The reluctant memoirist exposes the academy

AN HONEST LIVING
A Memoir of Peculiar Itineraries
by Steven Salaita
166 pp. Fordham University Press, $24.95

Steven Salaita opens his moving and powerful memoir with a preface in which he shares with readers his aversion to the genre. He argues that for a memoir to be satisfying, the author should “become a character in the reader’s universe” as a way to “appeal to an audience’s desire for relief in a hostile world” (3). Consequently, Salaita shares that “the successful memoir becomes a shared project,” which he generously calls “our memoir.” (3) That process of cohesion comes across seamlessly in An Honest Living. It’s a welcome invitation that I wholeheartedly felt as I read “our memoir.”

Salaita’s dabbling in the art of sharing personal sketches from his life seems to have begun with his first blog post in February 2019, which comprises the first chapter of this memoir. Several other pieces from his blog over the last five years also appear in An Honest Living, with minor alternations, even though I had read them previously, as individual pieces, reading them in one volume creates a deeply resonant experience precisely because it allows his story to meld into my universe by fusing all of the anecdotes together.

His first chapter, “An Honest Living,” is particularly immersive. I recall a similar feeling when I read it on his website. Perhaps it’s because I share many of his observations about academia as a recovering academic myself. Although I chose to leave the profession, like Salaita, I know that “[a]cademe is a scar impervious to cosmetic surgery” (98). It made me eager to glimpse how someone else has navigated a post-academic life. From Salaita’s description of northern Virginia’s suburbs to the procedural aspects of driving a bus, he brought me along for the sometimes bumpy ride (pun intended) in his characteristically absorbing style. 

Throughout the book, each chapter moves back and forth in time as he shares snippets from his life and intersperses his life stories with a trenchant critique of the economic system that structures all of our lives. More particularly, Salaita’s analysis of the role that academia plays in the economy is plainly laid out in all its egotistical glory. For anyone who wasn’t paying much attention to college life until Congress subpoenaed university presidents or until Gaza encampments made headlines, his portrayal of academe may seem jarring; “for all its self-congratulation, the academy’s loftiest mission is a fierce compulsion to eliminate any impediment to donations” (9). Indeed, watching the events unfold over the past few months makes it crystal clear that Harvard isn’t the only hedge fund that happens to have a campus.

The university’s propensity to protect itself at all costs, rather than its faculty and students who populate its campus, is a germane theme in Salaita’s memoir. Having grown up in an academic home — his father was a physics professor and his mother a Spanish teacher — Salaita’s inclination towards a life of the mind was enticing from early childhood. A bookish boy, we see this “little professor” emerge as someone who, in any other context, should have been an academic superstar. Salaita is actually one of the most prodigious scholars I’ve ever encountered. His prescience pushed him to publish early, starting in his doctoral program, in order to bolster himself against the inevitably offensive and racist academics he would encounter, starting with his experiences with the job market:

“People might act surprised or skeptical when Palestinians tell horror stories of life in academe, but, if anything, we undersell the horror because even bowdlerized versions of Zionist suppression are unbelievable. Think of it this way: you exist in a space that prides itself on pushing boundaries, on challenging orthodoxy, but your existence is wholly contingent on a byzantine ability to render yourself nonexistent. You’re an embodied boundary of the orthodox, at the point at which the status quo allows dissent before reasserting its dominion. In short, you are, merely by existing, a biopolitical weapon” (34).

It’s easy for young would-be scholars to enter the academy imagining that it’s a bastion of freedom that embraces heterodoxy. Indeed, there is significant scholarship that is a testament to that perception. But for Palestinians, and also for those whose research and writing is dedicated to the liberation of Palestine, the mythology of the university unravels much more quickly and readily. And beyond the Ivory Tower, it’s more of the same, as Salaita knows better than most of us: 

“We’re never truly free to speak. That’s one of the many myths arising from a religious devotion to ‘free speech’ in the United States. Speech has social effects and consequences and those are enough to limit the range of content, depending on the situation, never mind corporate or political restrictions. When situations change, so do the limits. Maintaining an academic career as an opponent of Zionism means being sharply mindful of vigorous limitations” (151).

In recent months we’ve seen how tenured and untenured professors are equally vulnerable to the precarity of their academic positions. And through the campus protests, criticism of the university has resonated with much of what Salaita has been arguing for years in his scholarship and his public writing. It’s made many people aware for the first time that “the university is a corporate organ wherein the life of the mind is less a regime than an ad campaign” (98). Salaita, of course, continues to wax eloquent on the illusion of academia as a bastion of freedom on his blog.

From kindergarten to his post-postgraduate studies, Salaita shares glimpses of an educational system deficient in freedom, starting with the architecture of his first school in a former mining Virginia mining town:

“The main school was set back from the trailers, atop a steep hillside. The building still stands, still looks like a Victorian prison with its harsh angles and concrete inlays, a monument to scholastic austerity. There I was to be socialized, tempered, domesticated, shaped into a good boy anxious to learn the ways of the world. But I knew. I fucking knew. I didn’t want to be near that goddamn building. Even at the age of five, I understood that death feels like the hypostasis of progress” (80).

His spidey sense gave him the foresight to withstand the lessons in conformity that American education is predicated upon. Looking back on those days from the driver’s seat of a school bus, he understands his role in shepherding a new generation of students into that world,“The school bus is our erstwhile conveyance into good citizenship, blazing along with the promise of economic mobility” (11). 

Although his own work as a bus driver meant that his family’s economic mobility traveled in a different direction, Salaita is incontrovertible about the role it played in his life:

“Bus driving was a godsend. The job got my family health insurance and a wage, both badly needed, but it also offered a rare sense of belonging. I recoiled when people portrayed my move from academe to the school bus as a fall from grace or a kind of tragedy. I never saw it that way. The circumstances of that move were unfortunate, no doubt, and underlain by a hint of despair. But the change itself was rather conventional. It was a public story, that’s all, and so it needed a theme. Personal downfall is always a solid choice” (133).

Bus driving is not romanticized, but it is compellingly contrasted with academic labor. From his colleagues at work who are “skeptical, heterodox, and international, in many ways a reflection of academe’s self-image, without the comfort or pretension” (98-99) to the children he transports every day: “You’ll never find anything in academe lovelier and more life-affirming than elderly couples picking up their grandchildren from the bus stop. It was, without question, my favorite part of the job” (137). Stories about the children, whom he carried off to school and back each day, helped Salaita “to discover that the ideal isn’t to find a labor of love, but to find love in our labor. That discovery came from dozens of simple intimacies: showing me their loose teeth, gathering around my seat for fist bumps and high fives, teaching me to speak in new languages” (143).

The culture of work Salaita inhabits in this new space is one that is far more redeeming than any college campus, which he notes, “Since elementary school, I’ve searched for a space where I could conform to my surroundings without feeling unmoored from an inner sense of decency. That space, it turns out, is equivalent to the volume of a school bus”(23).

It is while driving through suburban Virginia with a bus full of children that Salaita’s critique of education and labor opens up into the vast suburban puzzle he travels through each day. Those perplexing cul-de-sacs, which he likens to attempting to navigate through Thomas Friedman’s brain, “isolate communities into classed enclaves, manifesting a colonialist myth that development is the epitome of progress, each flattened sphere its own exceptional world. Home buyers cite safety as a major attraction. What does it tell us about a society that the absence of intersections is considered desirable?” (57). Indeed. But those intersections, whether literal or metaphorical, are equally unwelcome in the Ivory Tower where, for example, the intersection of politics and professing are increasingly marginalized. The mythology that such a nexus is possible and even desirable in a university makes such a living downright dishonest.

Salaita’s memoir is so much more than a story of work. It is also clearly a labor of love in the sense of his appreciation for language and the importance writing plays in his life. And the honesty with which he shares his story encompasses his experiences with anxiety and his struggles during the pandemic. Sharing that vulnerability with us only adds to our respect for Salaita’s candor. As he reminds us, “The only thing I have to offer is an honest story. Your humanity is the only thing I will accept in return” (132).

It’s hard to imagine offering him anything other than our humanity in return for reading this insightful memoir. His return to academia at the conclusion of this story — to a position at the American University in Cairo — reveals his pursuit of earning an honest living in spite of the return to an academic job. It’s not a return to the comfort of a tenure-track position, but it is a return to the classroom, to the life he labored so diligently for. It’s a reminder of the precarity of labor and of living, which is perhaps why I keep imagining the subtitle of the book as A Memoir of Precarious Itineraries.