I could write – and have written – the past twenty years as a string of successes for my linguistics career: I have presented my work at many conferences on linguistics, digital humanities and literature, in several countries. My pioneering work in computational sign linguistics continues to be cited on a regular basis. In 2008 I was hired to teach linguistics at Saint John’s University, where I developed an introductory linguistics curriculum. In 2009 I received my doctorate in linguistics. In 2012 I was hired to work on natural language processing at New York University. In 2016 I released the first segment of the Digital Parisian Stage. In 2019 I published my first book, Building a Representative Theater Corpus: A Broader View of Nineteenth-Century French. In 2021 I released LanguageLab, an app for audio mimicry exercises.

But of course, on the internet people put up a front. I could just as easily write a history of failure; in fact I hear it in my head on a regular basis: In 2008 my dissertation advisor refused to write letters of recommendation for me; my entire committee has showed very little interest in my work and have barely cited me. In 2013 the grant I was hired to work on at NYU ended, and with a brief exception I haven’t been hired to do any further language modeling research. I’ve applied to dozens of full-time teaching jobs, but have not even been invited to an interview. I couldn’t make a living as an adjunct instructor in New York, so in 2015 I stopped teaching and in 2016 took a job as a computer programmer, with no linguistics focus. As far as I know, hardly anyone has used my sign language software, my French theater corpus, my book or LanguageLab.

The truth is somewhere in between glorious success and abject failure. A lot of my difficulty has been due to circumstances beyond my control. The professor who I thought would be my dissertation chair was not actively publishing by the time I started my studies, retired right before I proposed my thesis, and sustained severe brain damage in a bicycle crash shortly after I defended my dissertation. I graduated into an incredibly difficult job market, due to cuts to liberal arts education and general research funding and a glut of underemployed people with humanities PhDs.

I have also made principled choices that have affected my career. The professor who I cited extensively in my dissertation has never publicly acknowledged my work, I suspect because I declined to participate in her patronage system. I intentionally chose not to work on projects that I suspected were extractive, exploitative or overhyped. In order to take care of my young child and prioritize my wife’s career, I moved thousands of miles away from my university, suspended and delayed my doctorate, and limited my job search to opportunities near her job. In the past ten years I’ve similarly limited my job options in order to care for my mother, who is severely disabled with Parkinson’s disease.

For decades I’ve been a prolific poster on the social media of the times – email lists and USENET in the nineties, bulletin boards and blogs in the early 2000s, Twitter and Tumblr in the teens. I’ve mostly projected the first image of myself – the authoritative expert – while fearing that people would find out about my failures.

That confident persona often came off as patronizing or condescending, but I felt it was necessary to assert my authority and stake out my territory in order to be taken seriously, to advance my career. I tried to do it with as much compassion and generosity as I could.

I’m still proud of my knowledge and my accomplishments, and I want to be recognized for them. But now that my academic career appears to be stalled at best, there doesn’t seem to be much point in being brash the way I was.

The thing is, we’re all putting up a front. Academic competition seems to demand it. It’s very hard to do it without being cruel or indifferent to others.

Recognizing that everyone fronts means that it’s important to have compassion for the ways that other people front. Judging others for being cruel or indifferent is reasonable. Judging them for fronting at all is not.