Farewell to my so-called academic career

You could never consult Archival Records in a straightforward manner. Much of the interpretation which emerged from that source had to be accepted on the word of the ones who brought it or (hateful!) you had to rely on the mechanical search by the holosystem. This, in turn, required a dependency on those who maintained the system. It gave functionaries more power than Taraza cared to delegate.

 - Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune

It's now been four years since I quit my PhD, and this September, I returned the pile of infantry regulations I had on loan from the National Defence College library, which I guess marks the ultimate end of my "academic career". I wrote a little bit about this back when it happened, but now that it's been some time, I want to take a broader view of what's happened.

**

The subject of my PhD was the development of Finnish military doctrine as a process of nation-building. Very briefly, in the first two decades of independence, a lot of the things the Finnish military did had a lot more to do with building a very particularly racialized and gendered kind of Finnishness than with national defense. I started understanding this when I did my master's thesis on Finnish armor, and took a preliminary stab at this with a peer-reviewed article I wrote on the jäger way of war.

I worked as a freelancer in defence journalism for a decade or so, so I knew a thing or two about the national defence scene in this country. Our history, and especially our military history, are still captive to a very nationalist, triumphalist Story of the Nation, where heroic Finland overcomes huge odds and difficulties to become the greatest country in the world. The military history of the early years of the republic is invariably written from the viewpoint of the 1939-40 Winter War, which is still framed as a literally miraculous victory over the dastardly Stalin's Asiatic hordes.

So I knew going in that anything that challenges these views is going to have a hard time. That difficulty is compounded by the fact that military history in this country is largely monopolized by the military, in the form of the "cadet school", i.e. the National Defence College. For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, it's classed as a university, even though the master's degree theses they produce in history would barely make the grade as bachelor's theses in most actual universities. The academic publications the cadet school produces aren't much better; they almost exclusively refer to research produced inside their own institution, with a smattering of random international non-fiction works thrown in.

The military took exception to my research efforts surprisingly early. Way back in 2014, a seminar paper of mine was published in a collection of undergraduate gender studies papers. I wrote about how recent military publications on conscription talk about gender. This led to a faculty member at the defence college looking me up on Twitter, belittling me and berating me for writing "unscientifically". This was absolutely not true, but also a remarkable intervention for an undergrad student to experience. I still don't think I wrote anything particularly incendiary, but I was still sought out by a senior serving officer and abused for it.

That was the most direct military intervention into my academic career, if you will, but certainly not the last one. While I was working on my PhD, I also qualified as a history teacher, specializing in adult education. That led to me teaching some lecture courses at several adult education centers.

One of the first courses I taught was a history of the Jäger movement. Military history is pretty popular around here, and it was packed. The feedback I got was overwhelmingly positive - except for a couple of people, one of whom called me a communist. At least one of them started reporting on my lectures to a military heritage foundation, whose head (a retired general officer) then got in touch with my superiors at the institute.

It was a very silly game of broken telephone, where whoever was reporting on me was exaggerating what I said, and in some instances straight up lying, and the aforementioned retired general then put his own gloss on things. It would almost have been funny, if the foundation hadn't directly demanded that I no longer be allowed to teach. I'm happy to say they were not successful.

Like I said, I've worked in defence journalism in this country, and I know what these people are like. It was very unpleasant to have to defend myself against malicious lies, but on the other hand, I couldn't help feeling that these extremely hostile reactions meant that I was doing something worthwhile. I was also quite cheered by the fact that so many ordinary, non-academic people responded so positively to my teaching. What I didn't expect was that I would also encounter this sanctimonious military patriotism in civilian academia.

**

During the editing process of one of my publications, I was directly told that I shouldn't criticize deficiencies in published research by military officers, because it would be very bad for my career. I was also heavily pressured to remove references to published university-level research that was uncomfortable for the army. I had made what I thought were fairly uncontroversial references to research published in the previous century, and I was treated like I was trying to sneak Erich von Däniken into my footnotes.

Eventually I complained about this, and this person - a fairly influential academic in my field - exploded at me. They angrily denied saying any of the things that they said in the emails they sent me, and were very insulted that I had the nerve to make these kinds of accusations when they were only trying to help me. The editing process was eventually completed, but there were times during it when I thought I was losing my mind. I had physical stress symptoms like I'd never experienced before.

I feel it's fair to say that by this point, I was feeling fairly heavy pressure to conform to the military-patriotic line in my research. The trouble was that I had almost no resources to fight back with. Quite frankly, no-one at my university cared about anything I did. These things were happening in some of my first ever teaching experiences, and my first encounters with academic publishing, and I didn't really have anyone who could help me with them. Apart from some advice from my academic friends, I had to figure everything out myself, and it really multiplied the stress.

Like I think most PhD students in Finland, officially I had two supervisors. I never even met one of them. I've also heard people tall about a "university community" or a community of researchers. If there is such a thing, I certainly never encountered it. I haf great trouble figuring out even the most elementary parts of things like funding applications, because there were times when I couldn't get any answers to my questions.

During my time as a postgraduate at the University of Helsinki, I did not once feel that anyone there even remotely cared about anything I did, or indeed whether I was even doing anything or not.

**

An article in the Finnish journal of adult education divided PhD researchers into four groups. Studying PhD researchers' accounts of their academic careers, they saw these defined by personal and systemic conditions. Personal conditions were things like age and gender, but also research subject, skills and abilities, and so on. Systemic conditions include funding, supervision and "networking".

Those researchers for whom personal and systemic conditions apply are labelled "golden boys and girls", and are highly likely to succeed. I strongly appreciate the authors' remark that when the "golden boys" talked about their careers, there was often at least one, if not several, key points where an academia gatekeeper had given them an opportunity, and they were very reluctant to talk about how it happened. Gatekeeping in academia is very real and very significant, but people who pass the gates don't want to admit it, and those of us who are shut out are dismissed as embittered.

The article identifies three other groups. Those who get systemic support but experience adverse personal conditions are labelled the imposter syndrome sufferers, and those whose personal and systemic conditions are adverse are called the downbeaten. Excluded from support and funding, with severe doubts as to their abilities and a very reasonable skepticism of their chances of success, the downbeaten tend to quit.

I strongly identified with the fourth group: the phantom researchers. In terms of personal conditions, I was fine: as a white cis dude, I'm undoubtedly privileged, and I was quite confident in my abilities. I also think my skills were not entirely lacking. However, I had next to no systemic support. I couldn't secure funding and doors were very determinedly shut in my face. I saw people who had started after me getting opportunities I never had. There were events directly connected to my specialization, where researchers younger than me were invited to participate, and I heard about them afterwards. Apart from the personal support of some of my peers, for which I remain grateful, I was basically left to figure everything out for myself. It's impossible to "network" when you don't have any opportunities to do it. Even though I managed to produce several peer-reviewed articles in this situation, nothing changed. The gatekeepers kept the gates shut.

According to the article, this kind of thing leads to a feeling of being taken advantage of, and eventually bitterness. I'll say.

This is especially compounded by the fact that, as I've said before, the whole gatekeeping process is totally opaque. I certainly never even got the slightest hint as to why none of my funding or work applications were succesful, and I have no idea why the ones that succeeded did so. Rather unsurprisingly, I've found that people who succeed in this system think it works, and those of us who don't have the opposite view.

I raised this question of the opacity of funding for early-career researchers on social media once. I was directly told by a somewhat famous academic to shut up and stop being so bitter that I didn't get funded.

**

So, to recap. I tried to do a PhD on military history. The Finnish army and some of its associated organizations were openly hostile. No-one at my university cared about anything I did, and I was shut out of any opportunities to demonstrate my abilities.

What I expected from academia was a place where I could do work that was meaningful, and where my career prospects would largely depend on the quality of that work. What I found was a system where, unless you know the right people and they're willing to open the right doors for you, it simply doesn't matter what you do, because no-one gives a shit.

I'm sure that many of the people doing research and teaching at universities in this country are as good or better at it than I would have been. What I know for a fact is that that has never actually been determined in any way.

So yeah, you're damn right I'm bitter. It's a terrible system. My time as a PhD student at the University of Helsinki was some of the worst of my entire life. I would rather go back to prison than start a PhD again.

I am deeply grateful that I've since had opportunities to work for employers, both public and private, who actually care about the quality of my work. Right now, I have the great privilege of being employed on a project that's genuinely exciting and delightfully distant from the absolute bullshit that was academia. Whatever happens with that, wherever I end up, at least I know that one chapter in my life is closed for good.