So far as I know, no one has ever done a study of the unhappiness of academics. Who might be assigned to the job Business-school professors specializing in industrial psychology and employer/employee relations would botch it. Disaffected sociologists would blame it all on society and knock off for the rest of the semester. My own preference would be anthropologists, using methods long ago devised for investigating a culture from the outside in. The closest thing we have to these ideal anthropologists have been novelists writing academic novels, and their lucubrations, while not as precise as one would like on the reasons for the unhappiness of academics, do show a strong and continuing propensity on the part of academics intrepidly to make the worst of what ought to be a perfectly delightful situation.