What’s Your Vocation?

A couple of apparently very different things have crossed my desk in the past few days. The first is the hilarious, much-mentioned, sadly accurate video at xtranormal.com depicting an undergraduate seeking a letter of recommendation from one of her professors to go to graduate school in English to write about “literature … and death”:

The other is a brochure I’ve received from the Council of Independent Colleges promoting its program “Presidential Vocation and Institutional Mission.” The CIC program is designed to help prospective presidents “think deeply about their own sense of vocation” and how that calling might connect to a potential future institution.

What brings these disparate artifacts together is the notion of “vocation,” or calling, and how it has inflected the academic job market and academics’ self-images. In viewing the xtranormal video, I have this terrible feeling that virtually everyone who has gone to graduate school in the humanities in the past 30 years or so has had pretty much exactly this conversation with his or her professors. I certainly had similar conversations with several of my faculty mentors when I was taking the GRE, writing application essays, and thinking about where to go to further my education.

Moreover, I’ve had versions of the same conversation several times with my own students. The result is generally the same: The student is determined on graduate school, and after fair warning, I will write the requested letter if I believe the student is strong enough to do well.

The narrative that casts an academic career as a calling is powerful and compelling. A lot of very smart people, in possession of excellent data about the likelihood of success and the relatively low compensation most faculty members earn even if they make it to a tenure-track job, will follow the path anyhow. As the student in the video says, “I want to lead a life of the mind.” This desire is very powerful, and seems impervious to the often-terrible realities of the job market and academic employment in general.

The CIC program sits at the other end of this same spectrum. It relies on the idea that serving as the president of a college or a university is a vocation, which it probably is, at least if you’re going to do it right. I work very closely with our president, and have known several other presidents well, and not one of them has been in it for anything other than the love of education and the hope to improve his or her specific institution. I am not so naïve as to assert that there is no opportunistic careerism and glory-seeking among college and university presidents, but really, for many presidents the obvious return on the investment of time, energy, and stress is not all that high.

The vocational narrative persists in the face of these negative factors because it’s still got a lot of truth. It’s terribly difficult to get an academic job—the market is poor and getting worse; labor conditions are often dreadful; increasing bureaucratic imperatives have significantly reduced the fun of being a professor; and external forces (state budget cuts, endowment losses, etc.) have unsettled the future of higher education. College and university presidents give up their private lives, navigate difficult politics, work huge numbers of hours, and take a lot of heat from various constituencies, and most of them (there are a few exceptions) are not all that highly compensated for this work.

I know that the rhetoric of “vocation” can be used as a cover for exploitative working conditions. I know that people can be lured to their destruction, or at least supreme unhappiness, by a narrative that mystifies the difficult reality of academic employment. The problem is, I do still think that higher education is a vocation, a calling that compels people to pursue an academic career even when they are told the unpleasant truth.