The Starving Children Fallacy
The topic of the moment in the academic blogging world is this piece in the Chronicle by David Lester, which comes under heavy fire from the Invisible Adjunct and Crooked Timber. There are two parts to his argument: the second, in which he brags about avoiding many academic responsibilities (he writes, "I went to the first graduation ceremony at the college in 1973, but I have never attended one since. I have not attended a faculty meeting since 1972." This leads to some speculation that this might be a Good Thing) has attracted most of the criticism, but I'd like to address the first, on which most people have given him a pass.
Lester opens his article with the Dale Carnegie-esque observation that academics are a bunch of whiners, and that there are worse ways to earn a living:
As a college student, I worked five days a week in a factory in the summers and delivered parcels for the Postal Service at Christmas. That work was stressful. I also spent a full day down a coal mine, being choked by dust and trying to avoid having my legs gashed by the speeding conveyer belts. That was truly hell. Compared to lives in those jobs, academe is a good place to work.
Coal miners have it much worse than academics, you see, so everybody should just stop complaining. Also, there are children starving in Africa, so eat your vegetables, you ungrateful little snots.
This is a class of argument with a long and distinguished history (in satire and elsewhere), and I'm always puzzled to see it advanced by people who otherwise appear to be smart. Gregg Easterbrook struggles with essentially the same problem in a recent book (though one could raise valid questions about whether he can still be counted as "smart"), and I can't figure that out, either.
The fundamental problem here is a misunderstanding about what people are doing when they complain. The complaints of tenured faculty aren't claims that their lives are objectively awful in an absolute sense. That would be ludicrous-- there are lots of people who have harder lives than academics, starting with academic support staff, and ending with subsistence farmers. The complaints are relative: they're not saying that life as a professor is worse than life as a dirt farmer in Africa, they're saying that given what they do, their lives are harder than they need to be. It's certainly true that academia is an easier life than coal mining, but it's not especially relevant, except as a rhetorical dodge.
Complaints about the stresses of academic life are generally not about things that are an intrinsic part of the job, but rather about those foolish inefficiencies and unreasonable demands that add to the difficulty of the job with no clear purpose. A running joke in academia says that tenure-track faculty are expected to spend 75% of their time on research, 75% on teaching, and the other 75% on campus service, and it's funny because it's true. Worse yet, the requirements for tenure tend to be somewhat nebulous, and often seem like a moving target from the junior faculty perspective. And the advice we get from senior colleagues and administrators is often contradictory-- I've had colleagues tell me that I should do absolutely no committee service before tenure, and focus entirely on research. I've had other people tell me that there's no chance of getting tenure without doing some committee service, and that the best thing I could possibly do for myself would be to spend a year on the most important and time-consuming committee on campus. And I've heard everything in between those extremes at one time or another.
That's something that adds to my stress level for no good reason. And that's something that I ought to be able to complain about without needing to rhetorically genuflect to all the coal miners and subsistence farmers who have it worse than I do.
Posted at 9:05 AM | link | follow-ups |