When Your Mind is Too Wild for Academia

Kaitlin Smith
Aug 23, 2017 · 5 min read

I have a confession to make: my mind is wild.

To those who know me in academic spaces or as a psychotherapist, this admission might seem to carry many potential meanings. After a ten-year flirtation with academia that took shape at Swarthmore College and ended when I opted to discontinue doctoral study at the University of Chicago, my experience has led me to a conclusion that could only arise through the unauthorized conjunction of feeling and intellect. I am writing to express an unapproved vision that I simply can’t shake: that inspired intellectuals reject the self-abnegation and intellectual sycophancy mandated by the academic world in favor of a wilder path stretching into a changing marketplace. Want to know what I might mean by that? Read on.

Going Wild

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines ‘wild’ in the following ways — not ordinarily tame or domesticated; not subject to restraint or regulation; emotionally overcome; marked by turbulent agitation; going beyond normal or conventional bounds; indicative of strong passion, desire, or emotion; deviating from the intended or expected course.

In the context of the academic world, I am using wild to mean an orientation that embraces marginalized traditions of thought, ways of knowing, and one’s personal needs as a multidimensional being. Unlike industry leaders who consider passion a liability, this is a heretical orientation animated by an interior agenda, a deep wellspring of inspiration, and a sense of personal vision. It involves rejecting the consuming sense of duty to institutions intent on shaping our psyches such that they can mine our energy and intelligence in perpetuity. It entails deciding that your bodily and emotional integrity are priorities that must be upheld at all costs. It means valuing yourself and the limited span of your life enough to speak courageously and own what you have voiced. Though seemingly innocuous to the uninitiated, those touched by academic socialization know that these assertions fly in the face of countervailing dictates that would have you abandon yourself and your interior compass at every turn. This essay constitutes both a rejection of that outdated program and an affirmation of the possibilities that lie in its wake.

This essay is not intended for those for whom the rituals of academic socialization are sacrosanct or of too little disturbance in their own lives to warrant closer examination. Within this industry, we all know people who delight in research agendas that do not particularly challenge convention, whose identities seem to meld seamlessly into their fields, or for whom personal authenticity is significantly less important than the seeming security of tenure, rising to the top of the academic cotillion, or churning out proteges that result in additional CV lines (nevermind whether those people are positioned for professional stability).

In contrast, this essay is addressed to intellectuals within and beyond the academy who know that they simply must work from a place of abiding inspiration and have the audacity to proclaim that “I have more to offer the world and myself than my unending subservience”.

Farwell to Inspiration?

Despite the sneers of disapproval and mandate for dispassionate detachment from one’s scholarly production, many people who deal in ideas do so in service to a specific vision, lineage, and/or tradition of critique or contemplation that is dear to them. Your personal charge might include speaking the silenced tongues of ancestors or resurfacing buried lines of contemplation in a kind of living prayer that envelops your personal and professional life. Though the anointed arbiters of legitimate knowledge look down on this kind of investment, academia has long served as a kind of (imperfect) haven for those whose knowledge, wisdom, experience, and identities may be difficult to reconcile with a life in other domains. And yet, the stakes of delivering a visionary meditation or an unpopular critique as a member of that community can be significant. The internal and institutional constraints on our expression grow in depth and complexity with each passing year: internal pressure engendered by the academic socialization process and institutional pressure that leaves all scholars, tenured and untenured, increasingly precarious (take the recent case of Steven Salaita and many others).

The high degree of mental and scholarly conformity that these pressures induce is, therefore, understandable. In an industry where tenure-track jobs are vanishing at breakneck speed and mounting digital surveillance renders all academicians the (highly disposable) intellectual property of their institutions, the impulse to make one’s work and life as uncontroversial as possible predominates. For people who come to their work out of a sense of personal vision, however, this mandated survival strategy can feel like spiritual dismemberment. The progressive realization that the terms of life within this consuming industry will never permit you to say what is within you to say can erode the creative will of even the most incendiary visionary thinkers. Couple this with the other ways that this industry makes demands on people’s bodies, relationships, and sense of futurity and it is a miracle that we are able to function at all.

Meanwhile, it is clear that efforts to ensure job security through dispassionate compliance are failing to protect even the most obedient junior scholars. The promise that if one can simply present one’s ideas in safe enough a container, they will be permanently absorbed somewhere is a dangerous, outmoded, and woefully inadequate survival strategy in most humanistic and humanistic social science fields. Though contrary rhetoric is reinforced both explicitly and implicitly, this saves very few people from the endless postdoc-visiting assistant professor-adjunct cycle of servitude. When one finally wipes away the thick layer of cognitive dissonance, the needless insanity appears in plain sight.

Wild Together

As my most recent blog entry describes, merely acknowledging this cognitive dissonance is often not enough to propel individual change and certainly not collective change. This essay calls for the formation of a community dedicated to honoring, nurturing, and operationalizing your inner wild — one’s world of feeling and unapologetic intellect. I am calling this the Wild Mind Collective and I invite you to join the first iteration of this virtual community here.

I believe that we do not need more sanitized, dispassionate “interventions” that energize neither us nor anyone else. I believe that we can do better and that both our communities and ourselves depend upon this decisive reorientation. In coming together and rejecting unacceptable treatment by these institutions and ourselves, we can begin to discern the wide possibilities that await in a changing marketplace.

If this essay resonated with you, I hope that you will write to me below (comments have been fixed!), on Facebook ( private group | page ), and join my mailing list.

Much more to come,

Kaitlin

)
Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade