First Person

A Journalist Looks Back at Academe

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By Annalee Newitz

You can take a person out of academia, but you can't take academia out of the person.

In my new job as features editor at The San Francisco Bay Guardian, an alternative weekly, I oversee (among other things) a monthly literary supplement. But because the literature editor works from home, all her books come through my desk and wind up on two tall bookshelves behind me. Many of them come from academic presses.

Just recently, an academic anthology arrived that contained articles by several former colleagues whose work I'd adored. I paged through it nostalgically, marveling at the audaciously dry leads, intricate multi-claused sentences, and tidy little batches of endnotes. In just a year, the formal structure of the academic essay has become almost completely alien to me. These days, I'm concerned about captivating a broad audience in the lead and writing clean prose that will keep the copy desk from sending me surly e-mails.

But I still miss some things about academia, in particular the ease with which we could describe complicated ideas in just a few words: ideology, interpellation, subjectivity, aporia, cathexis. Damn, I miss that cathexis. What I wouldn't give for a conversation with somebody who truly understood all the nuances and ethical implications of what Freud and Lacan meant by "idealization."

Although we were always bitching about the end of canonization (or its reinstatement) in the humanities and social sciences, we really did have a canonical body of texts to which we all referred and to which people in the real world absolutely never, ever refer. That canon is still in me, like a perverse implantation.

The other day, I caught myself making a bland, offhand reference to an issue Foucault describes in his History of Sexuality -- I can't even remember what it was, something about bodies and oppression. And suddenly the editors and interns whom I'd been addressing all gave me strange, wan looks. "Oh," one said in a weird voice, "you've actually read Foucault? What's he all about, anyway?"

I couldn't bring myself to reply. It was just too huge; we had no common language that I could call upon to explain it. So I mumbled something self-effacing about "boring academic bullshit," and we all went cheerfully back to our work.

I'm truly part of the "new economy" now, holding down two full-time jobs. As a freelance writer, I write about pop culture, technology, and sexuality for a handful of national magazines and online publications. My weekly column on high-tech culture, "Techsploitation," runs in several Northern California weeklies (some online). I'm making more money than ever before, which isn't saying a lot, since my academic lectureships were paying about $15,000. But I finally bought a new computer (an iMac -- so sue me), and a new tattoo (a broken chain around my wrist -- very Karl Marx). Don't ask about my student loans. That would require a third full-time job.

How did I do it? Not easily. There was a lot of blood and gore involved, just like a horror movie. Luckily, academia had prepared me for such an incredibly ugly, abusive economic future that I felt positively euphoric when I was able to get a job after only a few months on the journalistic job market. My first nonacademic gig was as a senior editor and writer at the online countercultural magazine GettingIt.com, a startup that lost all its financing three weeks after I was hired.

When our director gave us the news that GettingIt.com was becoming an Internet shutdown, I ran to the bathroom in tears, thinking, "Academia has cursed me. How many jobs do I have to lose or not even get before I'll finally have a job title I can call my own?" Sure it sounds melodramatic, but you have to realize that after four years on the academic and nonacademic job markets, getting a job that lasted for only three weeks was like an extremely bad acid trip: surreal, menacing, and purposeless.

I went back to freelancing again, but within a few months I managed to secure my current job, which has now officially lasted longer than three weeks. My first day here, I remember staring at the walls and cubicles in a kind of shell-shocked amazement. "I'm really here," I kept repeating to myself, and I wasn't sure if that was good or bad.

Now I know that it's basically good. (At least, as good as a job can get in a capitalist society structured by what Marcuse called repressive desublimation -- mmmm, it felt so good to say that.) I live in San Francisco, a great city. My boss is a friendly Marxist who runs a flexible, democratic office. My colleagues are radicals, freaks, or people who actually believe in social responsibility of some kind. The work is hard, but fun. And hey, I can decorate my cubicle with bizarre, suggestive posters, and wear whatever the hell I want.

Ultimately, I'm glad to be free of academia. I do miss those hyper-intellectual conversations about desire and commodification, but there is no shortage of brainiacs out here in the world of journalism. They just don't use technical language. Although no job is free of toadies and office politics, I've seen a lot less of them out here than I did in the Ivory Tower, where resources are so limited that only the sharks get to eat.

To everyone who stayed, good luck. And to everyone who wants out, don't forget that there is hope.