Every few months, on a whim, I Google myself. There are a few other Philip Holdens who join me on the first page of my search results: the writer of hunting books from New Zealand, the managerial expert, the spirit medium who has been unmasked as a charlatan. But I’m always also present: I am not so very difficult to find. There was a time when most of the first few pages would be links to things to do with me: to the National University of Singapore, to most of the major books and articles I’d published, to talks and to op eds. There was often something I’d forgotten, an interview from long ago, or a student’s or colleague’s posting that mentioned me. But I was always there, and from the individual links from each search result you could easily construct the story of a career, and life in academia going back to my graduate school days and my first publications in the early 1990s.

On my most recent searches, I’ve noticed that I am slowly vanishing. Philip Holden the hunter is growing back like a persistent weed, and a thicket of other Philip Holdens, some new to me, are proliferating on that first page and beyond. What remains of me, in the Google.ca search my browser now defaults to, is a disparate series of fragments. An interview about the university in Singapore I gave a decade ago while at UBC as a visiting scholar, which wasn’t very incisive, because of that natural tendency that you have when you come from Singapore and you go abroad: you want to push back against expectations that you will speak always about authoritarianism. There’s a staff profile from Simon Fraser University, from when I gave a course on Southeast Asia through biography in the Arts 55+ program. Again, almost a decade ago.  LinkedIn and academia.edu pages that I have only visited in recent years to update forwarding details. And then a link to my Google Scholar account, with its graph of a citation count that peaks a few years ago, and is now tapering away. I’m reminded, oddly, of those recent COVID-19 projections of an ideal flattened curve, with the high point in 2017 and then a slow, but perceptible fall.

How does it feel to be fading away? I have mixed feelings. You are always taught, somehow, that academic careers will go on forever, and that they should follow an ideal path that very few actually conform to: the doctorate, possibly the postdoc, the tenure-track job, tenure and promotion, all the way up through promotion to full professor. There’s teaching and administration, of course, but the core of academic life in this story is research, and research productivity measured through a series of benchmarks: citation counts, monographs with top university presses, and articles placed in top international journals. Through a mixture of privilege, luck, and some ability, my own academic story conformed to this. I didn’t get a postdoc, and in my early years at the National Institute of Education the prospect of promotion and tenure seemed a very remote possibility. With my move to the National University of Singapore in 2000, however, I was firmly back on the idealized career track, just as NUS was making its transition from being largely a teaching university to a major international research university. In my career, I was conscious of, and for the most part able to, negotiate successfully with demands. I produced research I valued, always tried to keep teaching central to my work as an academic, and only took on administrative positions strategically, refusing those that I thought would take me too far from the classroom, and from engagement outside the university. And then, in my mid-fifties, I began to walk away. I took a leave of absence, returned for a year to find that nothing had changed, and then negotiated an agreement in which I could work part-time, be relieved of administrative duties, so that I could concentrate more on what I loved. When this arrangement—through other factors that weren’t under my control –was no longer tenable, I left. Yet I have to confess that when I’m reminded of what might have been, when I read research and watch online debates that I might previously have been part of, there is a sense of loss.

In the last few months, though, as my immersion in my counselling program and other areas of life has grown, a new feeling has strengthened in me. It’s actually good to vanish, to continue to do work that is now unseen. In my career I was always uneasy about networking and the instrumentality that came with it. I’m naturally shy, but I think my shyness was also telling me something important about how to be in the world. Community connections are very important, but there’s also a way that the making of “connections” under neoliberalism very quickly becomes about self-cultivation and self-promotion All those facebook posts in which someone shares a photograph of themselves doing good, or speaks of being humbled about having received awards or recognition. And the self then becomes very fragile to criticism of the work, or criticism of privilege: if the self is so much bound up in what you do, of course you will feel vulnerable when what you do is debated and criticized. 

One of the things that you are confronted with early on in counselling is that the world will never be fair to you. I struggled with this at first, because I do believe in social justice, and that the world can and will change to allow genuine equality. This kind of basic fairness is something to struggle for. Yet on an individual level, the world will never give you back the recognition you hoped for. I have seen so many colleagues who became caught up in the failed promotion, the negative book review, the elevation of a colleague’s work that is intellectually thin above their own, a hurtful student evaluation. It’s easy to move from that to a story in which the world, or individual and collective actors in it, have not kept faith with you, a story that becomes all-consuming. And a way to move beyond this is surely not to worry about the self at all, to realize that you have given the most when you have been thoroughly forgotten, when the experiences that your students, readers, clients had through you are now thoroughly part of them and the social action they are now part of.

I have a sense in writing this, not for the first time, that language runs away with itself, takes on a life of its own. There’s something I’m uneasy about here in generalizing my own experience, something about privilege that I haven’t fully addressed. So I’m offering this momentary pleasure in vanishing not so much as a prescription as an account of a path taken. I’m now exactly half way through my coursework, and in a week those summer classes, with their grades and measurement, but also with their larger possibilities of learning, start up again.