Academic anxiety, safety and survival
The Science article
I read with a rising sense of alarm and consternation a recent article in Science Magazine, innocuously titled “How I overcame my anxiety to achieve my purpose as a professor.”
When the author, Dr. Tae Seok Moon, shared it on Twitter, he framed it as a story that was hopeful and inspirational for academics, on how you can overcome your anxiety. As the article says
By many measures, my career was flourishing. I had secured grant funding, published high-impact journal articles, and given conference talks. I was popular among students. Even so, I was consumed with anxiety. During faculty meetings, I never spoke up unless I was asked. I focused only on research and education, not campus politics. I thought this was the way to success.
Being in academia is indeed anxiety-inducing. So far, so normal. But the opening of the article shows the source of that anxiety. The source is racist behavior and attitudes among senior professors. My jaw (as many others) dropped as I read this horrific racist incident at a university just down the road from where I live (!)
“Tae Seok, you know what to do: Make it quiet and kick him out.” “Him” was one of my best graduate students, who published four papers in 5 years while sending money home from the United States to his family in Africa. But he had run afoul of another professor when he took a phone call for a job interview in the hallway, where his cell signal was strongest. Based on his skin color, the professor assumed he was not a student and called the police, who escorted him away. Beyond the insult, it cost my student a dream job at his dream company. He filed a complaint with the university’s discrimination office—and now my institution’s leadership was telling me to make it go away. I was outraged, but I felt powerless. My tenure package was about to go up for evaluation. I didn’t feel I was in a position to fight back
….
This was my mindset 5 years into my faculty career, when the incident with my student occurred. I refused to kick him out, but he and I decided to focus on his research and job search, considering our family responsibilities. (Editor’s note: Washington University in St. Louis declined to comment on the events in this story.)
After many academics pushed back on Twitter against Dr. Moon's framing of academic anxiety, the paragraph just above was changed by Science Magazine. At first it seemed to imply the TT professor pressured his student to drop the complaint, which would be egregious indeed.
But even so, Dr. Moon still insists that given limited resources, opportunities, the fact that tenure needs to be made and families need to be fed, it is best to only make small, incremental changes rather than get upset about racism. There's only so much you can change. Keep your head down, publish, and then from within the system make small changes. As the article concludes
My regrets over the incident with my student helped me realize that my goal in life should be fulfillment, not just career success. I am now the happiest I have ever been because I have reconnected with my purpose: nurturing future generations.
How should we deal with academic anxiety?
Okay so how should we deal with cases like this?
Like many academics I've dealt with anxiety. I have a pretty anxiety-inducing (personal) situation right now, and I'm dealing with it in part with the tools I got from experience and mentors. My advisor, a lovely person with genuine care for his students, would say to me that to make it in academia, you can expect to regularly experience blows: a harshly-worded grant rejection, article rejection that makes you question if you'll ever be a good philosopher, failed job applications … He recommended the Stoic attitude of trying to do what is under your control, and let go what is not, and not value as bad (just as not preferred) outcomes such as rejection, loss of income, etc. He said if you practice this, “The lows will feel less low, but the highs will also feel less high.”
And this is true. I used to be so thrilled when I got good news, such as a paper acceptance. I'm still very pleased, but it somehow feels all a little cooler—like the palet of emotions has toned down to muter colors. It's very handy when you do a lot of social media.
Like many people early in their career I had situations where I was told to keep my head down and just write papers for top journals so that I would land a job. I talk about one such case here (a harassment case). I'm glad I only threw myself under the bus by not taking action and didn't harm others (I really feel sincerely sorry for Dr. Moon, and of course his student who was treated in an egregiously horrid, racist manner). But I would've done it differently if I had to do it all over again.
However, there are situations where, even though you're disempowered, you need to speak up. The scenario that Science article, taking it at face value, is such a situation. Even if it may cost you your career. And you must always have a student's back.
Maybe Audre Lorde's views on emotions can give us a better insight to deal with these sorts of situations than Stoicism. Lorde, who wrote about anger (and whose work on anger is wonderfully reviewed and used as a basis in this book by Myisha Cherry, The Case for Rage), thinks that anger can be a fitting emotion, for example in situations of systemic racism.
A key aspect of Lorde's philosophy of emotions is that by learning to listen to our emotions we can gain self-trust. In cases of racist abuse, you are often gaslit that your emotions aren't valid, or even you gaslight yourself. Similar to sexism. Listening to your emotions, sitting with them, digesting them and deciding on a course of action can help to shield you from gaslighting and auto-gaslighting.
For Lorde, when we trust our anger at racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism, we get a source of inner strength. This ties into her distinction between safety and survival (see Caleb Ward's beautiful blogpost on this). By keeping your head down, you aim for safety. But the survival of your whole being is threatened. You sometimes must forsake safety for survival. Because the odds against you are stacked. Racist hegemonic structures don't want academics of color to flourish. Playing into the system and being nice won't change that.
Seeing institutional racism as a personal problem of anxiety you can overcome is not the way.
Institutional racism needs to be tackled. It needs to be called out. It needs to end, so we may collectively survive in the wholeness of our being. Because poetry is often that much more powerful than philosophical prose, I will end with this brilliant philosophical poem by Audre Lorde in its entirety
A Litany for Survival BY AUDRE LORDE (1978) For those of us who live at the shoreline standing upon the constant edges of decision crucial and alone for those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice who love in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawns looking inward and outward at once before and after seeking a now that can breed futures like bread in our children’s mouths so their dreams will not reflect the death of ours; For those of us who were imprinted with fear like a faint line in the center of our foreheads learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk for by this weapon this illusion of some safety to be found the heavy-footed hoped to silence us For all of us this instant and this triumph We were never meant to survive. And when the sun rises we are afraid it might not remain when the sun sets we are afraid it might not rise in the morning when our stomachs are full we are afraid of indigestion when our stomachs are empty we are afraid we may never eat again when we are loved we are afraid love will vanish when we are alone we are afraid love will never return and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.