A good CV showcases your skills and your academic and professional achievements concisely and effectively. It’s well-organized and easy to read while accurately representing your highest accomplishments.

“Writing an effective academic CV” (2019)

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The academic curriculum vitae is a special genre, designed to be both terse and exhaustive, plodding a straight and narrow path of education, employment, publications … At the same time, it is selective, trumpeting high points only, never lows. Unexplained gaps would hint vaguely of failure.

A recent application for something or other prompted me to undertake the tedious task of updating my CV. As I added new entries, I began to reflect on the kinds of professional experience, often unsought and painfully gained, that a CV will never acknowledge. To fill in those blanks requires a less self-assured genre, one that allows for the winding implied by the literal meaning of curriculum vitae—“course of life.” What follows is my attempt at an alternative CV.

She tells of an unusual upbringing in rural Idaho, with survivalist parents who were prepping for Armageddon and kept their children out of school. Against these odds, the self-taught Westover manages to get a higher education, earning a PhD in history. To Westover, education represents freedom and self-invention, yet when she arrives at Cambridge, she feels out of place.

The circumstances of my own entry into academia fall somewhere between Westover’s and those of the other students she describes as blending in seamlessly at Cambridge. After graduating from high school, I enrolled at the state university on the other side of the lake. The oldest things on campus were trees, but I entered its halls (Collegiate Gothic style, anno 1950) with a sense of awe not unlike Westover’s at Cambridge. True to its etymology, the place served up the universe from an infinitude of perspectives. I was drawn to study literature for its capacity to explore the full range of human experience through words alone.

As an undergrad, I had only the vaguest awareness that there could be a backside to this world that so entranced me. Not until later did I realize there is no direct correlation between intellectual refinement and treating others well. There were occasional rumors of misconduct, but I didn’t want to hear these stories, much less believe them. I told myself they were anomalies in an otherwise benign world. Decades later, my former undergraduate advisor and longtime mentor would relate over dinner some scandals from the era of my student days. I didn’t want to hear them then either, and my conflicted reaction sparked our first disagreement in years (but I’m getting ahead of myself here …).

Looking back, I imagine that my aunt, the black sheep of the family and the only other one to earn a PhD, must have faced obstacles as a professor in the 1970s. When I was a teenager, she made me promise never to learn to speed type, on the logic that people can’t treat you like a secretary if you don’t have secretarial skills. I broke this promise, naively secure in the belief that, after the battles fought by her generation, I would never encounter sexism in my chosen career.

My undergraduate degree was made possible by a combination of scholarships, student loans and the modest help my parents could provide. High tuition made graduate school a long shot, but thanks to a fellowship from a prestigious university, I could afford to spend a few more years studying literature. It was in grad school that the contours of the downside of academic life began to sharpen. The graduate students tiptoed around a temperamental departmental secretary, lest she wield her informal power to our disadvantage. Every Tuesday and Thursday at 3 pm, my small cohort would breathe a collective sigh of relief at having made it through another seminar on medieval literature without freezing up or starting to cry. Misery loves company, but even this kind of camaraderie can crack and fissure. In the beginning we were four, then three—too few to withstand the atmospheric pressure. In an unforgiving environment, it becomes harder to forgive one another.

Some professors exchanged harsh words in the corridors, others didn’t speak at all. The majority were nice to students, but one seemed to take out aggression obliquely, on the graduate students supervised by a colleague he disliked. It was this that reduced me to tears at my oral exams. Afterwards I was mortified not so much by the belittling words, as by my own show of weakness in response. Many times since in my academic career, I’ve told myself I need to toughen up.

Another graduate student consoled me with the fact that no one in recent departmental history had passed their orals without breaking down. To the credit of the compassionate department chair, I received her apology the next day. She was not present at my exams, but had heard. Somehow, everyone had. She called the incident unforgivable and attributed it to a feud that had nothing to do with me. It helped to hear this, and I had, after all, passed with distinction. You’ve been vindicated, said my consoler. Yet that moment of undeserved humiliation influences how I approach exam situations to this day. Some colleagues might think I’m too quick to intervene on behalf of students, but I can’t tell students to toughen up, seeing as that’s never worked for me.

At the same time, the intense experience of graduate school was addictive. Never have I learned so much in so little time (even from the one professor who was not so kind). I basked in the aura of brilliant minds. The faculty were generous with their time and knowledge, my dissertation advisor ever-patient and encouraging. A slow reader, I lived by necessity with my nose in a book, spending entire contented days in an overstuffed armchair in the graduate reading room (Art Deco, anno 1938). I made my way through long reading lists, transformed by what I consumed. I traveled to my first conferences and took summer research sojourns in Europe. Two Nobel laureates gave poetry readings at my department. I was acquiring a taste for the intellectual pleasures of this profession, and there was no question that the good outweighed the bad.

Not long after defending my dissertation, I got lucky on the job market and accepted a position in a department distinguished by a collaborative spirit. As a product of the American educational system transplanted to Europe, I had a steep learning curve to climb, but my colleagues gave me a leg up. It was from them that I really began to learn how to teach.

I was fortunate to come to such a welcoming department straight out of grad school, but I’ve since witnessed disasters in the academic workplace. I’ve seen a thriving department, overflowing with students, decimated by internal strife that no one could get a handle on. The solution in the end was to downsize, rendering half the faculty redundant. Before we reached that sorry state, however, there was a five-day group therapy retreat, led by a consultant in Birkenstocks with a mandate to diagnose and treat our deficiencies. We sat in a circle eight hours each day, urged to reveal our innermost thoughts and feelings. “There will be yin and yang, crying and screaming,” the therapist had (rather alarmingly) explained to me over the phone when I tried (unsuccessfully) to get myself excused on the grounds that I was eight months pregnant. He assigned us divisive little tasks, like listing the five best and worst traits of each colleague. Reluctance to participate was viewed as an act of insubordination, of which there were plenty over the course of the retreat. If any good came of that experience, it was that it united us in collective distaste and resistance. On the fourth day, the therapist lost patience and accused us of undermining his work. “Never in twenty years,” he complained, “have I met such a hopeless group of people.”

Once an organizational psychologist, who had been hired by a university to investigate a harassment complaint, explained what he thought I needed to know: that being undermined by colleagues is a normal part of any workplace—the implication being that I should just toughen up. Needless to say, I haven’t followed this advice, and it turns out that part of my education has entailed learning what I am no longer willing to accept.

Yet my worklife has been far from bad—consult my CV and you will see the high points. I have been the beneficiary of generous resources, monetary as well as less quantifiable kinds, such as encouragement, kindness and constructive feedback. I have experienced the deep satisfaction that comes from collaboration with colleagues on equal terms, unmarred by envy and competition. And the classroom always provides a welcome refuge from collegial strife.

The truth of the matter is that the course of my academic life has wound through both good and bad, and as time goes on, it’s getting harder to reconcile the two. Once, when intradepartmental intrigues got so bad as to make me ill, the physician who examined me asked where I worked. On hearing the answer, she shook her head knowingly, making it clear I was not the first from my profession to turn up in her clinic. Yet I continue along the well-trodden path, still hoping the good can be made to outweigh the bad.

The above-mentioned dinner with my mentor took place at a critical juncture in my professional life. By outward measures, things could hardly have been going better, but I had been suffering at an unhappy department for months and inwardly knew the situation was untenable. Between the main course and dessert, my mentor inquired if things had improved. They had not, I explained. My mentor raised an eyebrow, expressed sympathy and offered some well-intentioned but disappointing advice. Don’t fight back, it will only make things worse. And it was then that the revelations poured forth about professors I had admired as a student. In a childlike reflex, I wanted to cover my ears to keep from hearing things I would rather not know. At the same time, an angry question formed on my lips. Why are you telling me this only now? My appetite for dessert was gone, replaced by a sense of betrayal. He said he hadn’t wanted to discourage me from pursuing an academic career, that he had hoped things would get better over time.

A few days later, my mentor sent an apologetic note and I forgave, knowing that the problem is a joint inheritance. He had just retired after a long and significant career, and now I was the one in a position to dispense advice. His choice back then was now mine to make—of what to be silent, and of what to speak. This book is part of my choice.