Excerpts from Matthew B. Crawford's "The Case for Working With Your Hands" - an interesting read, and one that I thought echoed some of my own experiences in transitioning from an "academic" life to a "pseudo-academic" type of job...one that attracts bright, driven critical thinkers but one that, in my experience, could not be more frustrating and ill-suited to someone who enjoys intellectual stimulation, careful analysis, and meaningful interaction with ideas. In Crawford's case, he describes a job he took after his master's degree writing abstracts of academic articles. Sounds dreamy, right? In reality, the profit-driven model (and the fact that the broad swath of "academic articles" covered areas of expertise that only a scholar in that particular field should rightly be writing abstracts for) had the reverse effect on his cognition, as actually understanding the articles had nothing to do with the "efficiency" model of churning out abstracts. (Oh, how I empathize!)
I'm so glad someone has written about this phenomenon and attached a word to it - "stupidification"!
"I was always sleepy while at work, and I think this exhaustion was because I felt trapped in a contradiction: the fast pace demanded complete focus on the task, yet that pace also made any real concentration impossible. I had to actively suppress my own ability to think, because the more you think, the more the inadequacies in your understanding of an author’s argument come into focus. This can only slow you down. To not do justice to an author who had poured himself into the subject at hand felt like violence against what was best in myself.
The quota demanded, then, not just dumbing down but also a bit of moral re-education, the opposite of the kind that occurs in the heedful absorption of mechanical work. I had to suppress my sense of responsibility to the article itself, and to others — to the author, to begin with, as well as to the hapless users of the database, who might naïvely suppose that my abstract reflected the author’s work. Such detachment was made easy by the fact there was no immediate consequence for me; I could write any nonsense whatever."
"How was it that I, once a proudly self-employed electrician, had ended up among these walking wounded, a “knowledge worker” at a salary of $23,000? I had a master’s degree, and it needed to be used. The escalating demand for academic credentials in the job market gives the impression of an ever-more-knowledgeable society, whose members perform cognitive feats their unschooled parents could scarcely conceive of. On paper, my abstracting job, multiplied a millionfold, is precisely what puts the futurologist in a rapture: we are getting to be so smart! Yet my M.A. obscures a more real stupidification of the work I secured with that credential, and a wage to match. When I first got the degree, I felt as if I had been inducted to a certain order of society. But despite the beautiful ties I wore, it turned out to be a more proletarian existence than I had known as an electrician. In that job I had made quite a bit more money. I also felt free and active, rather than confined and stultified.
A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this.
Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. Labor unions address important concerns like workplace safety and family leave, and management looks for greater efficiency, but on the nature of the job itself, the dominant political and economic paradigms are mute. Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences."
What I love about the article is Crawford doesn't seem to be decrying academia itself, as so many frustrated PhDs who can't find work in academia seem to do. This is really the best article I've seen to illustrate a point I feel strongly about - that the shortage of academic careers isn't in and of itself the problem, but the real problem is that the skills academics are trained in (critical thinking and a dogged passion for understanding the details and nuances of their field) can find little real use in the accepted employment model. Crawford could easily have concluded that it was his overeducation that was tripping him up, but he doesn't, and I find his critique of the "corporate" model (which can extend far beyond typical profit-driven businesses to education, government, nonprofit, etc.) much more compelling. What's important here is that with or without the degree, Crawford would have had the same inquisitive character, and all he really sought was an outlet for that need to be filled. What outlet did he find? He uses his prestigious political philosophy doctorate to run his own motorcycle repair shop, a career he makes a good case for being more scholarly, intellectually challenging, and fulfilling than his former careers directing think tanks and writing academic abstracts.
His advice deserves repeating:
"A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this."
