The Seduction of Theory (Chapter 5 from Springtime for Snowflakes)

The story of my postmodern education begins with a successful escape – from the “prison house” (Frederic Jameson) of corporate America – where I had been consigned for nine years – and into what I took for the last remaining haven of intellectual independence – academia. I would learn much later that academia demands as much if not more conformity than any other corporate field. In fact, the conformity penetrates much more deeply. You not only have to buy into the ideology, you must rehearse and recapitulate it without fail. Otherwise, you are deemed politically regressive. You might even be a “Nazi.”

I went ahead, leaving a relatively high-income position to undertake what some told me was not only impossible but possibly insane. I had a few friends in the know. They repeated the well-worn truisms. “There are no jobs in academia.” “As a white male, your chances of getting a job in the humanities are quite remote.” “You can’t raise three children, do full-time graduate work, teach at least one class per semester (required for the tuition remission and stipend), and hold down yet another job, all at the same time.” These warnings did not dissuade me. In fact, remarkably, they strengthened my resolve. Gretchen went along with it and picked up some of the slack money-wise by eventually returning to her career in property management. 

However, the career path I’d chosen involved transformations of a wholly different kind than these. The sharp reduction in income, the many nights of curtailed sleep, the sacrifice of almost all other forms of “entertainment,” the stress and strain on family and marriage, and the certain prospect of uncertain prospects: these were only the preconditions of the story, not the story itself. (Click here, or on title.)