Let me start by saying that I loved being in academia. Even though graduate school was incredibly difficult since I did it while raising three kids, there were aspects of it that I really loved. I would’ve stayed in academia, if I’d been able to find a job there. It was painful turning away and moving back to the other world. I adored teaching and conducting my research, analyzing data, writing papers. There were certainly parts I didn’t like – the incredibly petty squabbles, the politics, the lack of perspective – but I’d have taken that life if I could’ve gotten it.

I must also acknowledge that people might ridicule my research, even though I found it terribly fascinating. I wasn’t trying to cure cancer, of course, but I thought my research questions were very interesting, and the data were often compelling. Still. I studied pronoun use and what it reveals about us, psychologically.

So I stand in my own glass apartment and throw a little pebble at this line from an academic paper I edited yesterday:

There is strong evidence that the drop in neighborhood-level white poverty rates in central cities has been caused by the decline in neighborhood-level white unemployment rates.

Really? When people get jobs, their poverty levels drop? REALLY? I am certainly not disparaging the writing (academic-style, such a wimpy passive voice but it’s how it’s done), or the discipline (sociology), or the finding (though I could’ve told them that). It’s just so ……… academia.

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