John le Carre, Patron Saint of Disillusioned Academics

 I have a new piece at Tropics of Meta about John le Carre novels and how they are the true apex of "quit lit," that genre beloved by sad sack ex-professors like yours truly. Check it out!

Now That The Academic Lifeboats Are Capsizing, What Next?

On academic Twitter today I've seen a lot of folks sharing charts showing the steep decline in the number of available jobs in the humanities this year. It's an alarming image, showing what happens when bad goes to worse and then to something beyond. Today I have also been seeing a lot of stuff about the closures of small colleges. Beyond that, there's news out of places like Tulsa that are cutting back their humanities departments. I know someone who just left academia because the history department at their school got cut.

It appears that we might be hitting the crossover point a lot of people saw on the horizon around the time I left academia, back in 2011. I still remember my last American Historical Association conference as a professor that year. I booked the trip to San Diego, but didn't get any interviews (I was trying to get a job closer to my spouse.) My friends and I joked about there being an uprising in the job pit and the established scholars escaping the riot with jetpacks. It seemed like everyone who wasn't at the top was doomed.

Of course, no mass collective action arose to resist all of this. The people in the lifeboats, who had their jobs, stood by while people around them drowned, comforting themselves in the myth of mediocrity. They were the only faculty who had any real power. Those on the contingent track either gave up or kept hoping they'd get that tenure-track job at the end of the line. Back in 2013 I warned the lifeboaters that the reckoning was coming for them, too. Now it looks like that day is upon us.

So, what's going to happen? I don't foresee a mass movement by academics to defend their interests. The old timers will just wait to retire, the midcareer folks will hope for the same and the young scholars on the tenure track will cross their fingers and count their blessings with an understanding that the future is unclear. Contingent faculty will continue to lack the power to act and the churn and precariousness of their position will make organizing difficult, just as it is now.

At this point the salvation can only come from outside. The proposals by Sanders and Warren to make public higher education free might be the death knell for some of those small private colleges, but it would do more to bring money and majors to academia than anything else. At this point I think it is the only way out. I'm not holding my breath, and meanwhile lots of good people are drowning, their immense talent and potential squandered.

Letters of Recommendation

The seniors at my school are in the middle of the college application process, which means I am currently in the thick of letters of recommendation season. This year I have over twenty letters to write. This is a function of teaching juniors, and as difficult as it can be, I always cherish it. I am aware of just how much responsibility I have over my students’ future, and I take it very seriously. Being able to help them on their way in life is an example of how the work of teaching means making a positive impact on others.

It also reminds me of the difference in mentality between teaching high school and being a college professor. As a college professor I wrote letters of recommendation, but far fewer in the average year than I do now. Those letters also tended to be spaced out over the course of the year, while nowadays I have to do them in a massive flurry of activity. It’s not easy work, but I am also aware that it is an essential part of my job.

It also reminds me why I’m glad I’m not a professor anymore when I read articles like the one in the Chronicle today on the burden of letter writing for some professors. Like just about anything professors do, it’s considered an undue impediment for Working On Your Research. The only thing that’s never seen as a waste of time for professors is working on research. Spending too much time on teaching and advising are always warned against. The almighty god of research must be kept happy.

While the article is right that the work is uncompensated and often falls harder on some more than others (which I am well aware of), it is wrong to treat it as less important than doing research. Most academics need to realize that their research isn’t all that important. Few people are likely to read it, and those who do will turn it into a footnote, at best. Writing a letter of recommendation means making a direct impact on a person’s life. Isn’t that a much more significant thing than writing a journal article that will barely be read?

The same goes for teaching. If you are an academic you will make a far bigger impact on the lives of the people sitting in your classroom than anyone on a conference panel. I enjoy being a high school teacher for many reasons, but the biggest is that my work MATTERS and I work in an environment where others feel that way too. As a professor I published research that did not align with the fields of my colleagues, so it meant nothing to them. As a teacher I am part of a team motivated by the collective responsibility to teach our students well.

The older I get the more I try to focus on what matters in life. What matters most is other people and my relationship to them. My kids and wife mean more than my career. At school my students matter most. I'm glad to be working in an environment where human relationships are prioritized. It's a shame that the academy isn't like that more.

How "Meetings Day" Sums Up The Worst Of Working In Low-Level Higher Ed

Getting bawled out by jerks in suits is something salespeople and academics have in common

Tomorrow the school year begins for me, like it does for most educators, with a day of meetings. In fact, I will have four days of meetings, although a lot of that time will be with the students I advise and their parents. Those meetings are usually a great way to jump back into the school year. I am not as hot about the school and division-wide meetings we do, but I am generally just not a meetings guy. The administrators at my school do a good job of running them and making them relevant, so it's hard to complain too much. I come out of them feeling like we at least are doing something important with our time.

This is a far cry from my time in higher education. At many universities there is a big "Meetings Day" with sessions at the university, college, and department level. I have been spending the day feeling anxious just remembering those days. The message they tended to impart was that the faculty were peons. When I was a visiting assistant professor I was basically not told to go the meetings, the subtext being that I was "the help" and not welcome in through the front door.

Then I became a tenure track professor and realized that as belittling as it was to not be welcome at university events, having to attend the meetings was actually worse. I started at my job in August of 2008, which meant meetings the following years were full of talk of cutbacks, austerity, and the general message that we should shut up about it because we were all lucky to have a job.

What was surreal was how the austerity talk mingled with the usual administrator bragging over stuff that they built and "initiatives" they were planning. One year we heard about hiring and salary freezes and library cutbacks, but also how the new residence hall would have a big purple beacon on top. Why? Because the old residence hall being torn down had one and it needed to be replaced with a better one. Why? Because the school color was purple, and the beacon would signal that our sports teams had won their match that day to all the yokels in the small East Texas town where we were located.

The president of the school was so pleased to announce this. That year, like every other year, his annual presidential speech was met with a standing ovation after some of the older die hards would admonish the rest of us to join them. It was like something out of a Politburo meeting. At the college level meeting that followed we heard less about building and more about "initiatives." My favorite one is almost too ridiculous to describe. A land developer building a residential complex on a lake in the hill country over a two hundred miles from us wanted to partner with the college to have events there. We were a local university in East Texas and in the midst of having our travel budgets cut professors were being given some kind of time share pitch. I assumed this was some sort of tax dodge, and I could not believe that the dean was actually trying to sell this pile of crap to us. I have a friend from those days and we still get a laugh at the mere mention of it.

The day ended with department-level meetings, which were up and down but usually displayed our disfunction pretty openly. I still remember the time after a meeting I went to lunch with some of my colleagues and two of them joked about committing a violent act against one of their coworkers. (This should have been a clue that they would later backstab me.) Or the time I had to hear someone go off on how the United States needed to start a war with Russia over the crisis in Georgia back in 2008.

The Meetings Day was always the worst way to start the school year. It killed my morale because it made it obvious that me and my work were of little value to the institution that I worked for. Sometimes it also felt like a dark look into the future. Working for a long period of time at a regional state institution in an isolated small town that was never on the list of places you wanted a live takes a toll on your well-being. Every Meetings Day I noticed the two alternatives: to embrace cynicism to the point of calcification (I was already on that road) or to join the cult and to invest in the institution. After all, if you think the place you work for is shit, doesn't that kind of also make you shit too? That was the calculation that the people who stood for the university's president's propaganda speech had made.

I'm glad I chose the forbidden option, to simply leave the whole thing behind. However, on days like this I think about what could have been. My old university was full of a lot of good people. If they had been given the power to run things instead being forced to obey the whims of others, that institution could've been something special. Today I am thinking of all my friends and colleagues still working in the world of low-level higher ed, and hoping against hope that the tide can be turned and that universities will someday be worthy of their faculty and students.

If The Democratic Primary Field Was a University History Department

The Democratic primary field is a mix of clashing personalities who like to hear themselves talk and where white men are overrepresented. I was immediately reminded of the dynamics in a university history department when I watched this week's debates. With that in mind, here is the Democratic primary field (or at least most of it) as a history department.

Joe Biden is the old professor still teaching off of notes he typed up in 1975 and who gets handsy at the holiday party after one too many scotch and sodas. His colleagues have been privately asking themselves for years why he hasn't retired yet.

Bernie Sanders is the old Marxist scholar who doesn't show up to all of the faculty meetings, but when he does he's salty and still holds grudges established in 1983. While most of his colleagues are ambivalent to him, the grad students and adjuncts like him because he's one of the few tenured people to actually bring their concerns to the faculty.

Kamala Harris is the hotshot rising associate professor known for showing up to job talks and destroying weak candidates with withering questions. She also suddenly became a transnational historian once that became a popular topic and abandoned her dissertation on diplomatic history.

Elizabeth Warren is the established full professor who is still putting out highly regarded research while having a high reputation as a teacher. She also has managed to take Professor Sanders' side in faculty meeting disputes without alienating her colleagues.

Beto O'Rourke is the young, run of the mill assistant professor who thinks he is above his current department, and tries and fails every year to land a job at a more prestigious university.

Tim Ryan thinks his obsession with grade inflation is the reason that his class enrollments are low, not the fact that he is an insufferable ass who lacks empathy for his students.

Amy Klobuchar is the professor who has racked up a lot of publications but has never mentored a graduate student on through their dissertation, despite taking on several of them in their first year at the school. When asked about this her former advisees, who always take on a different advisor or drop out, go silent. Junior colleagues pray that she's not on their tenure committee.

When Tulsi Gabbard comes up in conversation her colleagues sigh and point fingers over who was responsible for hiring her.

Pete Buttigieg is the Type A personality assistant professor who got hired while he was still ABD at an Ivy League university. He was the golden child of his well-known advisor, but he mysteriously hasn't published anything yet.

Julian Castro is the new hire that nobody talked about when he arrived but had the fattest binders when he applied for tenure.

Cory Booker is the professor who is constantly talking about himself. This draws a core group of impressionable students who don't understand why the other professors roll their eyes when they express their admiration for him.

Marianne Williamson is the professor who burns incense in her office and invites grad students over to her home to try edibles.

The Decline of the University Humanities as a Metaphor for America

A prophecy from the dawn of neoliberalism

During the twelve years I spent in academia as a grad student and professor in history there was a constant feeling of crisis, one that has only heightened since I jumped ship back in 2011. First came the cutbacks to salary increases and research. Library budgets bit the dust while retired professors meant the elimination of tenure lines and their replacement with adjuncts and "visitors." Then came the 2008 crisis, with furloughs, salary cuts, and soon the absolute destruction of entire departments and programs. The languages, once considered a cornerstone of higher education, got eviscerated. In recent years philosophy and even history have followed. We are now living in a country where so-called "universities" have football teams that mash their student athletes' brains into mush but where a student can't major in philosophy. 

All the while, precarity has become the norm. More and more classes are taught by adjuncts paid by the course who do not get basic benefits and protections. If you want to see American capitalism at its most exploitative you won't just find it in the strawberry fields and slaughterhouses, you will also find it on tree-lined campuses. 

The future is going to look a lot like the past. Higher education in the humanities is going back to being a luxury good reserved for the affluent. In the meantime, careers and lives are being destroyed. Those of use who were on the front lines in this as grads, adjuncts, and even tenure-track profs at regional universities in red states saw this coming. The people who ran our professional organizations, who were supposed to be looking out for the interests of their members, didn't lift a finger. Why? Because they really represented scholars at the most prestigious universities, whose precious advisees would always be in demand on the job "market." Now, at long last, some of them seem aware that action should be taken. (Probably because their star grad student had to stoop to take a job at a regional state university somewhere in the South. Eww!) Of course, it's too late now. The die has been cast.

I feel like this is a metaphor for America at large. Just as neoliberalism has gutted universities, it has gutted the nation as a whole. The rot has been setting in for decades. I first came of political age in the late 1980s. Back then, over THIRTY YEARS AGO the discourse was full of concern that inequality was rising, that poor communities were being pushed down harder, and that deindustrialization was wrecking whole regions of the country. Thirty years later we still have the same issues, and they have only gotten worse and worse. For example, in the 1980s my home region of rural Nebraska was ravaged by the farm crisis. Back then people express alarm over the spike in farm foreclosures. Since then family farms have kept disappearing and the small towns have been more and more emptied out. Nowadays the only thriving retail in my hometown is dollar stores. 

This entire time, the elites of the country could see what was happening. Like a lot of tenured professors at R1 universities, they didn't like it, but they also weren't directly hurt by what was happening to others. They could watch those drowning around them, turn their backs, say "That's a shame" and get on with their lives. This of course only goes for the sympathetic elites. The others just laughed and counted their money. 

Since the election of Trump it has dawned on the more sympathetic elites that something truly wrong has happened in the country and they need to respond to it. Of course, like those tenured professors they aren't equipped to see the severity of the problem. They somehow think that our institutions alone can solve the problem, that it can be combatted with "civility" and "norms." Again, those at the front lines know that something more is necessary, but they are kept away from having any kind of voice in the halls of power. 

In any case, it's already too late. While the elites were ignoring the problem it was quietly overwhelming them. The Sex Pistols, singing in the late 70s at the first dawn of neoliberalism, were prophets. "No future for you."

REO Speedwagon, "157 Riverside Avenue"

I recently had the good fortune to hang out with two of my friends from graduate school. Like the middle-aged men that we are, we talked about the old times, and how much we miss them. I was broke in grad school, often stressed, and prone to depression, but those were the best days of my life up to that point. It was the only time in my stint in the academy where I was able to "live the life of the mind." The quest for knowledge consumed a plurality of my waking hours. That said, I spent plenty of time with my friends, from playing backyard bocce ball to going to concerts to just drinking and laughing until the wee hours.

We did all of this in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, one of the great overlooked places to be in this country. It was cheap, easy to get around, but always full of events and culture. It is a place that gave birth to and nurtured writers, scientists, and thinkers. It also gave us REO Speedwagon.

While I lived there I chuckled a bit when one of the streets in downtown Champaign was renamed REO Speedwagon Way. After all, weren't they sort of the standard bearers of a kind of forgotten, lowest common denominator arena rock? A couple of my friends in Chambana who had grown up in downstate Illinois managed to persuade me otherwise. Before REO was an arena rock behemoth in the early 1980s, they were a hard working hard driving hard rocking band that didn't have any hits but did have a devoted following in the midwest. It wasn't until their eighth album in 1978 (the tragically named You Can Tune A Piano But You Can't Tuna Fish) that they even had a long player in the top 40. It's kind of amazing that Epic, their label, hadn't dropped them by that point.

Perhaps they heard something that others hadn't. My friends certainly had, and with their help I heard it, too. I can't help thinking it's some kind of metaphor. People tell me I'm not supposed to like going to graduate school, listening to REO Speedwagon, and living in the corn belt, but I ended up loving all of those things. I guess I was extremely lucky to be around like-minded people for so many years. It's certainly a blessing to see them again.

That's a roundabout way of introducing my song for this week, "157 Riverside Avenue." It's off of REO's first album, but has been a staple of their live shows even after there were hits for the audience to expect. For that reason I chose the live version from their 1977 double-live You Get What You Play For. (They really have a thing for tragically named albums) It makes the most sense, since pre-fame REO played show after show after show searching for that big break while building a loyal audience.

The double-live album was obligatory for rock bands in the 1970s, and one even catapulted Peter Frampton to fame after a similarly long time in the woodshed as REO. The sound is pure early 70s boogie rock but by 1977 the once shaggy band had made itself a fine-tuned arena-rocking machine. The boogie bounce is still there but the solos are blistering, courtesy of the incomparable Gary Richrath, perhaps the most underrated rock guitarist of the classic rock era. Kevin Cronon still throws in a silly bit of banter and scat singing in the middle, but it sounds pretty tight.

Not only does this music remind me of my spiritual home of Champaign-Urbana circa 2000-2006, I try to take some hope from it. As far as my writing goes, I'm still striving and trying after many years to get a hit. I've managed to hone my skills, and even build up a (small) audience. I guess I can hope that something bigger and better is still possible.

A Requiem For The Faculty Office

I have a new piece at Tropics of Meta, which as far as I'm concerned is the little scholarly website that could. Read their stuff, it's pretty fantastic.

My latest article is a response to a piece in the Chronicle about the attempts to replace faculty offices. My piece is both a defense of faculty offices, but also a call for professors to be aware of how their privileges (like offices) will not last unless they take collective action.

Take Action On Grad Student Tuition Waivers

This post is not one where I am going to analyze politics or riff on pop culture, no sir. I know most of my readers are academics or former academics, and so y'all know that the new tax bill would tax graduate student tuition waivers. This would have prevented most of us, including yours truly, from going to grad school. I know that they are whipping votes for this tax bill in the House next week, and I think we need to flood our representatives with letters and calls about this. I know my rep in New Jersey has my back, so I wrote the representative for the district where I went to grad school, who happens to be a Republican. I will share that letter below. However, I also plan on contacting my alma mater to demand they get off their asses and lobby said rep to do the right thing by his district. I recommend that the rest of you do the same. Kvetching about it on social media alone doesn't solve a damn thing.

Anyway, here's the letter:

I am a proud graduate of the University of Illinois, where I earned my PhD in history. My six years in Champaign-Urbana were some of the best and most fruitful of my life. My graduate degree allowed me to become a university professor and a now teacher at a private high school. The knowledge I learned at Illinois is something that makes in impact on young people every day I go into the classroom, and it is one of the things that I am most grateful for.

It is thus with great trepidation and sadness that I have learned that the current tax overhaul proposal in Congress would start taxing tuition waivers granted by universities to graduate students. Without my tuition waiver there is no way that I would have been able to complete my studies. During my graduate education I worked as a teaching assistant, earning less than $20,000 a year and barely scraping by. Having to pay taxes on a much larger amount of money than I was actually earning would have ended my graduate career.

There are literally thousands of graduate students at the University of Illinois in this situation. The U of I, as I am sure you are aware, is one of the biggest economic assets that the 13^th district possesses. It draws in people from around the country and around the world, many who fall in love with central Illinois and become great assets to its economy and communities. The so-called “Silicon Prairie” would not exist without a fresh group of graduate students in the computer sciences.

What does the government actually gain by taxing poor graduate students? The revenue will be slight, but the negative impact will be tremendous. It is also morally outrageous for a tax plan to do this to graduate students while simultaneously making it so wealthy children can inherit more of their parents’ money or for massive corporations to pay the same tax rate that I, the teacher and spouse of a teacher, will be paying under the new plan.

While it might be a lost cause to persuade you to reject such giveaways to the richest Americans, I at least hope that you can see that the tax on graduate student tuition waivers will have a horrible impact on thousands of your constituents and be extremely bad for the district whose interests you have promised to represent. If you cannot reject the current tax bill wholesale, at least work to eliminate the tax on tuition waivers. If you refuse, I must assume you serve masters other than the people of central Illinois.

Thoughts On A Reunion Of Grad School Friends

I just spent the last three days in East Tennessee in a house with a bunch of my grad school friends (some of whom make up the tens of people who read this blog on the regular!) It was a great experience, and actually got me thinking a lot about the changes in higher education.

We earned our PhDs or left grad school in the period roughly between 2004 and 2008. Some of us are tenured and tenure-track faculty at various universities. Just as many of us are working at universities in another capacity or teaching at the high school level (like yours truly.) Back in say, 2006, when I graduated, I doubt any of us would have predicted any of this. A lot of this had to do with the infamous academic job market, but not in the ways you might think. A lot of the folks who are no longer university faculty were once tenure track professors (like me), or were offered but turned down tenure track jobs. (I am glad to say that while many of us worked for a time as contingent faculty, none of us tried to make a life out of adjuncting.)

It wasn't so much that getting a job was impossible, it was that those jobs were often incompatible with our lives. I am not the only person in my circle who opted out of being faculty to either solve the "two body problem" or (relatedly) live in a place I actually wanted to live in. I had long agreed with the wisdom that academia requires its adherents to be a kind of clergy, whose work is to be a calling demanding great personal sacrifice, rather than just another professional career. Seeing us all gathered together this weekend was a very visceral reminder that so many in my generation of PhDs have not followed the path they worked so hard to forge in grad school.

Until I fell in love with my wife, I was willing to accept the calling and try to make myself happy with the consolation that I was a scholar, even if it meant living in places far from friends and family where I did not truly want to be. Once my life had different priorities, it was inevitable that my academic career was going to end. That's the case for a lot of other people, too, both in and outside of my circle of friends.

While I and my non-professor friends are contributing a lot in our current jobs and get personal fulfillment from them, I can't help but to think of how much scholarly potential was and is wasted by a system completely inadequate to human needs. Of course, as far as the department we graduated from is concerned, those of us who are no longer professors might as well not even exist. And so for those just emerging from my alma mater with their doctoral diplomas fresh in their hands, the cycle continues.

Graduation Is The Sweetest Time For a Prof Turned Teacher

Graduation day is the day when "This Is Where I Belong" by the Kinks becomes my theme song

Today was my high school's graduation, and by that I mean the school where I teach. It is the day of the year, above all the others, that confirms my decision to leave academia to become a teacher.

When I was a professor, attending graduation was a chore mandated by the university. (We had to go to one per year.) While I was always excited to cheer on favorite students who were graduating, the event was mostly a sterile reading of names. (I learned to go to the summer graduation, because it was shorter and because the keynote speech was given by a fellow prof, meaning it was better than the others we usually got.) The last graduation I went to at my university happened right after I had accepted my job offer at a high school in New York, but before I had informed the university and my chair. (I had to wait until Monday.) At this point I was so estranged from my surroundings that I drank two stiff bloody marys for breakfast and drove to the graduation blasting early Fall singles.

Flash forward to today, when I showed up an hour early to mingle with the students before the ceremony. During that time one student tearfully told me I was the best teacher she ever had, and would miss me. Another told me I was a role model for him going forward in life. I have a tremendous amount of respect for both of these students, and I almost just started breaking down and crying right there. Afterwards there were not just students but parents hugging me and wishing me well and testifying to how much they appreciated my work. Again, it was hard to keep it together. I finally broke when I got home and opened the card a student had given me expressing her gratitude. I don't want to get into the details, but it was so heartfelt and flattering that I am still shaken by it.

Until I became a teacher I never knew that I was capable of having such an effect on other people's lives. Sure, there were glimpses of this when I was a prof, but nothing approaching this level. I have never felt in my life such a sense of meaning and importance in my work. What happened today, and what I did to build those relationships is a million times more important and meaningful than any monograph I could write, any conference paper I could give, any research that I could do. The connections forged in the high school classroom are of an intensity higher than I imagined possible when I taught college students.

It is on this day when I feel that I do not deserve what I have. I went from being at a job where I was treated as an afterthought to one where my work is valued and recognized. I get a constant sense of appreciation from my students, their parents, my colleagues, and even my superiors. How did I get so lucky? This is why, when people ask me if I want to go back into academia, I just laugh and laugh and say nothing. This is why the old cycle of regret has melted away. This is why I am glad and proud, not sheepish or embarrassed, to call myself a teacher.

Why Professors Are The New Target For The Authoritarian Nationalists

Don't call them conservatives. Don't call them populists. Call them what they are: authoritarian nationalists.

With the embrace of Trumpism the Republican party has fully become a nationalist party as much as Alternative for Germany or The National Front. They have melded their preexisting free-marketeering more fully onto a nationalist message, evidenced this week by new bills in the state legislatures of Missouri and Iowa to strip tenure from professors there. The politician pushing the bill in Missouri has called tenure "un-American."

Academia is one of the few institutions in this country where the left has any level of real power. And the right, as I have been at labored pains to point out, sees themselves as the "real America" that must eradicate all "un-American" elements from society. They cast a wide net. They want immigrants deported, Muslims banned, African Americans terrorized by killer cops, gays in the closet, and trans people invisible. The professors who promote points of view that contradict this must have their power broken and to live in fear, and that is exactly what these nationalists want. They want loyal, obedient subjects with enough technical knowledge to run the machines and perform their jobs, but too stupid and ignorant to be able or willing to criticize the system that dominates them.

In former times they justified these anti-academic policies via cost cutting and efficiency. "Why are we offering arts majors when we need more coders?" Now they have crossed the line into wanting those oppose them crushed directly rather than indirectly. Without tenure there are going to be mass, wholesale firings as entire departments are scrapped, and any individual professor who teaches classes on race, class, or gender will be targeted by some dipshit in the state legislature. We will have the perfect intersection of austerity and nationalism. The states want to slash non-technical education anyway, now they can have the icing on the cake by destroying the careers of left intellectuals.

In other nations where authoritarian nationalists have come to power, intellectuals and academia have never failed to be a big target. It's time for academics who've been in the lifeboats as their adjunct brethren drown around them to wake the fuck up.

Don't Adjunct

It finally appears that there is a growing awareness in American society of the crime of adjunct labor exploitation. Today Gawker did an extended piece (in a running series) about it. I remember a time when students in classes taught by adjuncts didn't even know what adjunct professors were.

It's May, which is when the so-called "secondary" academic job market is in full swing. In this job market positions are minimally advertised, if at all. In this market departments look at their ledger of courses marked "staff" in the system and are looking for someone to fill them. Whereas regular job searches can be painstaking, the secondary market can be quite haphazard.  A lot of the folks on the secondary market are just about to get their PhDs, but have struck out in the tenure track search. I remember the May of 2006 vividly, because I was one of those people. I remember the pure, unrefined fear for my future that I was feeling, and I empathize greatly with those feeling it right now.

All of a sudden, I went from someone who was unwanted to having four job interviews for temporary gigs and three job offers, all for "visiting" positions. Not good enough to score a campus interview in the regular search, I was suddenly a hot commodity on the secondary market. (This was during a time when enrollments were shooting up and before the crash of 2008. After that even the secondary market got dicey.) It was then that I started to realize just how much of the academic labor system was kept afloat by temporary labor. (None of the institutions where I matriculated relied on it much, so I had been shielded.)

During my visiting gig I realized that I was relatively lucky. A friend of mine adjuncted, which meant he taught the same number of courses as me, but got paid a little more than half as much (without benefits), meaning that he supplemented his income with classes at another local university and a part time job. There was no reason for this disparity, other than the fact that the school I worked for wanted a ready stable of cheap, on the spot labor.  (At least he got promoted to visitor the next year. Evidently some of the same folks who adjuncted are still there today, a decade later.)  While there and at another institution I soon observed that adjuncts are paid as low as the market will bear, and can have classes taken away from them at the last moment, meaning their standard of living is always in doubt.

The Gawker article has all kinds of adjunct horror stories, and I've heard and witnessed my share myself, even if I never adjuncted. I've heard and seen enough to know that scholars leaving their grad school days behind need to hear this message: don't adjunct.

Of course this is not absolute. You gotta eat, after all. But you should only do it for as little time as possible. You should spend your time while adjuncting finding ways to get jobs that aren't adjuncting.  This is not victim blaming, because it's no one's fault that they are an adjunct, it's the fault of a corrupt system that refuses to pay people a living wage for their labor.  If you're at a school with a unionization movement, join up and fight, but if a union is not in your future, start planning your escape.

You can't pull any yahoo off of the street and ask them to teach a college course, but adjuncts are paid and treated like, well, yahoos who are just pulled off of the street.  On an hourly basis you'd make more money doing practically anything else.  I get sad when I hear stories of long-time adjuncts who die destitute, and then I get angry, but then I get frustrated. Don't do that to yourself. You are highly educated and the economy is growing again.  There are paths out. I and a lot of people I know have found jobs outside of academia that involve better pay, more respect, and security. It's not easy to make this transition, but it's a helluva lot easier than being a "freeway flier."  You might love the life of the mind, but trust me, you can pursue that in your free time, too.  (That's what I do.) You might love being part of academia, but academia won't fix your broken tooth or pay for your retirement if you're an adjunct. It will put you on the street when it needs to. Academia has no loyalty to adjuncts, so it is absurd for temporary academic laborers to feel any sense of loyalty to academia.

When all is said and done, wretched adjuncting jobs will be around as long as there is a mass of people willing to take them. Once enough people refuse to spend their time being exploited like this, things will change. Until then, it'll just keep getting worse and worse. Adjuncting work not only keeps you poor and insecure, it helps maintain a system that keeps other people poor and insecure, too.  Don't be a sucker or a cautionary tale. Don't adjunct.

My AHA Signature Cocktail

Surprised that the hipsters haven't tried to revive this bourbon label

A former student of mine who is now working on her PhD posted an article to Facebook about the "signature cocktails" this year at the annual American Historical Association conference in Atlanta.  These will be served at the various conference hotels, with cute in-joke names like "The Bourbon Restoration."

The article made me chuckle, and not just because of the cocktail names.  When I went to the AHA, I did my fair share of drinking, but very rarely in the overpriced hotel bars.  I was either a broke-ass graduate student or a barely less poor junior scholar, already having to foot the bill for plane tickets and expensive hotel rooms.  For that reason, my signature AHA cocktail was Evan Williams from a bottle bought across the street at a liquor store mixed with warm coke, usually served in a plastic hotel room cup and consumed with other similarly situated friends.  Evan Williams is indeed some cheap, rotgut stuff, but it is the king of cheap rotgut bourbon.  Why?  Because while alone it burns without any smooth bourbon sweetness, mixed with the sugar of the coke it becomes the best twelve dollars ever spent.

I still remember my last night at the DC AHA in 2008, exhausted and punchy hanging out with friends in our room above its legal occupancy to save money, turn of the century tenement style, downing this concoction while speculating if any of our interviews were going to lead to a future job.  (They didn't, but that's another story.)  Unlike those other signature cocktails, it doesn't have a name, but what it lacks in panache it more than makes up for in affordability.

That drink is a reminder of how the AHA's annual conference, perhaps more than anything else, highlights the division between the haves and the have nots among professional historians.  Job seekers are the ones who most desperately need to go to the conference, since their livelihoods depend upon it.  However, they are more likely to be required to pay their own way, despite being the group who can least afford to go.  Those who have secure positions in the professoriate usually have institutions paying their way, which leaves a lot of surplus dough for downing cocktails in the hotel lounge.

I went to the 2015 conference because it was being held in New York and I would get to see a lot of my friends.  It was a wonderful experience.  I took in some cool panels, scouted some good books, and caught up with old grad school chums.  It was entirely liberating to be there because I wanted to, and to have enough money that I wasn't in a constant state of anxiety over what things were costing me.  All I had to do to have a pleasant AHA was to quit the profession.

The Great 2006 AHA Road Trip And Hope Shredder

I am coming up on a very important anniversary: attending my first American Historical Association annual conference in Philadelphia back in 2006.  I was there as a grad student making my first of six consecutive runs on the job market.  I came into it nervous but with great hope, I came out of it with my confidence shaken and my hope for the future shredded.  This time of year every year I thank God and the universe that I no longer have to subject myself to the horrors of the academic job market.

The trip started with high expectations.  A friend and I rented a car together, and decided to drive all the way to Philly and to share a hotel room to save money.  Being grad students we had to economize the best way that we could in the face of the ridiculousness whereby penniless grad students are expected to pony up big bucks to travel to a faraway city and get a lavish hotel room all for twenty minute interviews that could easily be conducted over the telephone.  We at least sprung for a full size sedan, and drove a beautiful Chevy Impala, much more reliable and much roomier than my '92 Mazda Protege, which was being held together by spit and bailing wire at that point.  The automatic seatbelt had stopped working and the horn had been removed because it had developed a mind of its own.

We drove that Impala over 700 miles straight on from central Illinois to Philly, listening to Johnny Cash over and over again, particularly "Sam Hall."  I remember stops at those isolated service stations on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, furtively smoking cigarettes backs against the cold January wind.  We rolled into the City of Brotherly Love on a cold night, parking at a surface lot near our downtown hotel, which was bustling with the nervous energy of hundreds of junior scholars trying to keep their shit together in the face of overwhelming fear and anxiety.

I didn't really see my friend until we left because he had something like twelve interviews, which made me curse studying Europe rather than Asia, which was hot that year.  I did have four interviews, however, a decent haul for someone without a PhD yet.  Once I got to the conference hotel, I realized that I may have made some unorthodox decisions.  I intentionally did not wear a business suit to my interviews, but dark tweed and tie with a dark shirt and black pants.  It seemed like a good idea before I left, but now I felt exposed.  That uneasy feeling stayed with me when I went to the hotel suite where my first interview was located.  Some background: this was for a job I considered ideal.  It was at a university in Chicago, at that point my favorite city in America.  It was primarily not a research position, but  those faculty in the department had research bona fides.  This was my ideal job, but I was having to interview for it without ever done an academic job interview before.

I predictably bombed.  I epically fucked it up so bad that I have only recently been able to come to terms with it.  I prepared intensely for this interview, I even took the time to look up and read the scholarship of the people on the committee.  I can still tell you to this day that one of the committee members wrote about the Portuguese colony of Sao Tome as well as the postwar communist insurrection in Malaysia.  Things were going okay, then they asked me about how I would teach a set of specific topics courses.  At that moment it hit me that the committee chair had told me in his phone call before our interview to prepare some answers for this.  But being a moron, I had forgotten about it, and had done an insane level of preparation for things that weren't nearly so important.  I came up with some answers off the top of my head, which were obviously not impressive.  They practically shooed me out of the room at the point.

I knew I had fucked up, and then I had to go to an interview with a large public university in Texas.  While this school was in a small city I had been to before and disliked, the school itself would have massive research support and a light teaching load.  My confidence was so shaken, however, that some of my answers to their questions were so quiet that I had to be asked to repeat them.  (The committee members were really nice, at least.)  Being trapped in a hotel suite with a group of people deciding your future is so stressful that I can only last 30 minutes, but the interview ended up lasting 45 minutes because the chair informed me that the person after me had moved their slot, and for some reason decided to extend my interview.  At that point I thought I was going to vomit.  I was too demoralized to sustain my "interview face" for that long. There went another job down the drain.

My third interview was with a small liberal arts college in rural Virginia.  It was in the Appalachians, my favorite landscape in America, and I'd heard good things about the collegiality of its department from someone acquainted with the school.  This is the one interview where I felt comfortable, largely thanks to the friendliness of the committee.  At the same time, I got the feeling that they had a very specific need to fill, and I was not the guy to fill that need.  Still, it was the one interview I left Philly thinking I hadn't totally fucked up.  I had even managed to overcome the awkwardness of interviewing in an actual hotel room, rather than a suite.  And yes, one of the committee members was sitting on a bed.  (Having your future decided in what feels like a "drug deal gone bad scenario" isn't comfortable.)

I definitely didn't do a great job with my last interview, which was on the last day of the conference in the morning with a private university in Los Angeles.  It was also my one and only interview in the official interview area.  Sitting with a bunch of other anxious and shell-shocked grad students in ill-fitting business attire made sitting outside of the hotel rooms waiting to be let in seem positively heavenly by comparison.  It was a place that smelled of fear, desperation, and broken dreams.

I remember the committee chair coming to get me, and walking with him past table after table after table.  This space seemed endless, and filled with the voices of young academics trying their hardest to impress while holding it together in a huge sweaty cacaphony.  I was seated in front of four people, almost like a tribunal.  I had a hard time knowing who to look at, and I still remember the committee chair being amused at one of my answers.  They were looking for something, and I wasn't it.  It didn't help that at that time in my life I was probably afflicted by undiagnosed anxiety disorders and depression, so in such situations I was incapable of acting naturally and probably came off as the kind of weirdo that you cross the street to avoid.

The time between the interviews is a little bit of a blur.  I have some strangely specific memories, though.  I walked with a friend down to the tourist sites, and I had to wait in a ridiculous security line to see the Liberty Bell.  My PhD university still had an alumni party at the AHA back then, and I quaffed the free booze and got some words of comfort from the people I knew who had been able to find in prior years.  Over the three days I ate at a lot of Irish pubs, since there were many in the area and they were the one affordable non-fast food eating option.  I ate from a huge box of mandarin oranges bought to supplement my diet of lamb stew and shepherd's pie.  I spent my spare time reading George Packer's Assassin's Gate and contemplating the war in Iraq.  Such things were actually a welcome distraction from the intense waves of fear washing over me.  If I didn't get a job, I didn't know what I was going to do with myself.

Those thoughts crossed my mind the next day as I drove with my friend on a bitter cold morning back to Illinois.  I remember the snow on the ground in the woods of central Pennsylvania, and my friend telling me stories about growing up in China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution.  I was at least really happy for him.  I look back at this trip, though, and I have a hard time feeling any sentimental nostalgia.  While I know this isn't the case for most people, my time in grad school was pretty idyllic.  I had amazing friends, lived the life of the mind, and was lucky not to have any financial emergencies at a time when I was poor.  The trip to the AHA suddenly made me realize that this idyll was coming to an end, and that it was not going to have a happy ending.  In the ten years since I have lived in three different states, met my wife, started a family, and switched careers.  The ending has been happy, but only once I made the decision to leave academia.  There's so much I cared so much about back then that I don't care about anymore, especially the academic job market.  I think back to the great 2006 AHA road trip and feel longing for my friends who live so far away today, but no longing whatsoever to be part of that world anymore.

On The Persistence Of Quit Lit

Yesterday a friend from my crummy old "visiting professor" days posted a link to a new piece of academic quit lit on his Facebook page.  Unlike many others, this was not on a blog or the Chronicle, but published in Vox.  It's a piece I've described as neoliberal hot garbage mixed with an insane level of self-regard, basically the author saying "I am too cool and great for academia."  I won't get too much into why I didn't like it, since the reasons seem pretty obvious if you read it.

What sort of surprised me was that on Twitter today a lot of folks were expressing their dislike of and fatigue with the whole genre of quit lit in response to this one piece.  As you would expect, this sentiment almost always comes from people who have good academic jobs, and almost never from anyone who actually quit academia.  A lot of people have written a lot of poignant stuff about the experience of leaving the profession.  While it might be easy to dismiss and say "hey man, it's just a job, and there isn't a deluge of quit lit by lawyers and stock brokers," I think that sentiment is mistaken, even if there is a grain of truth in it.

Being a prof is in fact just another job.  I tell this to friends who are thinking of quitting the life, and I think one of the great things about quit lit is that it helps others realize that quitting can be done successfully, and that the water's fine.  Because while being a prof is just another job, academia is not just another profession.  My father had studied to be a priest and quit after several years in the seminary, and quitting academia, while not on the same level, feels closer to quitting the priesthood, rather than quitting being an accountant.  It's supposed to be a calling, and not a career, basically.  Like the clergy it demands poverty, lack of choice over where one lives, years and years of study, and often sacrificing a stable family life, or a family life at all.  (This was my primary reason for getting out.) Quit lit helps demystify the transition out of academia, at the very least.

On top of that, the reason for so much of the quit lit is that working in academia is getting massively, demonstrably worse, meaning that a lot more people are quitting.  From adjunctification to constant cutbacks for tenure track faculty, the pay is lower or stagnant, the course workload and research expectations higher (even at teaching schools with 4/4 loads), security undermined or non-existent, academic freedom restricted, control from above by administrators increased, and so on and so forth.  Bad quit lit, like the aforementioned Vox article, can be irritatingly narcissistic, but the good stuff is moving and helpful. It also feels good to vent spleen at a system that's let you down and exploited your labor.  (Trust me, I know.)  It feels especially good when you're told that the system is a meritocracy and you only have yourself to blame for your failure.  Living in that world gets pretty lonely sometime.

I mused on Twitter today that quit lit might go away when when being a prof becomes just another job.  We aren't there yet, and for that reason quit lit performs an important function, especially for those of us moving on with our lives.  If you are in academia and aren't quitting because you like what you've got (and hey, I was like you once), but seem inordinately upset by the existence of the quit lit genre, you might want to do a little self-examination, or at least develop a little more empathy.

On Seeing My Grad School Campus Again

Today I finally returned from my 16 day road trip with my wife and two daughters.  It has been a long, strange, tiring trip.  The sound of the Frozen soundtrack (played to placate my toddlers) is still ringing in my ears, and I feel like I have a bit of the white line fever.  We took a meandering path on the way to and from my Nebraska homeland, stopping to see all kinds of friends and family along the way.  On Friday we happened to pass through Champaign-Urbana, where I did my doctoral studies.

We had already taken an extended stop in Springfield to see various Lincoln sites and to have lunch with some friends from my grad school days who are living there.  I was hoping to stop in Chambana and take my daughters out of the car and walk them around the quad while my spouse took a well-deserved rest.  (I drove, she tried to keep them entertained.  Not sure which was harder.)  Toddlers being who they are, they had just fallen asleep in the back seat after a morning of being less than easy to deal with.  (That was the exact point at which I think they hit the wall, poor kids.)

I was not going to mess with nap time, so instead I drove through downtown Champaign, campustown, and the campus itself.  Earlier that morning I harbored ideas of going back into Gregory Hall and seeing if any of the profs were about.  Once I gazed upon campus again, I knew that such actions would be totally out of the question, and not just because my daughters were sleeping.

Unlike a lot of other people, I had a very pleasant grad school experience.  Until recent years, it was the happiest that I've ever been in my life.  I was living the life of the mind, young, and surrounded by great people in a town that was affordable and had a lot going on.  I knew that the job market was going to be difficult, but I had always put that in the back of my mind.  After leaving the nest I ended up in a dead-end, temporary "visitor" job for two years, then three increasingly unhappy years on the tenure track.  (I'll spare you the details, but my interpersonal relations at work were setting off panic attacks on a daily basis by the end.)  I gave up on my grad school dream and left academia at that point.  Gazing upon that golden campus, I felt an intense wave of sorrow.

Looking back, I was a completely different person in those days.  A vast gulf of painful experience has estranged me from that person.  While I am happy these days with my personal life and my job, my five years in the cauldron have made me distrustful, cynical, and even a little bitter.  My sorrow was the sorrow for losing the hope, belief, and optimism that I once had that I know will never really come back.  Of course, I am a whole lot wiser, pragmatic, and driven than I was back then, too.

I've come to see my decision to go to grad school to be, in the words of Elvis Costello, a "brilliant mistake." I had no clue what I was getting into back then, and from a financial standpoint, I fucked my life over pretty good.  I also developed my mind and gained friends who I wouldn't trade for anything.  I've met plenty of good people since I left the academic world, but none have shared the bonds of friendship that I wove back then.  I was lucky enough to see many of these friends on this trip, and today I was hit with the realization that it is not Champaign-Urbana or my old campus that means something, but the people I met there.  I'll continue to keep going great distances to see them, and will likely not bother to revisit my grad school campus anytime soon.

Cranky Bear On Tenure's Long Slow Death

Editor's Note: My rather impolitic friend Cranky Bear has come out of hibernation with a vengeance this year.  It's a Friday night here and I am tired, I thought I'd let him have a turn again.

Cranky Bear here, with a hoppy summer beer in my hand and righteous indignation burning in my heart.

The academic world is abuzz this week with the news that the state of Wisconsin seems poised to effectively eliminate tenure in its state university system.  This is coming on the heels of a major cut to the state university system's funding, and I am willing to bet that the tenure elimination is an attempt to make sure that the funding cuts bring about massive layoffs of professors, rather than tuition hikes to make up the difference.  People like Scott Walker want state universities to become glorified vocational schools producing obedient workers smart enough to do the menial knowledge tasks of the new economy, but too ignorant to be able to question the system.  (George Carlin basically nailed it right before his death.)

Walker basically got away with destroying collective bargaining rights, and then a bunch of other Republican governors jumped on the bandwagon and did the same thing.  If he succeeds in kneecapping tenure and shared governance, you can bet your ass that the likes of Mike Pence and Rick Scott are going to do the same damn thing, and that administrators around the nation will be falling all over themselves to put their faculties in their place.

Here's the deal, though.  Tenure is already mostly in the grave anyway.  For the huge numbers of adjuncts and other non-tenure track academics, it never existed in the first place.  For forty years now universities have hired a growing army of employees who have been told that they don't need (or deserve) tenure.  Honestly, who the fuck is going to listen to tenured scholars when they defend their privileges when they have been complicit in a system that denies this supposedly essential right to their own co-workers?

Obviously I'm not blaming those with tenure, or at least not mostly blaming them.  The neoliberal onslaught has consistently pushed universities to "be more like a business" with predictably wretched consequences.  Just like the supposed "talent elite" (that phrase makes me puke) in other fields, university administrators make more an more money, while the grunt workers make do with lower pay, fewer benefits, and a general climate of fear to keep them in line.  Adjuncts, visitors, and lecturers have experienced the worst of this, having practically no job security or respect.  Now the protected are about to lose their protection.

Think of it this way: the grand edifice of tenure began to slowly rot four decades ago, but nobody seemed to notice who wasn't being actively fucked over by that system.  Year by year by year the rot kept creeping in more and more and more, with those lucky enough to have tenure looking at the contingent laborers drowning around them thinking "there but for the grace of God go I."  Or at least they thought that if they actually paid the plight of contingents any mind.  Now the whole thing has gotten so rickety that a couple of good smacks from a legislative hammer can have the whole crumbling structure come crashing down to earth.  That is exactly what's going on in Wisconsin.

And you know what?  It makes me sick to my fucking stomach.  Good ole Cranky Bear has long since ambled his way out of academia to greener pastures, but I have many friends who still reside in its walls.  These are amazing people who are smart as hell and bust their asses to reach their students.  They have endured the indignities of a wretchedly tight job market, they have been furloughed by conservative politicians, and they have faced years without pay raises.  They are so talented and do so much, yet their efforts are met with so much derision and hostility.  The message of Wisconsin's government to these good people is "you are expendable."  It is a job where one is forced to live wherever one can find work and make a helluva lot less money than many other professions that require a lot less brainpower and work.  It used to be the case that scholars accepted these things, but knowing that they would get security and respect in return.  Now they are being given neither.

As horrible as this is, let us not pretend we didn't know the die was cast a long time ago.  It was easy for so many to turn their heads and pretend they didn't see the exploitation that surrounded them, now tenured and untenured will be cooking in the same pot, in solidarity at last as they are consumed and shat out by the great neoliberal Moloch.

A Final Report On Letting The Academic Dream Die

Loyal readers of this blog may know that I once wrote quite a bit about academia and negotiating life after quitting academia.  If you look at the sidebar with my most popular posts, you’ll see that this topic has brought more readers to this site than any other.  Since this blog is not a careerist endeavor, I haven’t felt the need to keep providing more post-ac content, since that’s not where my head has been. 

I have been thinking about it again, but mostly reflecting about how I’ve begun to think of my academic life as something confined unalterably to the past.  I’m just about to finish my fourth year of teaching at an independent high school, and I have fully internalized my new career and vocation.  I don’t really think of myself as a former professor who happens to be a teacher, but a teacher, full stop.  I no longer see that as a step down or a sign of failure, or am even tempted to even think about it that way.

Four years ago, it would have been hard to think about being in this situation.  I was about to fly out to NYC for a job interview, desperate to escape my circumstances but frightened and anxious about what lay ahead.  I was elated to get the job, but in the summer that followed I often had heart-pounding anxiety attacks and was bedeviled by self-flagellating thoughts about my apparent failure to stick with academia.  I had devoted seven years of post-graduate schooling, two years of a low-paid low-respect visitorship, and three years on the tenure track to the academic dream.  I had a dental health issue I waited too long to get fixed due to grad student penury, and which still cost me an arm and a leg because my visitorship didn't come with dental insurance.  I had moved to a town 1500 miles from my soon to be spouse where I felt isolated and lost.

Thankfully I had stopped committing myself to the life equivalent of throwing good money after bad.  Four years later, I am so much happier living in a place where I want to live, with a job I love, and most importantly, with my family.  For about three years or so the nagging doubts and feelings of inadequacy would still sneak up on me from time to time, but they've passed.  This year I think that finally ended.  I taught a historiography class, and really enjoyed introducing my students to the basics of the scholarly approach to history.  It wasn't a graduate seminar, mostly because it was actually enjoyable.  Once my students found out that I had written journal articles, they really wanted to read one of them, which we did.  In their eyes I was not a failure, and it seemed pretty stupid at the time for thinking myself one for never having published a book, and letting my current projects slide.

Yes, I would love to get that book published and finally get an article manuscript out that I've been sitting on for three years, but I've got more important things to do.  I have students to teach, children to raise, family vacations to take.  When the end of my life comes, either tomorrow or in fifty years, will I really care that I never got tenure at a university?  I doubt it.