Eric Jarosinski Says Nein to Academia

These remarks by Eric Jarosinki, ostensibly about the virtues of Twitter, but ultimately about the vices of academia, resonate with me. I, too, at some point realised that I would not be able to carry off a convincingly academic performance. I didn't want to write that way or talk that way or spend my days working that way. I, too, did not want to pretend to understand what my peers were so earnestly saying they knew. At one point, I even decided I lacked the "moral compass" required to navigate the ambiguities of an ethical, academic life. So I also chose this "alt-acish" career as a coach and, indeed, a social media presence. I'm not as successful as Jarosinski, but I make a decent living, and on most days I enjoy the work.

There's a nagging doubt, however. I'm sure many of us feel a little sadness for the university that Jarosinski left. The university, we think to ourselves, needs him more than he, it seems, needs it. For a long time now I have felt like I abandoned my post. To be sure, I didn't yet have tenure (I don't think he did either), and I must say that I didn't feel like it was being handed to me on a silver platter. Getting the "privilege" to make the contribution to your culture that pretty much everyone around you knows you should be making can be a very humiliating experience. Nonetheless, I feel a bit of shame about not "doing the work". Moreover, I'm vain enough (and have friends and colleagues who nurture this vanity) to think that I would make an excellent professor. From everything I know about Jarosinski, so would he. Students everywhere, let's agree, are poorer for the decisions we have made.

And this raises an interesting question that I will spend some of my summer thinking about. What would a university that people like Jarosinksi and I are qualified to teach at look like? What sort of place would take us "as we are". What, we might say, is the utopia that Jarosinski's negation implies? Specifically, what if our social media presence were all the "publishing" we needed to do? I've considered this question before: imagine a university that hires based on a scholar's contribution and demeanour on Twitter, in the blogosphere, and, say, at Wikipedia. And what if the "culture" we imparted to our students was precisely a matter of shaping their persona in these media, their ability to "be present" there? Sure, an occasional long-form essay and even a book, written at one's leisure, would not be out of place either. But let's stop making academia so unpleasant that people precisely like Eric Jarosinski end up saying NEIN! to it.