[Do What You Love] is a secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation but is an act of love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, presumably it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace ... “Do what you love” disguises the fact that being able to choose a career primarily for personal reward is a privilege, a sign of socioeconomic class.
Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life! Before succumbing to the intoxicating warmth of that promise, it’s critical to ask, “Who, exactly, benefits from making work feel like nonwork?” “Why should workers feel as if they aren’t working when they are?” In masking the very exploitative mechanisms of labor that it fuels, DWYL is, in fact, the most perfect ideological tool of capitalism. If we acknowledged all of our work as work, we could set appropriate limits for it, demanding fair compensation and humane schedules that allow for family and leisure time.
Miya frames her argument around workers rights and employee exploitation. I think this misses the big picture. I view the DWYL mantra less as calculated elitist slang, and more as an attempt to hold on to a production/wage-based economic model in the face of increasing automation. That is, an alternative explanation is that most "work" is becoming unnecessary. Society consciously or subconsciously realizes this, and puts a folky, agreeable war-time slogan as a band-aid. Rather than a "perfect ideological tool of capitalism", I think DWYL is the equivalent substituting hamburger for steak.
In any case, my view on work engagement is the converse: do something first, become good at it, and later you'll love it. It's hard to love doing something you aren't at least decent at.
Applying these ideas to academia, she writes
Several points:
Nowhere has the DWYL mantra been more devastating to its adherents than in academia. The average Ph.D. student of the mid-2000s forwent the easy money of finance and law (now slightly less easy) to live on a meager stipend in order to pursue his passion for Norse mythology or the history of Afro-Cuban music. ... The reward for answering this higher calling is an academic employment marketplace in which about 41 percent of American faculty are adjunct professors—contract instructors who usually receive low pay, no benefits, no office, no job security, and no long-term stake in the schools where they work.
1. Over which set of PhD students is this average being taken? I can assure you that if your PhD is in electrical engineering or computer science, your best post-PhD career option is not an adjunct position. Nor is walking away from academia to industry a death sentence -- engineering departments greatly value scholars who have experience as practicing engineers. So this statement is at least not true generally.
2. Markets are not perfect algorithms for calculating economic valuations and punishing "unproductive" activity, but they are the best tools we have. With caveats in mind, markets appear to have decided that the study of certain sub-disciplines does not deliver significant economic value. Hence, even at the tenure-track level, salaries and available resources reflect this. Moreover, supply and demand for labour in these areas can very quickly come out of balance, driving down the acceptable level of wage for an adjunct struggling with sunk costs. I do not buy the argument that leaving for industry would signal a lack of dedication to the academic tribe -- this is a red herring to distract from the utter lack of walk-away options in certain disciplines. You can of course contend that markets are not properly valuing the activity, or are too short-sighted.
Some other thoughts came to mind regarding the underlying societal and macroeconomic forces driving these phenomena in academia, but I will explore those in another post.
Overall, I think the proper way to frame Miya's thoughts is in terms of giving individuals a walk-away option, such as a basic income guarantee.
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