Life as it so often does, however, throws you curve balls. An injury forced me to reconsider working in factories for the rest of my labouring life, something in retrospect that was my good fortune since little known to me and most Americans at the time, the era of deindistrialisation and globalisation, both of which dried up the number of good paying and good benefit industrial blue collar jobs in the US and both driven by corporate elites and their political toadies, was just around the bend. So, in 1975 I enrolled in classes at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. In 1978 full of dreams about becoming an academic, I transferred to Indiana University in Bloomington where I finished my bachelor's degree in 1983.
My undergraduate experiences managed to wipe some of the romantic sheen off my perceptions of academia turning me into someone who took a pluses and minuses approach to the academy. Despite this, I still hoped to attend graduate school and I still, despite the diminution of my romanticism about academe, had plans to become an academic. I didn't, however, know what I wanted to specialise in. Nor, given my broad interests in the social sciences and humanities, did I know whether I wanted to specialise in any academic discipline at all. I thus applied to and was admitted into a post graduate interdisciplinary programme in American Studies at Notre Dame.
Not finding Notre Dame's version of American Studies particularly conducive to my interests and not finding Notre Dame and South Bend conducive to me, I took an assistant acquisitions librarian job at the Science/Engineering Library at SMU in 1985, a job which, in retrospect, I wish I had never left. Unfortunately, I did quit the job to go to graduate school with my dreams of the academic life still somewhat intact. Though I was accepted at the University of Chicago (Social Thought) and the University of Kansas (Sociology), I matriculated at the school that offered me the most money, Ohio University in Athens, where I studied Sociology beginning in 1985.
Though I loved the intellectual and cultural life of Athens my interdisciplinary self still tugged at my intellectual heartstrings. So, in 1987 I matriculated into an interdisciplinary doctoral programme at SUNY Albany. Fearing the difficulties of getting a job with a doctor of arts degree I transferred into the Anthropology Department at Albany and took a master's degree in 1988. I didn't opt for the Ph.D. because anthropology seemed too ahistorical and too anemic when it came to the study of the modern and postmodern core nation world. I wanted to do anthropological and sociological history and I wanted to do work on the history of North American Protestantism.
Because of these interests I eventually applied to and was admitted into a Ph.D. programme in Sociology in 1991 at Brigham Young University, a place where I could study in depth and historically, ethnographically, and sociologically, a group I had become fascinated with, the Latter-day Saints. I liked aspects of BYU. I learned, for example, a lot about the history and culture of Mormonism. I was alienated, however, by the cultural religiously grounded parochialism of the Y and of the Mormon Culture Region. So once again I found myself exploring the academic marketplace.
Among the choices I had for graduate school after BYU was my dream college and university the University of Toronto (History of North American Christianity), Queen's University (North American Religious History and Mormon Studies), LaTrobe University (History and Sociology under the guidance of Rhys Isaac), and SUNY Albany (History). Money again was the deciding factor and I went back to SUNY Albany where I finally earned a Ph.D in history and wrote a dissertation on Mormon Studies. By this time, however, getting a job in academe was about as easy as taking a trip to Mars with either Mr. Amazon or Mr. Virgin Records. Moreover, I had already earned a lot of pension and health care credits while teaching in the State University of New York system.
All of this is a long way of saying I know academe. I have, thanks to being a student and a part-time teacher in the academy, irregularly in the 1990s and regularly since 2006 to 2021 when I retired, gotten to know by experience academia quite well. Memories of my academic life were stirred as I read James Axtell's The Pleasures of Academe: A Celebration and Defense of Higher Education (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), Like Axtell I found, over the course of my academic sojourn, pleasure in college towns (something I wish Axtell had been more systematic and analytical about since college towns are towns which the college or university dominates economically, politically, culturally, demographically, and geographically), in college town bookstores (which are, I have always thought, measures of the quality of a college and university; it is no accident, for example, that the Coop Bookstore at the University of Chicago is one of the best bookstores in the US; it is also no accident that the Barnes and Nobles takeover of so many college bookstores, including that of my alma mater and the Harvard Coop, and the decline of supplementary books in such bookstores, probably reflects not only the increasing triumph of what Veblen called business strategies in academe but also the decline in the quality of student intellectual life and student reading life), in college town built environments, in college town intellectual life, in college town cultural life (lots of foreign film opportunities and musical performances in B-town), in college and university learning, in college and university research, in college town and college and university teaching, a not unalloyed joy, and even in college town semi-professional athletics (I was at IU when we won the NCAA basketball championship in 1981 and what I can remember of it was exciting, amazing, and wonderfully ritualistic).
What I don't remember is what the mostly demagogic polemicists who attack college faculty complain and whinge about: political and ideological correctness, elitism, too much faculty involvement in research and not enough in teaching, and too complacent and lazy a faculty thanks to tenure. It is hard to know what to do with such rhetoric. If anything, faculty, particularly part-time cheap from the bureaucrats point of view faculty, are overworked and underpaid in part because of the American tradition of anti-intellectualism that impacts college and university funding, particularly in the states, while administrators, who are increasingly authoritarian managers are overpaid, underworked, and committed to a retail model of education. As Axtell notes and the data he quotes quite clearly shows, such whinging is not grounded in reality. But them demagogues are not known for their commitment to empirical facts. The function and purpose of their anecdotally dripping rhetoric is to manipulate the masses by playing on emotions like fear rather than to have a civil, reasonable, and rational argument about what economically, politically, culturally, demographically, and geographically is. In the end, I think we need to call such empirically anemic rhetoric what it is, bullshit.
Given this it is hard to know to whom Axtell's civilly toned book is aimed and to who it is addressed. If it is aimed at the polemicists even if they even bother to read it, which I think is unlikely, they are likely to perceive it and the statistical facts within it as yet another instance of liberal or left wing political and ideological correctness. If it is aimed at someone like me, it is preaching to the empirically grounded choir. If it is aimed at the inbetweeners, at anyone with an open mind and a commitment to fact-based analysis, hopefully they will find it helpful in understanding academia and academic faculty. I suspect, in the end, however, that Axtell's biography/memoir/history/ethnography/quantitative analysis is aimed more at people like me than anyone else. And that may be a reflection of a divided America that does not talk to itself anymore and does not have a common identity and sense of community if it ever did outside of the Great Depression to World War II era.
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