Bad Habits & Other Reasons to Flee Academia

Bad Habits & Other Reasons to Flee Academia

In this post: I review former academic turned novelist Amy Gentry's latest thriller "Bad Habits" and its reminder of the crucial role of imagination.
Next week: I get real about the jobs I tried to get in my transition to alt-ac and Post-PhD. Let's talk about the jobs I tried to get, how little I was paid, ad what I learned from that experience.
Last week: What is culturally responsive pedagogy? How do you decolonize the classroom? On the importance of refined critical thinking skills.

A Thrilling Reminder of Why It’s Probably Best to Leave Academia Behind: Amy Gentry’s Bad Habits 

If you (or someone you know) are currently trying to transition out of academia, chances are you’re beyond frustrated. This is definitely a feeling that is still omnipresent in my own life as I’ve fought tooth and nail to claim some sort of life and financial stability in the wake of my academic exodus. I am four years out, and the road has not been easy. In one banal job interview after another, I was told that I was “overqualified, but lacked hands-on experience.” But, with an art history Ph.D. and eight years of teaching and writing experience, I was only qualified for entry-level jobs. The agony of it all.

I’ve found myself, repeatedly, fantasizing about what my life could have been if I had been able to stay in academia. I imagined my life teaching engaged college students and working on research topics that I loved. I imagined one day having graduate students of my own, and how I would be the one to break the cycle of advisor-advisee abuse. But, of course, that is an idealized fantasy that is just as removed from the reality of academia as I now am. 

Which is why, when academic turned novelist Amy Gentry reached out to ask me if I’d be interested in reading an advance copy of her recent thriller novel Bad Habits, which will be released on February 2, 2021, I heaved a heavy sigh. The novel is set in a prestigious humanities program and revolves around desperate power plays and abusive exploitation between graduate students and their ruthless professors.

What could a fictionalized version of my very real experience in toxic humanity graduate program possibly offer me, other than a deluge of triggering and painful memories?

It turns out, quite a lot. 

Gentry’s Bad Habits reminds me of the crucial role imagination plays in how we process our own realities. I think this is the true genius of fiction-- to tell the truth in ways that reality cannot. As I’ve been mired in reality and trying to narrate it in my own writing, Gentry’s Bad Habits is a good reminder of how fiction can tell us truths that we haven’t even verbalized to ourselves. 

The plot revolves around the figure of Mac, a driven young woman from a working-class background in her first year of a Ph.D. program. We see the world through her eyes, and as a result, the glaring classism inherent in academia comes into full focus. The generational wealth afforded to her peers stands in stark contrast to Mac’s job waiting tables in order to send money back home to her addict mother and special needs sister. 

A full professor in the department, Bethany, takes Mac under her wing with such a swooping abuse of power that her every word of encouragement to Mac smacks of future exploitation. We all see it coming from a mile away, and so does Mac. Yet, Mac is as powerless as the reader is to stop herself from being used as a pawn. 

What I saw reflected back in me through the figure of Mac was a ghost of Christmases to come in a Bergsonian sense of the virtual-- a potentiality of who I could have been (and might be) in another universe. Am I Mac? That’s the question academics will find themselves asking as Gentry weaves her tail.

The cycles of abuse repeated throughout the novel, usually with the reader fully aware of the repetition before it even begins again, have the effect of a clever temporal displacement. You understand their present moment, but also how they came to be the aggressors in the first place. Bethany is all too real of a professor at a top graduate program, as is the dysfunctional relationship she has with her professor husband Rocky, whose own ego is deflated by two simple words: spousal hire. 

However, it is through the figure of the only true academic in the book, the character of Tess, that we see the truth of academia as it really is. The only Black woman in the program, Tess is intentionally and always on the periphery of the main action of the book. In doing this, Gentry exposes how both systemic and internal racism compound the injustice of what happens to Tess. Even though academics who read this book won’t be necessarily surprised by Tess’s cruel fate, with any hope, we’ll all be appropriately sickened by it nonetheless. (I also can’t help but think of Gentry’s PhD in Literature and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Ubervilles as potential inspiration for her name, because there are some rich symmetries there for anyone who’s looking).

Gentry’s handling of Tess’s trajectory might be the best victory of the book-- it shows white readers what the consequences of racism are in no uncertain terms, and without being “preachy” about it. No small feat!  To top it all off, Gentry’s characterization of the complicity that the main character, Mac, in what happens to Tess really enlivens just how shitty white women can be. It’s a sobering reminder of the difference between opposing racism in theory and being anti-racist in reality through your actions and words.

Ultimately, Gentry’s Bad Habits shows just what it takes to survive in academia, and precisely what type of person can do so. Just as you think you can’t bear to read more, a too-perfect Freudian and near-Oedipal catharsis arrives in the form of a series of escalating cruelties and lies that are as unbelievable as they are intensely familiar to anyone who has been exploited by a superior.  This book made me endlessly grateful that I chose to get out because it stunningly calls out academic culture for what it is.

So, for all of you disenchanted academics out there, I cannot recommend Bad Habits enough, if only because its ending proves to be immensely gratifying because everyone gets precisely what they deserve (which is why the book is fiction, not fact). 

P.S. If you haven’t yet, subscribe to NSFS: Not Safe for School, a weekly newsletter full of education snark, anti-racist reading lists and anecdotes, and new Post-PhD alerts!

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