Fun-having ban of epic proportions take two!

I've been working on written exam number two for three day snow. I've got about six solid pages written, which is a decent but not spectacular start, and I'm feeling reasonably good about it. I've also found out that I passed the first written exam, which puts me on track to have my orals at the beginning of the quarter.

Which is all well and good, but I seem to care less and less. The more I think about the academic lifestyle, the less I'm sure that it's what I want to do. It was all well and good in the 1970s, when they couldn't hire tenured professors fast enough so coming from a decent program meant not only a job but the potential for a bidding war, academic publishers would publish anything that was of sufficient academic merit, and the only people who made it to college were the ones who really wanted to be there. But now that universities are downsizing, students are more and more treating college like high school where all they should have to do to pass is the absolute minimum, and academic publishers are choosing to publish based on possible profitability rather than on merit, it's not looking so pleasant.

I don't want to spend the next five years attempting to publish constantly in order to meet ever more ridiculous tenure requirements. I don't want to put having children off until I have tenure, but I don't want to have to teach two or three classes a semester and write a book and several articles while pregnant or with a new infant. I don't want to have no choice over where I live, because there are so few tenure-track academic jobs open that IF I'm offered one, I will have little choice but to take it. I don't want to spend the next five years barely scraping by as an adjunct, never having time to do my own research but not being able to get a tenure-track job without constant publications. I don't want to deal with entitled students who think that just because the made it to college (or because they're at an Ivy League), they deserve good grades with little or no work, because 'that's how it was in high school'. I don't want to never be able to afford to own a house because universities are almost always located in the most valuable real estate areas. I want health insurance that involves a doctor who doesn't assume that the only possible illnesses are pregnancy and STDs. I want dental insurance and eye care. I want an income that a person could live on somewhere other than rural Idaho (that not being, notably, where I actually live).

It truly saddens me that academia has come to this. I love my research, I love teaching, I love thinking deep thoughts and trying to puzzle out how people work and why, but the bureaucratic nonsense has made that less and less of the job.

Nontheless, I treck onward. I'm going to finish the damned degree at this point no matter what. If I chuck it all at that point, all well and good, but I'm too far in not to finish.