – and it does make you think, reflect and feel generally middle-aged. Even more so after hearing a senior colleague in the faculty referring to a certain department that will remain nameless, blessed with an staff age profile that is particularly heavy on the forty-somethings, as suffering from a collective mid-life crisis.

What, I feel impelled to wonder, is the academic equivalent of buying a ridiculously expensive motorbike or getting a face-lift? There are, I would suggest on the basis of a minimal amount of observation and a lot of self-examination, a number of more or less common manifestations, which really ought to be illustrated by Ronald Searle along the lines of his magnificent portraits of Masters at a Glance. Volunteer illustrators very welcome – or, indeed, additions to the bestiary of academic mid-life crisis…

(1) “Why don’t I have a parking space?” The career so far has been pretty impressive: prizes at school and university, strolled through the PhD straight into an Oxbridge JRF and then straight into a series of ever more prestigious permanent positions; a series of well-reviewed books, a series of easy promotions, hefty research grants, and ever more invitations to prestigious conferences – it doesn’t get much better than this. And that’s precisely the problem, because he’s foolish enough to go to college reunions and feel eaten up with envy at the way that far less clever and competent contemporaries are apparently basking in riches, enjoying holidays in their little place abroad and eating out at expensive restaurants in London, while he spends most of his salary on commuting from outside the city, faced with a choice between a half-hour trek up from the station or a half-hour trek from somewhere beyond Bristol Zoo as the only place where there’s any hope of finding a parking space. There’s only one solution: move into academic management, where not only are the financial prospects better and the biscuits at meetings coated in chocolate, but there’s also an opportunity for venting all of his resentment of colleagues who are clearly under-performing and need to be introduced to the real world in which alpha academics like himself get to call all the shots…

(2) “Daddy’s dead!” Academia continues to be dominated by intense, tangled relationships between mentors and mentees, supervisors and students, and patrons and clients – the German term Doktorvater always seems wholly appropriate provided that one keeps in mind the standard Freudian line on father-child relations. Some students devote themselves body and soul, theory and practice, to their academic mentor, taking their cue from them in everything they write; others ostentatiously rebel, so that everything is written againstthe parent who must be overthrown again and again; some develop a variety of avoidance strategies and just feel permanently guilty. In every case, the ‘death’ of the dominant parent – which may be simply a matter of retirement rather than anything physical – is a deep psychic wound, leading to loss of any sort of direction and fundamental uncertainty about identity. It ought to be a moment of liberation, when the younger generation steps out of the shadow of its elders; in practice, the main feeling may be that the shoes are simply too big to fill. The most common response is a frenzy of contributing to or editing Festschrifts, not through duty but as a means of clinging to the past.

(3) The Roving Eye Some early career academics work their way through an astonishing number of different institutions until they find ‘the one’ with which they can settle down; some maintain the pattern throughout their career, constantly keeping an eye out for a new, more desirable opportunity. Others, however, find their perfect partner at an early stage, and are lucky enough to be able to make things permanent and settle down for the long haul. But people change, and so do departments; the colleagues who once seemed interesting and exciting are now all too familiar and too busy with their own work to pay so much attention to the former ‘rising star’. He feels neglected, marginalised and resentful, being nagged to take more responsibility for sorting out squabbles between fractious colleagues. His eye starts to wander towards the job advertisements and the tempting, more attractive prospects that might appreciate him properly…

(4) In Denial  I’m middle-aged? Not in spirit – I’m still the same rebel that I always was, and will prove it by simultaneously clinging to the radical theories of my distant postgraduate years and seizing upon as many of the latest trends as I can safely appropriate without having to switch departments or make significant changes to any of my teaching plans. I’m on Twitter, I’ve been blogging for several years – it’s amazing how clueless most of my contemporaries are when it comes to social media, unlike the younger generation – and for all that I’m comfortably established in a personal chair and a final-salary pension, my real affiliation is to the struggling early-career academics, with whom I regularly sympathise by stressing how much easier things were when I was a grad student – I’m pretty sure they find it a comfort to have that sort of historical context and to know that there are people at the heart of the system who don’t feel comfortable about the way things are…

Incidentally, before anyone decides that this is a roman a clef and starts trying to put names to caricatures, I should emphasise that all of these are, to a greater or lesser extent, me…