This is a playground

If you choose to play and explore with me, beware.

I’ve been realizing lately that there is a need for me to clarify my intentions, my “why”. What is this newsletter about? What do I do here? Simply put:

I’m here to explore and play with ideas.

I write to understand the world around me. There’s joy, wonder, anxiety, sorrow, critique, humor, and more in the thoughts that pass through my hands to this letter. I am a thinker, and these are my thoughts.

If you dare join me, beware. Exploration can be dangerous. I am not afraid, and I will never apologize for expressing my thoughts here. If we hope to find anything new, the dangers will be unknown. In science, we have no formal understanding of the purpose or mechanisms of curiosity, and perhaps curiosity might kill the cat, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take. I can’t not explore.

To me exploration is play. Not only do I enjoy kicking around an idea, I love sharpening my knowledge against anothers’. I want to understand what I know in relation to the world around me. I crave riding the limits and boundaries, understanding why they exist, if they should and whether we can push on them. But again, be warned: play it can be considered inappropriate and rough. We learn through play and we make mistakes.

I make mistakes, and I need to rectify one I made today.

I want to apologize to my friend Josh for expressing my thoughts on the Facebook post he tagged me in this morning. He wrote a lovely piece with updates on his road to recovery as an ex-academic and tagged me, a Facebook group for recovering academics, The Chronicle, and Inside Higher Ed. However, it caught me off-guard once I realized I had been kicked out of the academic recovery group. I knew why: I had called out the exploitative nature of the group’s “owner”. In my playful way, I commented on Josh’s post that being associated with me was dangerous for him because I will call out nefarious intentions. I immediately felt bad for hijacking his post, erased the comment, and decided to take it to the ‘Stack.

I started this Substack to be able to explore ideas, hoping to recreate the feeling of wonder that I felt when I first walked the campus of my undergrad university. I understand the drive to make a career out of exploration, and the idea that the modern university system is an inhospitable place to do it. So when I found Josh and he told me about this group that was aimed at helping with academic recovery, I was excited to meet 25,000 others just like me.

Except they didn’t seem like me. This group was merely another level of gatekeeping. Ultimately, if you know the group’s owner and are in her good graces, you are allowed to post within the group, and mostly, you’re allowed to post if you’re asking for help rather than offering your story. I merely questioned the process and was told that this was to keep people from spamming the group with promotional material, etc, and was promptly kicked out once I noted the hypocrisy of the exclusive promotional content from the group owner (Karen, ikr, LMAO) harvesting clients for her academic recovery counseling business. The owner of this group is contributing to the system by selling services that help others leave that system for another one. This group claims to be a *mutual support* group for academics who are moving on and welcomes everyone “no matter where on your journey.” Except me. Who is on my bullshit-about-hypocrisy part of the journey.

I do feel that I was unjustly removed from the group, and I stand by my statements on Josh’s post: “we should all beware of any industry, coaching services or ahem groups that make a living from this debacle. Exploiting a problem is not the same as helping to fix it.” But I am sorry that I reacted quickly. I should have written this and responded through my own post. I played a little too rough, and I hope my friend Josh will forgive me.

Academic recovery isn’t just about getting over being an academic. In my opinion, it should be about rediscovering the playful drive that brought us to this career in the first place. That group felt like an AA meeting. I’m sure it serves a purpose, but I’m past that part of my journey. I’m getting back to having fun with knowledge and exploring ideas the way I originally intended before I was sucked into the academic industrial complex.

Tomorrow my new podcast, NeoAcademia, launches. I’m excited to explore ideas again with brilliant scholars and thinkers. I’m gonna make waves, and I’m gonna piss some people off. For the record, it’s not my intention, but it is an effect of exploration. If that makes you uncomfortable, well either suck it up or go hide out in a nice, safe space like a Facebook group that kicks shithead rabble-rousers like me out.