Fear, loathing, and trembling

Søren Kierkegaard wouldn't think much of an academic who was granted a promotion. Here's what he says about assistant professors:

How ludicrous an assistant professor is! We all laugh when a Mad Meyer tugs at a huge boulder which he believes is money - but the assistant professor goes around proudly, proud of his knowledge, and no one laughs. And yet that is just as ludicrous - to be proud of the knowledge by which a man dupes himself eternally.

Yes, you assistant professor, of all the loathsome inhumans the most loathsome, you may very well manage to say the same thing as the religious person has said, perhaps in even more beautiful language, you may also manage to reap worldly advantages with your shrewdness, yes, even honor and esteem such as the authentically religious person never one in this life - but you are duped eternally.

He's not much higher on associate professors:

Secured in life, they live in their thoughts; they have a permanent position and secure prospects in a well-organized state; they have centuries or indeed millennia between themselves and the earthquakes of existence... Their task in life is to judge the great men and to judge them according to the outcome. Such conduct toward the great betrays a curious mixture of arrogance and wretchedness - arrogance because they feel called to pass judgment, wretchedness because they do not feel their lives are even remotely related to those of the great.

Kierkegaard is usually both witty and withering in his criticism, but these strike me as pretty standard attacks on academics' vanity and isolation from a mythical land known as "the real world." If you've made it to associate professor, then you've faced this and worse. In fact, given the propensity for self-loathing among academics, most of us have said far worse things about own profession.

On the one hand, we believe that what we do - live the life of the mind, cultivate the minds of others - is nobler and more worthwhile than what others do, because everyone else is a slave to the bottom line. But on the other hand, we feel guilty about our security, our relative freedom from bottom-line thinking, and the worry that what we do is self-indulgent, especially compared with that of people who, you know, work for a living.

And for those fortunate enough to have a tenure-track job, pride in one's accomplishments has to be tempered by a form of survivor guilt; many, many people with equal (or better) qualifications work as part-time or adjunct instructors, paid a fraction of what tenurable faculty make for the same work and lacking the generous fringe benefits universities provide their employees. Little surprise, then, that we lash out at ourselves.

The dim prospects for academic employment have led some holding humanities PhD's to question whether bright young people should be encouraged to pursue the same credential. William Pannapacker has argued in a series of columns in  The Chronicle of Higher Education (writing, Kierkegaardianly, under the pseudonym Thomas H. Benton) that grad school in the humanities is now suitable mainly for the sons and daughters of privilege, who needn't worry much about finding part-time jobs while they pursue their degrees and then can turn down unappealing teaching-job offers once they finish, continuing to hone their research until they receive a prestigious tenure-track job offer. On this account, financially poorer students end up in lesser grad programs, take longer to finish, and then wind up in lesser positions (if any) once they graduate. Despite self-satisfied claims to the contrary, the academy may be less a meritocracy than a plutocracy.

Which brings us back to Kierkegaard. He didn't need an academic job. Or any other kind of job. He was rich, having inherited a fortune. Money freed him from the academic establishment, thereby also freeing his prodigious literary imagination. Without question, we are better off as a result of his privilege. (Denmark's aspiring pastors were also better off, incidentally, as the obsessive and disagreeable Kierkegaard would have made a miserable teacher.)

But if only the rich can really afford to pursue academic careers, why do they put themselves through the trouble of seeking degrees and teaching jobs? Why not follow Kierkegaard's example and put all of their effort into writing? Aren't prestigious academic jobs appealing precisely because they require less teaching and allow more time and resources for writing? Isn't a zero-zero teaching load every academic's dream? Or is there something else about academic prestige that appeals even to the already-rich? Was Kierkegaard jealous about being excluded from it?