Academia and the Problem of Locality

I suspect that most graduate students who, like me, have spent a number of years ensconced in academia have a love-hate relationship with it. The loves are pretty obvious, and so are many of the hates: the lowly stipends, the banal arguments over arcane concepts, the departmental bickering, the professorial egos. Other critiques of academia are more subtle, such as the contradictions between what the academy espouses and what it actually accomplishes. A good example of this is the fervent embrace of all things sustainable. It is academics who have provided arguably the most diverse and sustained set of arguments in favor of sustainability, and by now the subject is heralded in fields as varied as ecology, sociology, economics, and the countless interdisciplinary programs lying in between. And yet, as recent posts by Ink and Plants Are The Real Capitalists describe, there is a contradiction here: the study of sustainability tends to become abstracted, overly theorized, turned into merely an idea stream, and in the process it loses its connection to the sense of hard-nosed pragmatism, the manual labor, the sacrifice and struggle and work that are its ineluctable companions. As Ink writes, "The dilemma for students of sustainability is that we are torn between the academic pursuit of sustainability, and the gut-feeling urge for immediate applicability."

I'd like to elaborate a bit more on one particular topic that weaves in and out of Ink's essay, a recent arrival on the academic bandwagon whose star has risen even faster than that of sustainability: "the local." A decade ago nearly no one except hippies and organic farmers was talking about local foods or local cultures in the popular discourse, while today scholars can't get enough of building local food systems, reviving local economies, creating local currencies, tapping into localized energy sources, and praising local communities with deep roots. Walk into any advanced seminar on sustainability or the environment or "sense of place" and you will hear reverent praise for the Amish or Native American communities or other indigenous groups worldwide, in large part because of their long occupations and deep understandings of a singular locality. But there is a glaring disconnect between the idea of locality and the whole career track that is academia.

For all of its glorification of place and rootedness, academia is one of the most placeless and rootless sectors of the work world. Look at the resumes of university professors and you will see a repeated pattern: bachelors at one college, masters at a second, and PhD at a third. And chances are they are now teaching at a fourth institution, if indeed they haven't gone on to a fifth or a sixth. This is the hallmark of the contemporary professional class: a career-driven, place-blind wanderlust where salary and prestige take priority over place and local connections. At least doctors and lawyers have some power over where they move, since their particular skills are in demand everywhere. In academia, you go where the jobs are, where the good departments are, where your chosen mentor is -- almost never where your family remains or your roots lie.


Of course, there are plenty of professors who put down new roots in their new university towns, who become deeply involved in local politics or the local arts scene or the local food culture. But that is only after they pulled up stakes long ago and resettled, far from where they came from. Survey any number of graduate students planning a career in academia and you will hear the same story again and again: they have applied to 10, 20, sometimes 30 or more different schools, and they will basically go anywhere. What choice do they have? It is the nature of the academic job market; you follow the career winds wherever they're blowing.

One of the contradictory elements of this arrangement is the powerlessness of a group one would otherwise call blessed. Here you have a class of highly educated, highly intelligent, highly skilled individuals, and upon exiting their training they have virtually no say where they will end up living. Shouldn't all that schooling, all that grooming to be an accomplished citizen at least give you the privilege of choosing where you will settle? I suppose one could call it freedom ("I could end up in Seattle, or Ithaca, or Chapel Hill, or San Francisco!"), but one could just as easily call it deprivation ("there aren't any openings back in Michigan").


But even more troublesome is the flip side of the same coin: the prospects facing the individual who decides to take a stand, to remain local, to stick with family roots. For what you are doing is taking a meat cleaver to your job options. I am from a town in northeast Ohio, and that is where I want to remain. I am six months from getting my PhD, and my wife and I have conversations every few weeks about our future plans. And every time we do, research opportunities and salary and benefits always take a back seat to our #1 priority: to stay where we are. We have a little hobby farm that I grew up on and that are in love with; we have my parents, several siblings, and nephews and nieces minutes away; we have two children who we can't imagine growing up without their grandparents as part of their life; and we have the myriad intangible ways that living in a place that is so familiar adds little doses of comfort to your daily life. But how many research institutions are within a reasonable distance from this town? A small handful. How many teaching opportunities in sociology open up within commuting distance? You can count them on one hand.

I chose to follow the academic path in part because I was so drawn by the ideals that academia stands for: not just knowledge and learning but community, social solidarity, sustainability, a humane future. It is exactly these ideals which have led the academy to embrace all things local, and yet it remains a deep irony that to choose an academic career path means basically abandoning your local desires to the precarious geography of the job market. And yet, in the end, if I am successful in building some kind of career in my town, if we can stay on the farm and raise our kids here, the things I gave up will pale in comparison to the intangibles we stood for. I may be constraining myself in order to choose lifestyle over career, but I will resist being constrained by a job market that will now allow me to stay true to the ideal of a rooted life.