# The Fall from the Ivory Tree
- An essay on the despair of the academic job cycle,
and the hope that must follow

Each fall, as the aspens yellow and the maples redden with their small stars, a kind of reverse Loch Ness monster lifts its head above the ivory tower. It comes in the form of a looming judgment. It runs its claws through your CV, counts the citations you have accrued, weighs the importance of the people writing your letters, and imprints an invisible grade upon your forehead; an imprint you can never quite make out in the mirror.

Its contradictions are dizzying. For an institution that calls itself the poster child of the human ideal of meritocracy, we are constantly instructed on how to become visible because we have to scream for our merit. We borrow ideas wherever we can. Perhaps the endless repeats of the Liberty Mutual ad are not to be ignored but taken as inspiration: my research projects, it seems, need an idea equivalent to an emu or perhaps a recommendation from the emu itself.

Before the ceremony of application begins, an irritation hums through the bones like a neighborhood priest chanting too loudly, even annoying the village rooster. You just want to do fucking science, goddamnit. Yet once you drag yourself from bed and begin stacking your Jenga tower of proof — evidence of scientific devotion tailored to every continent, a strange shaky radiance appears. The self begins to glow as you scroll through your finished materials. It feels like Mount Rushmore, except every face is yours. Oh my, you think, did I really climb this high? You look down from your fourteen thousand foot mountain of self citations that would even put Mt. Whitney to shame. Once a year you build a shrine to yourself: papers arranged like a larger than life Thai rendering of the Buddha, your lemmas and ablation studies glinting with gold.

Your loved ones peer into the temple from outside, worried. There are holes in your clothes you can’t see, and your ribs—barely hidden beneath the extra pounds earned from late night PhD experiments show all the same. To them it looks like the coffee stains on your customized coffee mug with your favorite equations have built a wall between you and the fat industrial salary. But you are somewhere else entirely: a valley of Gandhian poverty. Science is your baton, and you will march, again and again, to drive the colonizer of stupidity from the land.

As much as the self reflection is satisfying, even more so is the Excel sheet of positions you are applying for. It feels like Diwali, Nowruz, Eid, and Hanami all at once. Each green cell is a small lamp, a new year, a moment of gratitude, a petal about to fall. You can’t wait for the excited committee to discover your Buddha sized statue. But behold the little snowflakes of *“who the hell is this"* that settle on the nose of your statue, a single sneeze threatening to shatter its self image. Hollow, reddened eyes of overworked committee members stare at the goof ups you made in your overly AI ed cover letter that you ruined even more in the last moments with your personal touch.

Winter is coming. And if you are not born with a scientific silver spoon, the cold wind in your ears will slowly shatter your sense of self. But let me be reviewer number 0 on your feeling of despair, and pick up the baton that you were about to fling into the sea. I am not promising Kafkaesque, posthumous glory, of your post academia science.

But we can embrace the spirit of the living artist who treats their own mind like a book, a Hubble telescope into the world, and not a begging bowl for citations and forewords. The spirit that survives the grueling shedding of leaves every rejection season.

The spirit of the satisfaction of the long, slow pursuit. The meandering of thoughts during hikes and weekend visits to little town coffee shops. The romantic idea of a scientist, who survives irrespective of what their office plaque says. The lone boat trudging through the sea is not heckling for one of the speckles of white streaked gulls to land on your wrists, but you see the beauty in sketching them nevertheless. Recall the paper with four citations that you bumped into but realized is absolutely the twenty foot root of your work hidden from the world. Let that paper be the symbol of our silent worship.

No professional title can represent your identity as faithfully as the stubbornness of that truth-seeking soul. As a poet once said of their poems, once a paper has left you, its fate is no longer yours to decide. Like migrating penguins, it carries its own compass: it may find another wanderer like you, or it may settle beneath some weed-ridden rock.

That is the torch when the sun seems to set forever. It lives inside us, not in the portrait-ridden halls of artificial human institutions.