POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

In the online journal published by Still Point Spaces, Andrea Brady has written a lengthy, three-part personal essay on the “University as Anxiety Machine.” The essay should resonate with many academics in the U.S., as well as those in other nations. Here is the opening section:

It was Welcome Week at the university where I teach. Students were arriving, excited, nervous, some imagining a new life in which they could redefine themselves, others perhaps anxious or sad at what they’d left behind or brought with them. For me, it had been a busy summer with little chance to relax, various troubles, and no opportunity to work on my own research, following two years ofoverwork when I was seconded to a university strategic role (a full-time job in itself) with little or no buyout of my normal professorial workload. I was tired and frustrated as I sat watching my inbox spasm with new messages.

 Suddenly my office started to pale, the fringes of my vision were trembling and blurred. I didn’t feel exactly like I was a body, like I was in a place. I was desperately thirsty, and my throat felt constricted, as if I was being choked. I couldn’t speak. What on earth was happening to me?

 After an hour, unable to shake it off, it occurred to me that I was having a panic attack. And if it could come over me so unexpectedly, in the privacy and safety of my office, it could easily happen next Friday, when I stood up in front of colleagues and 200 students to give my first lecture of the term. Maybe I would open my mouth, and no sound would come out. The inner elastic had snapped. After two years of particularly severe overwork, following on 15 years of manic overproductivity (including the production of three children), I had run out of road.

 This is an essay about the mental distress which now typifies academic life. It considers how the university as ‘anxiety machine’ produces intolerable working conditions that drain academic workers of their health, creativity and will power. It is not yet an essay on recovery, exactly; but my experience of panic and anxiety over the past year has also been a kind of acute physical pedagogy, which forced me to radically re-examine the conditions under which I was reproducing myself, my family, and my students.

 In writing so personally and confessionally here, I am going against all my professional instincts. This is new to me, but it also feels emancipatory, and has led me to a different way of doing my job, including the job of criticism, two instances of which I describe later as ‘distressed reading’. So this essay is intended as a polemic about the costs of the way things are, and a demand for new models of what teaching and learning in the university could be: generous, open, and survivable.

The rest of the first part of Andrea Brady’s essay is available at: https://blog.stillpointspaces.com/2018/07/bind-me-i-still-can-sing/.

The second part is available at: https://blog.stillpointspaces.com/2018/07/bind-me-i-still-can-sing-2-of-3/.

The third part is available at: https://blog.stillpointspaces.com/2018/07/bind-me-i-still-can-sing-3-of-3/.