academics want the freelance life

I encounter all kinds of reactions to my freelance writer identity, from blank incomprehension to dismissal to enthusiasm to envy. At some point in life, or all along, we freelance types teeter over the edge of related careers, toy with committing to a more conventional field, and wonder at the wisdom of our chosen path.

So it was with delight, surprize, and "Aha" today that I stumbled onto Every Academic's Secret Desire by Michael Erard, which appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education on 12-2-2002.

Erard, who holds a Ph.D. in English, left academe to pursue a career as a freelance magazine writer, a career which has treated him well. In this essay, he describes the surprising discovery he made in grad school, that instead of his profs being happy at his freelancing success, they turned green with envy, and saw him as a threat.

"All these confessions are not simply cases of greener grass, I believe. Instead it's a symptom of a delirium that's endemic to the profession, particularly in the humanities. Only now do I see it clearly. It's a version of that deep need that crops up among academics, the need to prove that what one does is relevant in the world. It's a fear that what one spends all one's time doing does not, in the end, matter, " he writes.

"In that sense, the rhetoric of the "public intellectual" and the "intellectual entrepreneur" is one way that academics try to professionalize this fear. They do not acknowledge the fear, and they do not conquer it. They merely paper it over."