Where My Heart Lies: “That’s a lot of preamble, Dr J…Just saying”

Part 5: What’s Next

Whoops…Did you miss part 4?

If my quit lit series were a mainstream film, this would be the part where things start to pay off. You’d know from an auspicious key change in the score (a building crescendo in A major) and the arrival of a montage of furious action, sweeping crane shots, and quick close-ups of my face changed by a series of focused but increasingly jubilant expressions. The montage would draw to a close with a shot of me sitting at my desk, the opaque black of the windows signaling that it’s late. I’ve been working obscene hours. As the music breaks down into an airy and atmospheric trickle, I lean back hard, reclining in a pleather task chair with a satisfied half smile playing across my lips. It’s done…whatever it is.

Of course my quit lit series (and the real life that inspires it) is not a mainstream film. It’s a messy tangle of hard decisions and an exercise in life-planning that might be best described as attempting to build a plane while flying. Still, this is the redemptive arc of the quit lit genre, where one makes up for prolonged bitching and moaning by revealing exciting and inevitably rewarding future plans.

Here are mine:

1. I plan to teach and advise those who want to learn.
2. I plan to conduct research about cultural phenomena I am passionately interested in — in particular, craft beer.
3. I plan to engage in social justice work, service to the greater good, and community organizing.

You: You have got to be kidding me! I read four parts of this ridiculousness so that you could tell me you plan to keep doing what you are doing right now?

Me: Yes. Well…sort of.

The Lost FAQ

There is one FAQ that I left off the list in my last installment in this series. Its omission was intentional. I couldn’t figure out how to respond to what is perhaps the most frequently asked pseudo-question I’ve fielded since I announced that I will be leaving my position in the professoriate at the end of the 2019–2020 academic year — not in less than a couple thousand words anyway. That question, “I guess your heart is really in the beer stuff, huh?” effectively summarizes my life’s central struggle. Its asking captures precisely what drew me to the heady world of higher education and precisely what is inspiring me to walk away. People just don’t get me.

I will be the first to stand up and say that “feeling misunderstood” is a profoundly first-world problem, one that I am extraordinarily privileged to have. I do not take lightly the fact that I have the luxury to craft a life brimming with opportunity and complexity — that I am fortunate enough to hold the expectation that those I experience this life alongside will, as a condition of being my friend or lover or colleague, join me in making reciprocal efforts to understand and value each other’s complex potentials. I mean…that’s some shit. Still, first-world problem or no, this question is hard to answer because those who ask it fundamentally misunderstand who I am and why I do what I do.

I will try to be clearer.

“The beer stuff” is not new or different or better or more rewarding stuff. It is, and it has always been, the same as “the academia stuff.” I don’t mean simply in terms of subject matter. I’m talking about the way I engage the world.

I have never followed a singular path. I am the type to start down three paths at the same time and glory in exploring the uncharted spaces that one finds while jumping back and forth between trails that most are content to follow. This isn’t indecision. It’s synthesis and I move inexorably forward. For what I inevitably lose in ease and efficiency, I gain threefold in perspective and experience. And cool scars.

My fellow academics will have recognized in my future plans the trifecta that defines our profession — teaching, research, and service. They, more than most, may be wondering why I am choosing to leave academia if my future aspirations are defined by the hallmarks of the professoriate and if the “beer stuff” and the “academia stuff” are effectively the same stuff. Here is my truth (meaning I do not presume to speak for, or to the experience of, others working in academia). I am leaving academia because the systemic culture of higher education at large and the exigencies of my institution in particular make pursuing my life’s work in a healthy, ethical, and personally fulfilling manner damn near impossible. That is to say, I am leaving academia so that I can be a happier, healthier, and more productive academic. I will be pursuing my personal and professional goals in the craft beer space full time.

Why Craft Beer?

Lord. If I had a _______ for every time someone asked me that question, I’d be ___________. I was looking for a novel way to hack that idiom and came up with nothing. Do with it what you will as I walk you through an answer.

• I am interested in questions, not particular subject matter or objects.
• All of my little questions ultimately boil down to three big questions. How do we make cultural meaning? How is cultural meaning related to power? How do we use more nuanced understandings of cultural meaning and power and to erase inequity, pursue justice, and act with radical compassion.
• Since communication is the process of meaning making, I became a scholar of communication and cultural studies so that I could ask and attempt to answer these questions in intelligent and productive ways.
• People lie. We also say a lot of dumb shit. In fact, most of the meaning we communicate to others is transmitted via unintentional, nonverbal channels. I am fascinated by the channels that might collectively be called “material communication” — the way we make meaning with stuff, everyday stuff like mixtapes and art and shopping lists…and pints of beer.
• Beer is awesome and I love to drink beer. But that is not why I’ve dedicated much of my academic career to studying the cultural dimensions of the American brewing industry. Beer is a remarkably fruitful space to ask and answer the questions that drive me. Americans have been using beer to make and share cultural meaning for centuries. The cultural meaning created with and about beer has been used to consolidate and wield tremendous cultural, economic, and political power. More importantly, the power dynamics on display in the brewing industry are an incredibly “democratic” window into the broader culture. This isn’t reading American culture though the well worn lens of “great men” stories. This is American culture at its most banal and, I think, in one of it truest expressions. Most significantly, in the contemporary context, craft beer has shown itself to be a space and a community with a willingness to challenge the status quo and align itself with a broader sense of social justice — to engage with the meanings that circulate through and around American beer, through and around American social, economic and political life, and to respond.

An example of cultural meaning in beer: This is a political cartoon published at the turn of the 20th century to support Prohibition Party candidates for public office. This cartoon specifically attacks saloons that were tied to the north & midwest’s wildly successful German-owned breweries (e.g. Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, Schlitz), booming German immigrant population, and massive influx of Blacks fleeing the Jim Crow south. If you think Prohibition was just about alcohol, think again.

The Future in A Few Broad Strokes

For the most part, I cannot tell you precisely what my new full time life in the craft beer space will look like because I’m still working that out. And for a significant part, I will not tell you because I am being strategic about a number of things I am currently working on. But I am willing to paint a picture in three broad strokes.

I will be continuing my current work consulting, training, and speaking as an independent contractor in the craft beer industry. I have had the tremendous fortune to develop a faculty consulting relationship with the Brewers Association and a couple of other clients in the industry. I’ve completed more research in this role in the last year than I have in the last five years in academia. It’s remarkable what one can accomplish when there is no need to wallow in obscure theoretical argumentation or obfuscating abstraction just so that one’s work might be published in a lofty academic journal that absolutely no one will read, save the handful of scholars in your sub-specialty who live to dismantle your ideas (it’s like #beertwitter but way more pretentious and your job depends on being actively engaged in it).

I will be writing and publishing...faster. I have been working on two books — the book drawn from my doctoral dissertation research about the American brewing industry and a work of speculative fiction — since 2014. Without the oppressive knowledge that the former will be the centerpiece of my tenure case and despair that the latter may not be accepted as part of my tenure case, I will (finally) be free to just finish writing the damn books I really want to write.

I will be engaging in nonprofit work. My current work in the brewing industry has been extremely rewarding, but it’s necessarily constrained by the dictates of faculty consulting. In this capacity, my first and primary priority is to my students — oh, how I will miss my students — and to the College. The hours I devote to industry work are rigidly limited. That doesn’t mean that I don’t come up with endless ideas for initiatives that I desperately wish I had the time and bandwidth take on, or that the hundreds (thousands?) of craft beer folks I interact with don’t ceaselessly pitch projects and collaborations that seriously pique my interest. Most of these initiatives and projects are precisely the kinds of things that nonprofit organizations take on. They are mission-driven and rely upon collective problem solving and community organizing.

You: Wait…which nonprofit organization? Is there a nonprofit organization that does what you are talking about in the craft beer space?

Me: (Smiles enigmatically and closes computer).