The following thoughts have been collected through years of conversations between me and another friend in the English department. She is a great observer, speaker, and listener. I wouldn't be validated in my experiences or empowered to articulate them if not for her.
Perhaps no English department can escape the perilous grounds of entangling the personal and the academic. It's what makes us look like a cult, but not in a fun way. Cultural theory especially pertains to identity. Everyone's experience of a text is informed by their background. It's an obvious statement which often dominates what's determined to be an acceptable or unacceptable opinion. Keep in mind that most of this phenomenon is done through self policing. We are afraid to talk about things we have not personally experienced, so we dilute our thoughts with vague anecdotes. It's a habit I'm not fond of. Often to the detriment of conversation, we feel compelled to contextualize our opinions in relation to ourselves. "As a woman...", for example, is a frequent starting comment which prefaces an opinion pretty much anyone could have come to. I'm sure most students in my conference in Intro to Cultural Studies wince at the memory of the discussion after our unit on Blackness in America. Our group was extremely white, and so you would hear confessions like, "as someone with a Chinese grandfather...". Don't get me wrong; my favourite part of reading cultural texts is to then carry it with me in my personal life. But our continued dependence on identity can too quickly blur the boundaries between healthy conversation among colleagues and extremely volatile confessions. Especially when the demographic is simply not able to personally relate to these texts, as happens on a pretty frequent basis, attempts to latch on to some shared experience seems artifical. I enjoy my math department: most professors seem to value me for the content of my contributions, and not the circumstances surrounding them. There is a time and place to connect academia to the personal life. But I don't think TAs are equipped to deal with that in conferences, nor are professors able to react appropriately to any personally charged claim. I yearn for a concrete boundary between my ideas and how I am perceived.
Let's talk about syllabi. The syllabus for Introduction to Film Studies when I took it in 2020 had 8 films, and all were directed by men. Our professor didn't even notice this until it was pointed out to him on the last day of class. Although effort is made to include marginalized voices in our cultural theory courses, these marginalized voices are limited by talking about themselves and their identity. Women are only included in the feminism unit, people of colour are only included if they talk about their race, etcetera. Now you might say, Abe, you just mentioned that you're sick of bringing identity into the conversation! And while I do enjoy that distancing, we must take note of these unequal grounds when they occur. If all 8 films chosen to represent the entire domain of film are created by men, then this is a symptom of some deeper (albeit unconscious) prejudices.
The real life representation is perhaps even worse. On paper, the staff gender ratio isn't so bad - 11 women out of the 31 professors. But male professors often teach the larger, more popular classes, while women are delegated to more niche subjects. For this reason, an average student will interact with many more male professors than female. Sometimes male professors, uncomfortable in their status, make remarks about how sexist the past generation was, and that was how they were able to succeed. The acknowledgment is sweet, but it comes with the subtext: I'm not like that. I'm one of the good guys. And this just doesn't hold up. Out of the 12 TAs I've had in English courses, 9 have been men. It's even more depressing when we consider that the majority of undergrads in English are women. Somewhere along the line from the undergraduate to graduate status, women are being weeded out extremely effectively.
Oh also! Professors love to show off a feminist film or text, but hate it when gender escapes the confines of tokenism. My friend, and one of her friends, were in the same course and wrote very different essays that both engaged in a feminist lense. Despite their otherwise totally disparate subject matter, they both recieved eerily similar feedback. Now, my friend and I deliberatly avoid writing about gender, because we have both been burned from it by male professors, who see the word "gender" or "feminine" or "woman" and dismisses it as a tired trope.
In literature classes, professors ask us to buy 10 books from the McGill bookstore. Unlike my math courses, where professors frequently direct us to free resources, or make sure copies are available at McLennan, there's less patience in English for students who have to wait to find material second hand. My friend's prof recently said to subscribe to a service for $60 a year, something he described as a very small amount. It's rich (no pun intended) for a professor to make a judgement about what is or is not affordable to students.
Then there's the whole accessibility issue. I happen to be one of those annoying bitches that mostly enjoys archaic writing styles and long, exploratory phrases, but at a certain point it seems that discourse is reserved for thinkers with a formal background. Extremely niche vocabulary and constant inside references are a way to gatekeep less privileged voices from participating. This seems like a pretty fundamental tension in theory that I don't see acknowledged by professors. I wish there was a desire to strive for clarity among these writers, even at the expense of status.
I was recently vaguely recruited for the honours program by a professor I admire. Professors, understandably, have a skewed vision of the world. They've made it, and often mistakenly attribute their success to some special qualities they possess. But an experience in the English program is completely dependent on identity. I don't want to fight this uphill battle. I want to live life before I start seriously writing about it. So no, I am not interested in (English) academia.