Ambiguous loss in an academic career: A note to my young(er) colleagues
The public health crisis of 2020 has provoked much commentary on how to make sense of this season of social isolation, disruption, and uncertainty about the future. As an academic, I have been thinking about what it means for my own career, but especially for students and younger colleagues who are closer to the beginning of theirs. The coronavirus was upon us all at once around mid-March, producing at best a low-grade anxiety ever since. Like other knowledge and information workers, we’ve had to adapt but fortunate to be able to work remotely, so in many ways the work goes on as before: we think, write, and share our thoughts, but it continues to take its toll in less obvious ways.
The last couple of years I taught a proseminar in my school for doctoral students in their first semester of the program, in which we dealt with the challenges of launching and sustaining an academic career. I considered issues of productivity and the psychology of writing, along with mapping out the field itself. As my syllabus suggests, they join a conversation that has been going on for many years, familiarize themselves with it, and become prepared to meaningfully contribute to it through their own careers — learning intellectual craftmanship beyond methodology per se. I’m not doing that course this fall, with our entering class postponed in response to the pandemic. I’ll miss that conversation, but that prompts me to still reflect on these issues as they relate to the season we find ourselves in, and consider what kind of advice I would offer to them now, including, I hope, some words of reassurance.
I’m more fortunate than many, but I still regret these losses in my own professional life. It’s not what I had in mind at this stage of my career, and I don’t much care for online teaching. I miss being in an actual classroom, my colleagues and the day-to-day stimulation of being in conversation with them. I miss the travel I had planned just since March, places I was looking forward to going and people I wanted to see, and I fear that the rolling cancellations will continue well into next year. Much of the work continues, of course, but a lot of the fun stuff went away. Even if I’m protected from a major negative impact on my career at this point, I’ve still worked hard to be in a position to exploit the opportunities that were continuing to come my way, and now a lot of that is on hold.
Social media reports don’t help when they suggest that others are continuing as before to produce, publish, and accomplish. Even if their own struggles are not shared, I suspect that in this new kind of FOMO many will feel like they’ll be falling behind in their professional advancement, even though we’re all sidelined in many respects, and no campuses are exempt from the consequences. Indeed, the idea of productivity has always been a double-edged sword. Being productive and getting things done are essential for success, but elsewhere I’ve considered the dangers of “hyperactivity,” where productivity becomes a goal in itself (Reese, 2014). Careerism can lead to an obsession over prestige-chasing, publication metrics, and CV padding, producing a general harried feeling that there are things undone that need doing — and that it’s never quite enough. How are we to cope with the current difficulties, which are cause enough for anxiety, without being exacerbated by these more familiar worries about the professional future? Although this season has caused considerable angst, perhaps it may lead to some valuable contemplation on this question.
Ambiguous loss
Last fall I experienced the sudden death of a close colleague from a serious accident. That loss was profound and difficult but a traditional and well understood experience of grief. Some even have observed that as a society we have reacted to the pandemic through the traditional stages of grief (denial, anger, etc.), but Covid-19 has produced a different kind of loss, which follows a less familiar psychological process. I was listening to a podcast recently on one of my regular bike rides (one of my own ways of coping during this time) and heard Krista Tippett’s On Being interview with psychologist and clinical practitioner Pauline Boss, an emeritus professor at the University of Minnesota. Boss developed a new field in psychology around the concept of “ambiguous loss,” a kind that has no resolution or final closure. In her work with family members of soldiers missing in action or of victims of 9/11, she explores how best to cope with these kinds of losses, which if unresolved cause significant distress and lead to oscillating periods of hope and hopelessness.
This pandemic has created for many of us one big ambiguous loss. We’re not even sure we know all that we have lost or are missing out on as a result of it. We like to solve problems, Boss observes, and we’re not comfortable with unanswered questions, which is particularly true of academics. But perhaps, as Boss suggests, if we can name it we can better learn to tolerate, cope with, and find meaning in it. I realize there’s no easy solution for this predicament, but maybe saying some of these things out loud will help — even if just for myself.
So, to especially those newcomers to the field or early on in their careers, I would first just say, as an honest and appropriate response to ambiguous loss: “I’m sorry.” I’m sorry you’re missing out on what used to be normal rewards of the academic life, face-to-face conversations in the classroom, socializing with colleagues, and traveling to meetings. I’m sorry for the strain on family life, the loneliness, the economic uncertainty and the cloud hanging over future hiring and retention decisions. This has lasted far too long by this point, even if at this writing it’s just over four months. When Dr. Anthony Fauci told the country that a vaccine may not be available for at least a year that seemed like an eternity, prompting my own thought experiments as coping effort. For a time, I comforted myself thinking about the astronaut who spent a year on board the orbiting space station. He described the routines he used to manage his days, and I imagined I could handle something like that, but at least he had a specific end point to his journey. Even if I was a prisoner under house arrest that would also be a time of known duration, but this period is still uncertain. Academics have, by their nature, demonstrated a capacity for delayed gratification, but even that skill has been strained. A post-pandemic world will emerge but it can’t be scheduled.
Putting this time in perspective, however long it lasts, may not resolve the experience of ambiguous loss but perhaps it’s a start. A year seems like an awfully long time in our speeded-up cultural rhythm, but the older I get the quicker a year seems to go by. Visiting ancient university campuses like Oxford or Cambridge can be humbling when thinking of the centuries represented by those buildings, and I try to imagine that this period will be short in comparison. In another sense, I take inspiration from those who had a long involuntary hiatus in their career, like the Austrian psychiatrist Victor Fankl, imprisoned during the Nazi Holocaust, who resumed his work after the war and produced major insights with his book, Man’s search for meaning. I hesitate to compare what are largely inconveniences for middle-class university workers to such wartime suffering, but it still encourages me to consider examples of human resilience and the possibilities for important work following major disruptions in life — and how a crisis itself can be a source for new creative insights.
So, to my young(er) colleagues I would urge that you don’t despair and keep moving forward. During this “asterisk year” we are all experiencing an ambiguous loss, and hands-on control and carefully curated CV have to include a certain attitude of release and surrender. That can be difficult for professionals on an upward career path, accustomed to being able to manage their schedule and goals, but it involves navigating that crucial relationship between doing what we can and releasing the rest, a challenge posed by the great faith traditions. As the writer of Proverbs (20:24) cautions: “How can we understand the road we travel? It is the Lord who directs our steps.” Keep the basics in mind, of safety and preserving health. Do what you can, and try not to ruminate on what might have been. This pandemic will eventually come to an end, and when it does the world will have been changed, us along with it, and some will come out of it in better shape than others. I hope and trust that you will be among the former, that you will not only survive but thrive: physically, mentally, and spiritually. In the meantime, I look forward to having more of this conversation again in person.
Reference
Reese, S. D. (March 14, 2014). When Productivity Becomes Hyperactivity. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2014/03/14/cautionary-words-about-academic-productivity-and-problem-hyperactivity-essay
