The Loneliness of the Independent Scholar

by Stu Burns

You steer your car into the university’s interior drive. There is a lot next to the library where the impressions on the asphalt have taken the shape of your tires. You pull into the familiar spot marked “Visitors Only,” grab your well-worn leather bag, and make your way inside to a flimsy table. The temporary desk will support a diverse stack of books today, background research for a rigorous article on an original topic. You set up on the faux-wood laminate, noticing how it has warped from the condensation of too many students’ drinks on too many humid days. This is the closest thing to an office you have here. It suits you.

The conferences where you speak list you as an independent scholar. When you were a grad student, an old Oxford Don sniffed that this was a discreet euphemism for “unemployed.” You are more fortunate than that. Self-interested college instructors always said that a liberal arts education prepared you for a number of jobs, and they were right. You were trained to research things and write about them. In a business drowning in reports and figures where accountants can make profits appear and disappear based on office politics, executives appreciate well-made narratives and charts. You make a living as a business analyst, not as a tenure-track professor employed by a university to teach and do research. As an independent scholar, you do it for the love. That’s what the word “amateur” means: one who works for love, not money. You have become a professional at something else.

Your job keeps a roof over your head and clothes on your back. You work steadily, and you live well. Business hours are much easier to keep than the amorphous schedule of a professor. Research is still something to enjoy, not a struggle for tenure with your career path tilting and swaying like a cheap boat threatening to capsize if you imprudently shift some weight. The work you do is to please yourself and the audience of your choosing, not a committee with ill-defined objectives. You contribute, you publish your articles, and you paste together bricks for the temple of knowledge. Every once-in-a-while, you see your name in a footnote. People are reading, so it seems.

Writing is a solitary art, but you are more solitary than most. Most of your old colleagues have little time to do research and writing. Grading and committee work see to that, let alone spouses and children. Even so, when they do write, when they take trips to read newly-catalogued manuscripts or do fieldwork examining living cultures, they have support. They have colleagues who don’t need basic explanations of archives or ethnography. They have peers who will gladly look over their writing as a matter of course, applying thorough criticism and stern empathy. If they tug the proper purse strings, they get grants and sabbaticals allowing them time and resources. The independent scholar has none of these things, at least not with any reliability. Most of your friends, family, and co-workers cannot understand why you spend so many hours in libraries. Going to other states to collect folktales is another mystery, as is spending so many weekends hunched over your computer–at least without getting paid. You tell them you do have hopes of doing well with a book, someday, and you try to explain how the research is a reward in itself to you, but there is still a disconnect there, a crack in common understanding that sets you apart. Then again, that crack stretches in several directions: you could never understand flower gardening or golf.

You have thought about spending time around the departments at local colleges, but held back after reflection. You would be the amateur, the impure among the pure. When you were inside the lettered family, holding your station in colloquia and sharing space with leaders in the field, there were no amateurs in your ranks. There were no loosely-affiliated figures joining in your bull sessions when renowned experts came to visit. You might be able to hold a seat on a conference dais when you have cobbled together enough research and insight to fill out a spot on their program, but you haven’t pursued the narrow path of teaching and scrounging for grants that would lead you to a legitimate place in the halls of the learned. The fires you would have to endure to earn respect as a peer remain unwalked; you have not earned even a temporary niche at the table befitting a hanger-on. You are an independent scholar with all that implies except destitution.
You go over the books you have piled in your ad hoc office, texts that have not found their way out of printed obscurity and on to electronic media. You have culled them from arcane references left by the orienteers who navigated the ground adjoining yours. Your cohorts in the library are the foreign students who have not yet forsaken the study rooms, along with various schizophrenics using the open building for shelter. You have been mistaken for the latter, especially on warm days after long trips; comfortable clothes carry uncomfortable consequences when there are doubts about credibility. Today, this is friendly ground, more or less. The circulation staff knows that you contribute to the University Foundation; those tithes are the only way you have been able to secure limited access to their collection. The reference librarians know from your questions that you are here for legitimate reasons. At least, you hope they know that. If you were paranoid, you would suspect that they have given you a secret nickname and that there is a running pool concerning the day you start proselytizing about Bavarian Muslims using the pharmaceutical industry to control the Federal Reserve. There is nothing you can do but keep working. When the librarians catalog your book that will be some vindication, if they remember your name.

Even at your most self-pitying, you cannot blame yourself for parting from your trained career; that was no mistake. Doctorates do not guarantee a living. Professional academia has been getting harder for as long as you can remember. Colleges have found it much cheaper to hire part-time instructors than to bring on full-time faculty. Many of your friends who took on six-digit student loan debt are trying to patch together livelihoods from several small teaching assignments. Others have found mantles as professors, but some of these are making less than most new college graduates. There is a certain cowardice in what you have done, a surrender to the daunting odds against earning a comfortable living as a scholar. You acknowledge that you may not be good enough. You will never have the talent to learn languages like the best of your mentors. Even working on your own, the drive to do great work has not fired in your heart. Perhaps, the time has come to acknowledge that the dream of making a great contribution with the book you have been gestating for years is greater than any reality. You would call this an ontological proof of how great that nascent manuscript is, but that would be an obscure reference. Esoteric allusions are for writers who enchant readers to seek out their meanings; no one does this with your work. Even so, your cowardice has kept you in the game. If you were brave and had lived for years in poverty, you would not have lasted this long.

You push ahead with your work in the library. Even without the harsh but supportive peers your discipline finds necessary, without a bricklayer’s wage for your contributions, you thrive here, and your research fills a deep groove in your life. You keep up your lonely work at this poor student’s table; you embrace this ambivalent autonomy as your strength. This is not some lame rationalization or an earthy vintage of sour-grapes sophistry. The independent scholar has a freedom to fail that professionals have lost. There are no tenure committees to impress, no panels demanding results from a paid fellowship. If your work lacks the sophistication to impress the critics of the ivory tower, you can seek other markets, contributing up and down the spectrum of understanding. You own your work, you own your objectives, and you own your successes along with your failures. No one defines your bliss; you can walk away with no consequences, or you can throw in with renewed zeal. There is power in your independence that outstrips its limitations. You are what you do; no institution needs to define you. If this bare honesty can exist only without the nurturing body academic, then you embrace it. Independence makes a good shroud.

And if you find yourself searching out that last reference, perhaps there is hope for me yet.

With thanks to Margaret Atwood and Jay McInerney