Georgia NeSmith
2 min readJan 20, 2020

Everything said in this article is true of my experience with getting a doctorate in mass communication from the U Iowa in 1994. Even worse, I became disabled within 4 years of finishing, and those disabilities I never shared with my faculty, fearing their judgment.

It affected my teaching & I received low evaluations from students [along with some great ones], but I take those with a very large grain of salt. Example: one said “if I wanted to learn about black people I would have taken an African American Studies course!” [I took seriously the administration’s exhortations to integrate multicultural education into mainstream courses.] I was the only member of the department doing that, and pretty much one of the very few doing that around the country in my field.

I was up against major resistance and little backup from other faculty, and I lost my 2nd faculty employment contract. And couldn’t find others over the space of 4 years, when I finally realized I wasn’t going to be able to teach full-time anyway, and received SSDI. I’m now on “retirement” 25 years after the last time I taught FT.

However…

I have never regretted it for a single moment. Those years were the best years of my life. I became a different person, a better person, a more disciplined person, a more knowledgeable person than I would have been otherwise. Not to mention a better researcher, writer and teacher of writing.

At least for a period of time I was able to occupy space where I could engage the intellectual side of me [which is about 50%, the rest being creative] and be rewarded for it. Literally. I won the top award that my department gave out annually. I had finally come to understand that, despite being a woman, despite never having my intellect be taken seriously before, despite all the negative BS that had been dumped on me before, I had, in fact, an intellectual capacity no one had bothered to see before. And I was in one of the toughest, most prestigious departments in my field.

Most precious to me was that I gained a solid theoretical knowledge of how the world works…and it’s come in very handy as, like others, I am forced to cope emotionally & intellectually with the most insane world a modern person could ever encounter.

There’s nowhere else in the world I know where you can get those things.

Georgia NeSmith
Georgia NeSmith

Written by Georgia NeSmith

Retired professor, feminist, writer, photographer, activist, grandmother of 5, overall Wise Woman. Phd UIA School of Journalism & Mass Communication, 1994.

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