Fred’s University Creates a Department of Self-Help
The former Chair of the Fred’s University English Department gave the keynote address at the founding of the Department of Self-Care. He was asked to record his remarks for TikTok so people could watch from bed instead of having to make the trek to the freezing auditorium where keynote lectures have traditionally taken place.
Claiming he did not know how to “work TikTok,” the retired English professor instead printed copies of his lecture with the intention of distributing them to mailboxes in the new Self-Care Department Lounge.
On learning that mailboxes had been eliminated in the new department quarters in favor of a juice bar, the disgruntled professor left copies of his talk in the fruit bowl. Since the budget for the new department did not include stocking the juice bar, that bowl was empty.
The lecture caused a lot of hurt feelings in the new department, and all available copies were quickly shredded and composted.
Here is the critique of self-help the retired Chair delivered in full.
Self-Help Is Built on Three Lies
Self-Help Lie Number 1: You Can Only Change Yourself
Fundamental to the gospel of self-help is the renunciation of the world. Instead of investing in collective social action, self-help literature places the onus of change on the individual.
This is because the individual is the customer in self-help and self-help is a business, not a movement. The customer buys the self-help bestseller, the customer drives lucrative social medial views, and the customer attends the expensive workshops and coaching sessions.
But common sense will tell you it is all too easy to change others. There are people in your life who have changed you and people you have changed. For example, parents who neglect and abuse their children do permanent damage: they change their children.
The well-meaning version of the dictum you can only change yourself is designed to empower the victim of circumstance to look to their own inner power instead of focusing on the abuser.
It is true there is no good way to cure the addict in your life or to cure someone else’s mental illness. Nor are you going to be able to end systemic prejudice or poverty on your own.
But the sad truth that you can’t stop someone from drinking or unilaterally bringing about world peace does not mean that the troubles of our world are individual problems.
Addiction, for example, is fueled by industries that target consumers and manipulate them into using and overusing of products. Substance abuse is not just a bug. It is built into the despair of exploitative social structures. You can bet the alcohol and vaping industries don’t think they can’t change people. They are well aware they can turn an entire generation into vaping addicts almost overnight if they could just avoid government oversight for a few years.
Placing the blame on the individuals for addictions, or medicalizing them, prevents the larger social change needed to combat it. And isolating addicts also fuels the stigmas that obscure the larger cultural patterns at work.
If only the Boomer generation of English Department professors had seen the rampant alcoholism in our department as a symptom of the larger problems we were facing: declining wages, professional uncertainty, existential despair about our mission, guilt about our treatment of graduate students, and the inner rot of a profession based on imposing elite white culture on the world.
Instead, those who could afford it were shipped off to expensive rehabs by the rich spouse you need to survive in academia, and the rest of us nursed our cirrhosis in church basement 12-Step programs.
Now there is no English department anymore, and the students cough their way through class as they are slowly asphyxiated on chemical fumes from their plastic pipes.
Self-Help Lie Number 2: It Is Up To You To Set Boundaries
The idea that it is up to you to set boundaries with the takers and abusers in your life is rife on TikTok. (Ok, I admit it. I do know how to use the TikTok. What else am I supposed to do all day now that I have been made redundant literally and metaphorically?).
Again, in many situations, it is useful to examine the ways you “allow” people to walk on you and to think about how you can be firmer with your bossy great aunt or your pushy neighbor.
But boundaries are set at a cultural level. The fact that the Dean thinks he can leer at the “co-eds” in their “jailbait” outfits is a function of his institutional and gender role. The fact that a study showed that male students interrupted female students at an astronomical rate in our classrooms does not reflect that our female students set poor boundaries. In fact, women who set boundaries in those contexts are punished for being aggressive.
Those at risk of having their boundaries violated are the people who are not protected by society. When we put the onus of boundaries on them, we are blaming the victims and creating more shame and sadness for the self-help industry to capitalize on.
Our former Department Chair presided over an era where the most vulnerable students–those in minorities, those on financial aid, those without the advantages of private secondary education–were told they needed to learn to “look out for themselves,” “toughen up,” not “be so uptight” and dress “professionally.” Yes, those are all quotes from the lawsuit that eventually brought our department down.
Self-Help Lie Number 3: Follow Your Passion and The Money Will Follow
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
The idea of passion work is an entitlement deeply entrenched in the American mytheme. It’s great if you have a rich spouse or a trust fund, or a profession that rewards your particular hobby. But most people work to live, not live to work.
By setting up the idea that you should be paid for what you love, the self-help industry has doubled its target audience of people who are unhappy with their lives and are looking to buy a solution. It’s sort of the like the salt and sugar combination in junk food that keeps you wanting more. Like junk food and obesity, this commercial strategy leads to widespread cultural malaise.
Let’s take one example…
For a while, it appeared that academic life did offer passion work at a living wage to highly literate white men. But that illusion was underwritten by a lot of unpaid or under-compensated labor.
Back in the day, the white male graduate student was often supported by his wife while he got his degree, and then she would do the work of raising his children and running his household once he got a professorship.
Older wives would do a lot of the adjunct teaching for universities after their kids left home. These highly-educated women worked for almost nothing. Why did they do it? Their passion for teaching!
The first female graduate students worked for low wages as teaching assistants and then were largely shut out of higher-paying academic roles. Many of them ended up in dead-end minimum wage admin jobs when the ladder was pulled out from under them.
When you see professors’ houses in movies from the past, they always look prosperous and middle-class. That’s because American universities were often built on either stolen land grants taken from indigenous peoples or land grabs backed up by redlining and other racially divisive practices that set aside the best land for whites.
The cheap land that academia is built on made it possible to create a white middle-class bubble subsidized by theft from non-whites. Tax breaks targeted to white families kept the grift going for a long time.
Buildings and grounds were built, cleaned, and cared for by immigrants and non-white workers who were not paid a living wage or offered any of the economic benefits of the state-subsidized academic life.
Money from the slave trade funded many universities, including Harvard, Brown University of Virginia, and many others. Universities also benefited from the capital that flowed from Robber Barons and other capitalists who squeezed it out of low-wage work and then wanted to be thanked for giving it back as a gift for the select few. The institutions they funded gave the Robber Barons legitimacy and performed industry research that further enriched them.
It was good for the privileged few while it lasted, and I was happy to be among the last of them. My wife put me through school. She raised our kids doing the work that a young professor would now pay nannies, daycares, summer camps, restaurants, caterers, lice-removers, Ubers, tutors, and special ed teachers to do. She did all that without costing Fred’s University a dime in wages.
But it turns out that universities cannot survive as planned without the theft they were based on. Both the uncompensated labor and the stolen money is running out, and academia is crumbling as a result. Fred’s University may soon be one of the institutions in danger of closing.
Maybe if I had spent less time thinking about my passion for early Swinburne poems and more time thinking about the good of everyone, there would still be an English Department. Instead, in the institutional silo of my personal calling, I did not see that the university was burning down. While I was parsing poems, reckless administrators gambled away my pension.
Forced into early retirement, I can no longer afford even the low-interest mortgage the University offered me years ago. I will have to sell my GI Bill-era house to a developer who is looking to turn it into a pilates studio for the white tech bros who have taken over my neighborhood (yes, they are bros, the tech grift is just as sexist as academia was).
The tradition of an expensive farewell party for retiring faculty at FU was another victim of budget cuts. Instead of a goodbye party, I was given a pre-read copy of How To Live On A Shoestring In Retirement and offered the privilege of volunteering on committees I used to get paid to run.
As it happens, the book has a lot of good advice, and I intend to be scavenging school receptions for free fruit to use in the juice bar.
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