“I have resigned,” I keep on insisting whenever folks, however well-meaning, fallaciously refer to my retreat from academia as “retirement.” After all, I am not quite of retirement age; nor am I eligible for a state pension. My only recourse being a chance to set the record straight, it is incumbent on me to counter the tiresomely predicable visions that “retirement” conjures and dispel the mirage of a slow fade or a ride into an illusory sunset.
Sunset indeed! I just dodged a deluge. Such are the hazards of a life abroad: one day you are wet behind the ears, the next—and it sinks in only belatedly just how much later “next” is—you are trudging through a torrent of foul weather (let’s not call it the gutter just yet) you doubt will ever end up under the proverbial bridge. If my figures of speech were not quite so waterlogged already, the expression “sea change” might be dredged up to capture the mood at this point of departure.
Before I carry on blogging regardless about sundry products of culture, popular or otherwise, I need, for the sake of continuity alone, to acknowledge that change, especially since it may well translate into adjustments of perspective. This journal was designed to reflect my life in swings-and-roundabouts ways, but mainly roundabout. It is autobiographical without being diaristic; every piece of literature, drama or art I consider here, in the idiosyncratic fashion to which I have remained true, is being reflected on— and made reflective of—my life at that moment. I can imagine how exasperatingly gratuitous those references to my everyday must strike anyone expecting a conventional review, let alone an objective appraisal of whatever is ostensibly under discussion.
I commenced broadcastellan as a pop culture blog in the summer of 2005; I had not long completed my PhD in literature, and this blog was meant to provide me with opportunities to continue the project of examining radio plays in relation to drama and literature I had set out to explore in “Etherized Victorians,” my dissertation. I had just relocated to rural Wales and felt remote both from New York City, where, after leaving my native Germany, I had been studying and living, and from academia, which I had regarded as a surrogate family, as substitute parents to make proud and prove wrong.
Fast forward to 2024. I am once again out of academia. And I am still maintaining the journal that, after my first withdrawal—for so it then felt—gave me a mite of grounding and a sense of purpose way back in 2005. The family metaphor is apt. I had figuratively divorced my parents when I left Germany, not returning to my family home for three-and-a-half decades. I have now divorced academia, the ersatz family that, I gradually realized, showed as little concern for my personhood as my own parents. And why should it? It needs to get on with the business of surviving. I am just no longer involved in sustaining that business, or in sustaining the illusion that it still matters.
Universities, as they are operated now, do not strike me as sustainable. While promoted as sites of learning, they are run as business concerns, desperate to accommodate an increasingly diverse, demanding and challenged customer base that no longer holds together as a body, just as it no longer nurtures the body that is academia, which is feeding applicants the myth that they matter individually without equipping educators with the means and tools to meet the needs and the expectations it raises. That some of those needs are chemical—with the ailing student body of today firmly in the clutches of the pharmaceutical industry—complicates the matter of shepherding further.
It was difficult for me as an educator—and I have always seen myself primarily as a teacher—to keep alive, let alone believe, the fable that the main objective of our joint enterprise was to strive for the advancement of those the system is assumed to serve. The money derived from steering bodies through academia—the numbers and the speed with which they can processed being of the essence—is the primary concern. As I used to tell my students, it is far easier to graduate with a degree than with an education; we all have to work on the latter by ourselves. What I implied but did not quite say then is that today’s degree dispensaries may not offer the most efficacious means of acquiring essential life skills.
Today’s university “educators,” like the Gaul of yore, are divided into three parts: they are teachers, researchers, and administrators. I never did manage to reconcile the administrative side to the teaching and research bits. Not only did I struggle to merge those three divergent strands, I was ultimately unable meaningfully to define that “work” and find myself in it.
Administrative obligations encroach so relentlessly on the time set aside for teaching and research that the identity, or masquerade, of the scholar is compromised in the process. Teaching is being subjected to such an inordinate amount of scrutiny that it can no longer be conducted effectively, let along with a sense of accomplishment. Perversely, that scrutiny—or, rather, the stock-taking demanded for the purpose of accountability—does not translate into improved pedagogy; it contributes instead to the self-consciousness of lecturers entrusted with but apparently not trusted in their delivery of education.
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of academic life, and my role as director of research in my department, was the lack of collaboration across the disciplines; I never managed to work with anyone outside my supposed field, and not even much within it, despite my efforts, my experience of teaching in more than one department, and my liberal arts background. Transdisciplinarity, an approach to which I remained committed in my teaching, is little more than a buzzword. After all, it literally means blowing up the system. And now that research outputs are expected to be open-access—that is, shared free of charge—the disciplines are more invested than ever to be segregated as departments are vying for funding to demonstrate their viability.
I have always found it difficult to keep a diary while living, to be reflective at the very instant of creating memories; but that is just the kind of demand made on today’s educators: to quantify and account for their relative successes and failures, or, rather, effectively to articulate their successes and convert them post-haste into viable figures, including the figures that are meant to be foremost in the composition of a picture that does no longer come off: prospective students.
I am able now to reflect calmy, albeit not without a gallimaufry of as yet unprocessed emotions, on my thirty years in academia. The extraction of a tooth I endured earlier today felt decidedly less traumatic. Leaving without a liveable pension and leaving behind much of the intellectual property I had naively assumed would revert to me upon departure left me doubtful of my ability to extricate myself from a system in which replicated and repurposed versions of my research and teaching continue ghosting beyond my reach. It would not be in keeping with this journal entirely to omit this experience from the record of a largely immaterial existence whose worth the academic is almost contractually obligated to inflate. At last—and at the very least—I can say without irony, echoing the word of the Elephant Man: “I am not an academic. I am a human being.”
This journal must and will respond to the vagaries and waywardness of my dilettante life. As new opportunities present themselves, they will be represented here. Unlike in those early, tentative days of broadcastellan, when I felt I was missing a purpose and dreaded pursuing a ‘hobby’—that miserly parcelling out of pleasure according to the limits of a bourgeois imagination—would not only kill time but the very impetus of the pursuit, I am more confident these days that a blog is just the net with which gleefully to snatch up whatever trifle or detritus catches my attention, to drop such matter at will and move on …
Harry Heuser 