No Fun?

[little bongo]

Interesting CHE article (my campus subscribes, so I can read these from time to time) on the lack of fun in academia:

https://www.chronicle.com/article/no-fun-for-you

A quote to give you the general idea:

"We have never made pleasure central to our work, much less central to who we are. Even worse, our profession has trained us to be suspicious of happiness in all forms, to scrutinize every morsel of good feeling until it is rendered mute and sterile. Higher education has a pleasure problem.

"In the humanities and social sciences, pleasure has been out of style for a long time. Writing in 1993, the philosopher Robert C. Solomon opined that 'joy is extremely difficult to describe or to talk about without slipping into the mush that such moods freely supply.' Solomon suspected, as most in the humanities and social sciences still do, that both joy and contentment were 'distractions' that encouraged one to 'cop-out.' Pleasure is soft while thinking is hard. Enjoyment is acquiescence to ideology."

Any thoughts on how or if pleasure is central to your work?

[marshwiggle]

"We have never made pleasure central to our work, much less central to who we are."

For most of human history it has been commonly thought that pleasure was largely a consequence of pursuing meaningful activity.

When people are profoundly unhappy, *much of the time there's probably something they need to change in their lives. In "The Road Less Travelled", psychiatrist Scott Peck suggested that clinical depression was the body's way of indicating a need for some sort of life change.


(*Obviously people experiencing things like war, famine, etc. have more significant reasons for unhappiness, but most people in the developed world don't face anything so dire.)

[Wahoo Redux]

I used to dread the annual Modern Language Association conference when I would give a paper there.  It was like going to one of those teenage parties where everyone is self-conscious and nervous X 200.  No one smiled.  Everyone was ridged.  Part of this, I think, was the osmotic effect of the "bull pen" where applicants were being interviewed (pre Skype and Zoom) that pervaded everything.  But part of it was that humanities scholars tend to take themselves very seriously.  And part of it was that things were turning sour on the job market and in the vernacular perception of professors and the humanities in particular.  Everything is tension and competition now.  The fun is gone----if fun was ever there in the first place.

[secundem_artem]

I suspect this is mostly true - not a lot of yucks in higher ed.  That said, my dept head starts every dept meeting with some kind of "go around the room and tell us.....".  We usually spend the first 20 minutes of any meeting laughing.  It's amazing we get anything accomplished.  Believe me, Artem U has as many problems as any other place.  But we try and take 20 minutes a month to focus on something else. 

[Puget]

I think we academic psychologists have a fair amount of fun! Not that everyone is happy all the time of course, but mostly we seem to like each other, and like and care about what we do.

I wonder if there is a divide between fields with a lot of collaboration (e.g. lab sciences) and those where people mostly work solo. The most fun things to me are talking science with other smart people, learning new things, brainstorming new research ideas, and working toward shared goals. Engaging in meaningful activities with other humans is a pretty basic human need.

[Parasaurolophus]

I have loads of fun--both in the classroom, and with my research. I think that's unusual for the field of philosophy, but not at all for my subfield.

[apl68]

My experience of higher ed was as a PhD student, so I can't say as it was by and large an enjoyable one.  We PhD students were pretty collegial with each other and liked being around each other, though.  Most of the profs seemed fairly easy to get along with. 

The history department at Alma Mater always seemed to be having a great time with their work.  It was a big part of what made me want to get my PhD and become a prof myself.  My mother, who taught there after I left, recalls Alma Mater being a pretty collegial place as well.  There can be such a thing as a happy campus.  Or at least could be a couple of decades ago.

[mamselle]

I've just had a joyful week with a buncha crazy, bright, medeivalists in a range of fields.

Maybe it's the mix of study areas, personality types, and interdisciplinary options, but most people play nice and make it enjoyable for everyone else as well.

M.

[Wahoo Redux]

My experience of higher ed was as a PhD student, so I can't say as it was by and large an enjoyable one.  We PhD students were pretty collegial with each other and liked being around each other, though.  Most of the profs seemed fairly easy to get along with. 

I loved grad school.  Met my wife there.  Wish we could just have spent the rest of our lives with those folks from back then.

[sinenomine]

I chair a humanities department, and as a group, we tend to have a lot of fun. During a campus end-of-year dinner for faculty a few days ago, our table was noted as being the one with the most laughter.

Personally, I incorporate humor into my teaching, and enjoyed weaving some into slides during presentations in virtual conferences this past year.

[little bongo]

Astute observations and thoughtful sharing from all--thanks!

For me, my job is indeed one of the principal sources of my fun and/or pleasure (along with therapy and lexipro).

[Hegemony]

I feel bad when I hear how grueling grad school is for many, as grad school for me was about 90% major, lifetime-record fun. What a fabulous group of creative, amazing people! We had epic parties, not particularly debauched or anything, just full of hilarity. We had a study group that wrote a group novel that I still think was enormously clever. (One of the group went on to become a celebrated novelist.) We made up games, we had adventures, we went on field trips together, we mocked academia fondly. So great.  I am still laughing at the idea of the International Journal of Footnotes.

The trouble with the subsequent job is — well, that's why they call it "work," isn't it? However, I am still appreciative of the small ways in which people find little bits of joy. For instance, every year we're required to write a very dull report on departmental activities, which literally no one ever reads -- the dean himself has acknowledged that they're sitting on the floor in a corner of his office in a big pile and no one knows what to do with them. Anyway, one way we know that no one ever reads them is our Classics Department writes theirs in Latin every year.  Little bits of fun survive.

[Wahoo Redux]

The trouble with the subsequent job is — well, that's why they call it "work," isn't it?

There is something to this----particularly the differences in our responsibilities between grad school & faculty positions----but I love my research and I enjoy teaching.  I am primed for fun. 

But I think the stresses on academia, and the humanities in particular, have soured our ethos.  We are just too stressed out for "fun" right now...or maybe it's just the places I've been teaching.