Pursuing an artistic and an academic career simultaneously is too time-consuming, exhausting, and expensive for most people, especially in an increasingly unforgiving academic market and an inflationary rentier economy where home ownership is out of reach for a college-educated Generation Z still living with their parents. Aside from a handful of exceptional individuals—and even there, one must note their inability to avoid the effusive, transactional, upsucking deference euphemistically termed “collegiality”—for most people, the aspiration to juggle academic and artistic careers is near-delusional.
Exhibit A
No self-respecting artist or writer wants to be considered “‘generally artistic or literary’ but not a writer or an artist.”
People go [to graduate school] on a whim, or to get a promotion. Again and again the decision is invoked in terms of escape … It’s the last resort for the person who is ‘generally artistic and literary,’ but not a writer or an artist.
— Jacob Mikanowski, The Secret Scandal of Grad School, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 27, 2014.
MarketEdge™ Second Opinion. Academia: AVOID.
Exhibit B
Consider the authoritative, canonical Western literature dating from antiquity, first, against the seemingly reasonable objection that one could be an academic at one time and an artist at another, and second, to support skepticism toward academics who claim to write well.
And a third kind of possession and madness comes from the Muses. This takes hold upon a gentle and pure soul, arouses it and inspires it to songs and other poetry, and thus by adorning countless deeds of the ancients educates later generations. But he who without the divine madness comes to the doors of the Muses, confident that he will be a good poet by art, meets with no success, and the poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of the inspired madmen.
– Plato, Phaedrus [245a].
Exhibit C
Kay Ryan’s poem All You Did, an allegory about a mountain climber stuck on the vertical face of a cliff, stood apart from the other poems on the Poetry Foundation’s podcast Audio Poem of the Day.
[Kay Ryan] studied at UCLA, and briefly pursued a Ph.D. in literary criticism until, she says, she became appalled by the idea of being “a doctor of something I couldn’t fix.”
– Kay Ryan interviewed by Sarah Fay, The Art of Poetry No. 94, Paris Review, Issue 187, Winter 2008.
AI-recommended conclusion
Kay Ryan teaches at a community college. It’s blue-collar work. You see what I mean?
