The Life Cycle Completed: Despair at the End of an Academic Career

A few years ago when looking through the program for the AALS annual meeting I noticed the frequency of twelve step meetings – it seemed like there was one every morning.  It reminded me of an experience from graduate school.  A popular professor who I though was really wonderful was suddenly taken off the course list for the following semester.  I subsequently heard that he had gone into rehab for alcohol addiction.  How strange, I thought to myself, that someone in such a wonderful profession would fall into an addiction problem.

I’m not an expert on addiction and I’ve not done any research on this matter as it affects legal academics, but from observation I think I can begin to understand at least part of what happens. Most of us, I suspect, enter academia with the hope that maybe, just maybe, we’ll be the Next Big Thing, and then eventually the reigning king/queen of our field.  We’ll lose track of the number of citations our articles generate; pretty soon we’ll lose track of the number of symposia that are devoted to our work.  One day we’ll have a book of essays written in our honor.

Until, that is, we realize that’s not going to happen.  But by that time a funny thing has happened: we’ve gotten tenure and nobody’s going to fire us.  With paychecks automatically appearing in our account, nobody looking over our shoulder, and the prospect of real notoriety fading fast in the rear view mirror, it strikes me as no wonder that senior and even mid-career faculty end up at risk for checking out of their careers and succumbing to the kind of aimlessness that could lead to addiction.

Of course a million things can intervene to interrupt this process.  Most notably, personal lives can provide immense personal satisfaction.  And of course everyone’s different.  But I suspect that a lot of law professors, as some of the major “winners” in the profession, derive a significant degree of self-worth from their careers.  Thus, depression or pessimism about one’s career might have stronger effects than for most, especially when we’re not faced with the periodic reaffirmations that, say, partners in firms get by bagging a big client, winning a big case, or just surviving another year at Big, Bigger and Monstrous.

Looking around at my colleagues (read broadly to include faculty I know at other schools), it seems there are ways faculty can avoid this dynamic.  Some professors do pro bono work, others retool their teaching methods or more generally become master teachers, others get involved in school administration.  And of course, we can – and should – continue to do legal scholarship even if we don’t expect it to make the splash we once hoped it would.  (Indeed, the very idea that we do legal scholarship in order to make a splash raises a basic question of why we do scholarship – a question I think it’s really important for every person to ask and try to answer for him or herself.)

In my own career I’ve found myself surprisingly drawn to teaching.  I say “surprisingly” because it’s not something I expected I’d enjoy as much as I do.  I’ll talk about teaching as a component of a scholarly career in my next post.