You too can have eyes this bloodshot after marking 300 essays
Hello hello whichever lovely dudes might be reading this. Instead of the usual inanities of a first post (I am a Britisher! I like cake!), have some initial thoughts about why academics have more in common with ballet dancers than they thing. This is all heavily influenced by watching BBC4’s marvellous Agony and Ecstasy programme with a slab of cake.
1! Massive expensive training. Years in the doctoral tunnel, years in private dance school, huge amounts of monies exchanges with a few scholarships here and there, and then funnelled out into the place that you are TRAINED and MADE for.
2! A crowd of temporary positions, a few superstars. The troupe of each ballet company expands and contracts depending on the needs of the ballet, with the core troupe of permanent dancers bulked out by a swell of freelancers. This applies more, I think, to the US system of tenure-tracks and adjuncts, than to the UK where permanent lecturers are sliiiiightly more common. A bit.
3! Moving for the job. The English National Ballet has 20 nationalities in it, a similar number to the department I got my PhD in. And let’s be clear - working in an international environment is lovely, having such a mix of people (and the foodstuffs of their homelands - HELLO tacos from the Mexican students) is ace. But being forced to move from one side of the continent to the other to get one of the few jobs out there is less excellent, particularly if you’re doing it on a yearly basis.
4! Sod all money... Baby ballet dancers are paid bugger-all for their time - the English National Ballet pays freelancers £350 per week. Baby academics in the UK, with 7 years minimum higher education behind them, generally start on around £27k, even less if they’re scraping together pieces of part-time teaching work.
5!…because you do it for the love. I don’t want to start this all off on a sour note. Research is bloody brilliant - fitting together questions and theory and interesting methods; and teaching too, curating course content, developing curricula, growing tiny minds. There are some bloody brilliant academics out there doing amazing and valuable work who I want to profile in the next while. The ballet dancers too, saying how good it was to be out on stage in the Royal Albert Hall, how they just wanted to keep dancing. But. BUT. When it gets to the stage when you’re destroying your personal life/knee cartilage for barely legal working conditions, constantly scrabbling for funding and security and being told that it is a privilege to be wading through the mud by the people that you’re carrying high above it - then, maybe, something is wrong.
(Also, getting a PhD gives you mighty perky buttocks and firm thighs - trufax!)
