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.

Avoiding the Middle Age Bitterness Trap

I'm getting through middle age by tapping into my inner Peter Falk

Hitting 40 did not seem like much of a milestone, but age 43 has suddenly brought all the middle-aged thoughts I thought were coming three years ago. They aren't all necessarily bad. I think all the time about how I've done a lot in my life, and that what I do for a living has had a positive impact on the world. I'm okay not being young anymore. The bad thoughts are the morbid ones, of course. At this point it's very likely that I have more yesterdays than tomorrows. The problem with having gained a renewed will to live in the past eight years is that death scares me a lot more than it used to. In my younger days I was pretty ambivalent about living. I have learned to enjoy life more fully and now I desperately don't want to have to give it up. Sometimes on my morning commute I hope that when I eventually go I'm more prepared for it.

At the same time, watching other middle-aged people around me has made me hyper-aware of the traps of middle age. The two big ones are bitterness and resentment, which usually come together. Middle age is when you have the harrowing realization that you have become what you are. In youth you tend to think of yourself becoming something, there is still room for self-invention, and still room to think that your faults will eventually fade. If you don't "make it" in your chosen field by your 40s, well, you're never going to make it. That can be a spur for bitterness and resentment.

For the vast the majority of us never achieve the things we dream, and our consumerist society is constantly pushing us to "dream big," which usually means a big disappointment. In that respect I am glad that I left academia at the age of 35, when I was still young enough to reinvent myself and recover from the mental blow that transition made. If I did so at 40 I wonder if I would feel so good about myself right now.

I have seen so many people succumb to bitterness and resentment in middle age, their souls wilted and withered. This form of self hate always ends up getting projected onto other people. It closes minds and closes hearts and deafens ears to the sufferings of others. Those who are frustrated at their position and feel let down by life inevitably derive satisfaction from seeing other people brought down to their level. If the people around them are not as miserable as they are, they will make it so. These are the poisonous gossips at work, the family members who engage in belittling behaviors, the tyrannical boss who goes out of their way to always make you feel small. 

What's especially frightening to me is that this form of middle aged dysfunction has been weaponized for political use. White men in their 50s were Trump's most loyal bloc, the group most likely to be resentful about their lives. Those emotions can be easily turned against the "other" who is then blamed for their situation. I was just talking to a friend who said a bunch of his formerly apolitical friends (also middle aged) suddenly became vocal Trump supporters. It makes sense to me, considering the appeals he makes to resentment and those most receptive to it.

So every day I tell myself not to succumb, and to try to throw a lifeline to the people I see drowning in an all-consuming bitterness. Sure I never became a tenured professor or published a book, but there are things in life a lot more important than that. 

Back From My Hiatus With Some Reflections

I’ve been away from the blog for the longest time in years, maybe ever. (I haven’t checked.) First off, I spent my writing energy on a piece for publication, something I had resolved to do more often. (So far, no bite.) Soon after my parents came to visit, and I see them so rarely that I resolved to give them the full measure of my time and attention.

My time away, as well as my parents’ visit, has given me some time for reflection. Some of it has been good, some has been hard. On the good side on Sunday I returned to Frank Pepe’s, the justly famous brick oven pizza place in New Haven. We were on a road trip back from Rhode Island with my parents, and made time to get some awesome pizza. It had been seven years since I had been there, and the last time was pretty significant.

I had been in New Haven for a conference. I was not totally excited by said conference, but this was back when I was still an assistant professor in East Texas. Going to New Haven gave me a chance to see my wife, who drove up from New Jersey. I’d also been encouraged to attend by a friend I hadn’t seen in awhile, who was good to see again.

That weekend was a crucial one in my life, since it was on those days that I made the definitive decision to get out of academia at any cost. I knew right then and there that I was not staying in East Texas and nothing was going to stop me. The delicious meal at Frank Pepe’s capped off a weekend where I had suddenly attained clarity.

This came after months of severe anxiety and depression brought on by my career woes, illnesses in my family, living far from my wife, and being bullied and belittled at my job. Coming back to Frank Pepe’s with my wife, my parents, and my children made me realize just how much better my life is than it was seven years ago. That realization helped cut through some of the intense stress I’ve been feeling as of late.

As great as that reflection was, it came during a week of less happy thoughts about myself and my life. When I am with my parents I inevitably think about how I’ve changed since my youth. Seven years on, it’s apparent that my years as a low-level academic, first as an exploited “visitor” and then as a put-upon and bullied assistant professor, had a permanent effect on my personality.

On the positive side, that experience made me tougher. I am more of a fighter than I used to be, more confident and much more able to spot climbers, back-stabbers, and assholes before they have a chance to come at me. At the same time, I am not as nice a person as I used to be. I am much more cynical, and far, far less trusting. I am constantly thinking that someone somewhere is out to fuck me over at all times. I have no patience for other people’s bullshit, which I realize has made me an unpleasant person on things like local town Facebook group where yuppies run amok. I am as patient as I can be with my students, but that sometimes means that my patience is used up before I get home where I need to have some in reserve for my family.

I love Bernand Malamud’s The Natural because (unlike the film) it makes the point that suffering is not redemptive. I survived the worst low of my adult life, but it did not leave me unscathed. I learned some lessons, but also developed some bad habits. I can't ever be the person I used to be, but I am going to be trying hard to be a better person.

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.

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.

Ian and Sylvia "Four Strong Winds"

[Editor's Note: my "track of the week" series is continuing this week, but I'm no longer including the name of the series in the title, since it makes the article titles rather cumbersome for social media purposes.]

I turned 40 last week.  While it was great to have a night out on the town with my wife, it prompted some bittersweet thoughts, and not all of them about aging.  When my parents had their 40th birthdays, they hosted big blowout parties at our house with casino games, play money, and an auction at the end of the night.  All of their friends came over in a great show of good cheer.  (I was 14 when my mom turned 40 and got to deal some blackjack for the occasion.)  I'd always thought my 40th would be like that, but my friends are far too scattered to the four corners of the country and even the world to be around for such a thing.  They are as far flung as Pretoria, South Africa, and Amarillo, Texas.

I guess this is the nature of making your strongest friendships in graduate school, where you are basically ensured to end up somewhere you never expected once you get out.  (I am lucky to have a couple of my grad school compatriots working in the Big Apple, though.)  Seeing many of my friends during my travels this summer was a harsh reminder that I have had to say way too many good-byes over the last decade, from leaving grad school in Illinois to leaving Michigan to leaving Texas.  It was great to meet so many wonderful people in all of those places, but it's hard knowing that the people I'd most like to have a beer with or shoot the shit with live thousands of miles away from me.

When I am feeling like a Sad Sack Dad after I put my daughters to sleep on a night like this, feeling the cool autumn air on my screened-in back porch, I like to listen to "Four Strong Winds" by Ian and Sylvia.  I am a sucker for 60s folk music, especially by Canadians and even more especially by male-female duos.  This song is among the very few that will bring me to tears each time that I hear it, since it evokes the feeling of saying goodbye to good people more than any other.  These ending lines just say it all: "But our good times are all gone/ and I'm bound for moving on/ I'll look for you if I'm ever back this way."

Songwriter Ian Tyson was a bonafide cowboy and rodeo rider from British Columbia before becoming a singer, and being a scholar, like being a cowboy (or a folk singer, for that matter), is an itinerant existence in this day and age.  I for one am glad that my rambling days are over and that I now spend days with my wife and daughers and that I even have a back porch for resting on.  Be that as it may, there is not a single day that goes by that I don't think about many amazing people that I've had to say good-bye to along the way.

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.

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.

The Power Of Appreciation

The last two days have been full of intense emotion, mostly because the graduating senior class at my school has very publicly, and multiple times, expressed their gratitude and appreciation for me.  Among other things they have dedicated the yearbook to me and written letters about the impact I have had on them.  The levels of appreciation have been so deep that I have had to gather myself multiple times so as to not break down in a sobbing mess, tears of joy flowing down my cheeks.

I don't know what to do with all of this appreciation because I am not used to getting it.  Back when I was in academia, appreciation was in short supply.  Individual students often thanked me at the end of the semester, but my employers never heard these words of praise, nor did they offer me much appreciation themselves.  As a low-level academic, both on and off the tenure track, I was expected to fill the slots on the schedule and not inspire any student complaints.  That's the only expectation placed on my teaching, which was considered to be a negligible contribution to the university.  After years and years of this I started to go a little insane, wondering if anyone besides my students was aware of the impact I was having.

Things are different now.  My colleagues and superiors have both acknowledged the bonds I've built with the graduating seniors.  The appreciation and support I have received has only made me feel better about my work at school.  So few university administrators seem to realize that faculty need appreciation, they need a sense that they and their work have value.  Around the time I left academia, I began to think that maybe I had little to offer, that I did not have value, and that my work was meaningless.  Those self-doubts no longer exist for me, and it's all due to working in an environment where I am treated as a human being with worth.  That shouldn't be such a difficult feeling to establish, but the academic world, for whatever reason, seems to have a hard time with it.

Track Of The Week: Eddie and the Hod Rods, "Do Anything You Wanna To Do"

Three years ago this week I accepted my current high school teaching job, leaving behind my academic career.  It was a heady time, and as usual for me, I incorporated music into it.  For example, when I left my old town for Jersey, I cued up "Thunder Road" by Bruce Springsteen as my car hit the city limits, and had a big old grin on my face when the Boss cried "It's a town full of losers/ I'm pulling out of here to win."

Another important song for me in that moment was much more obscure, "Do Anything You Wanna Do," by 70s English pub rockers Eddie and the Hot Rods.  I'd first heard of the group years before as a punching bag for John Lydon nee Rotten, who attacked them as poseurs jumping on the punk bandwagon.  That impression changed in the late 90s, when I picked up a Rhino comp of 70s British new wave, and "Do Anything You Wanna Do" put its hooks in me.

The band and the song are hard to categorize, especially since the "pub rock" scene that spawned them shared punk's DIY ethos, but involved a certain reverence for the very old rocknroll and R&B idols that punk sought to smash.  Eddie and the Hot Rods are not punk rock, but you can't really blame the Rods for that, since they never claimed to be such.  (After all, it's not their fault if other people wanted to lump them into that category.)  "Do Anything You Wanna Do" nevertheless has a fast tempo and rocks hard.  Instead of punk's spittle and spite, however, the song contains an earnest message of everyday defiance.  The singer says he's "tired of doing day jobs/ with no thanks for that I do/ I'm sure I must be someone/ Now I'm gonna find out who."  It's a song about about telling your boss off, leaving your crummy town, and going off to find yourself.  I used to drive around with this song cranked on my car stereo, and sing along in my own tuneless warble.

As much as I loved it as a 35-year old, I can't think of a better song this side of Alice Cooper that better encapsulates what it's like to be 18 and itching to finally live your own life.  It's also been twenty years since my high school graduation, and while I didn't know this song yet, it pretty much nails how I felt at the time.  In an ideal world, this song would be played at graduations all over the country this month, not the usual treacly crap.

Remember: An Academic Job Is Just A Job

Three years ago this week I got offered my current job teaching at an independent high school in New York City.  From the moment I stepped foot in the place, I knew it would be a great fit and a great place to work.  (Thankfully my first impression has proven to be correct.)  Taking that job meant leaving my academic job on the tenure track, a job I had fought long and hard to get, enduring two years in VAP purgatory and three nerve-fraying shots at the job market.

Back then I saw an academic job as a kind of Holy Grail, an almost divine object that would lift me up into the comforting bosom of academia's inner circle.  I happily envisioned the years ahead, when I would be able to craft a second project that would make me a name in my field, where I would be a known fixture on campus, where I would eventually possess the knighthood of tenure and other delights.  I made a cardinal mistake that so many others have fallen prey to: I failed to remember that an academic job is just that, a job.

In another line of work one would more quickly question going through seven years of intense schooling followed by two years in the contingent trenches only to secure a low-paid, high-workload position in a backwater hostile to academics and working in a dysfunctional department and commonly subject to the cruel whims of capricious colleagues and administrators.  I was supposed to feel grateful at this turn of events because "at least you have a job."  On top of everything, I was living a thousand miles from my spouse and going crazy.  My academic dream had turned into a nightmare.

At some point, I don't know when, I had the epiphany that an academic job is just a job like any other job.  If your job is ruining your life, it's time to find another one.  A job is not worth sacrificing everything to.  Your job does not define you, or give you worth, or give you integrity.  It mostly gives you a paycheck, and everything else is just gravy.

There is an unhealthy and ultimately destructive tendency among academics to conflate one's job and one's life.  (I'm hardly the first to say it.)  The mantra goes like this: "I am doing what I love, so it's not really work.  If I work 80 hours a week that's okay, since it's doing what I love and what defines me as a human being."  This attitude is why you will often hear academics compete in the martyrdom sweepstakes in their conversations, each person bragging about how many hours they spent researching, how little sleep they had, how they don't have time for TV or pleasure reading, etc.  This attitude is why spouses are expected, no questions asked, to relocate to isolated university towns where they will have no chance of finding employment in their fields.  This attitude is why people who get paid a pittance compared to most other professionals will still work twelve hours a day without any pay increases for their labor.  If you ever say no to anything, if you ever question the need to be working all day all the time, you'll be branded weak, unworthy, and somehow lacking in the fibre to do your job right.

It's all bullshit.  A job is a job is a job is a job.  It is big part of our lives, it should never be our life, unless you're a monk.  Life is bigger than any job.  I certainly love my job and put a lot of work and a huge chunk of my soul into it, but if my job turned sour (which I doubt it ever will), I'd leave for a better one, not tenaciously cling to it and call it "my precious!" a la Gollum.  I had been brainwashed for so long, and been beholden so long to the norms of the profession, that it took me years to realize the error of my ways.  I am glad I finally did, and I hope others do too.

What I Miss About Being A Professor

I have spent a lot of time on this blog talking about how I left academia and why I'm better off.  Of that there can be no doubt.  However, I have had some very powerful flashbacks recently that have deeply reminded me of what I liked about being a professor.  Some of this was caused by recent conversations with academic friends, but also by my inexplicable decision to look up my published articles on JSTOR, which seem like they were written by a completely different person.

If anything, I miss being an expert and a researcher.  I miss getting 19th century steamship guides from interlibrary loan and taking them back to my office and spending hours reading them.  I miss having the time to do research, as limited as that time was with a 4/4 load and 160+ students a semester without a TA.  I have tried to maintain my research agenda, but in the three years since leaving academia I have only managed to squeeze out two and a half chapters of a book project that will likely never see the light of day.  Of course, more people will probably read this blog post than have read all of my articles combined, so it's not like I was ever some kind of meaningful scholar.  This summer I do plan on being a little more productive on that front, though.  I must say that it at least feels good to do research because I want to, not because I need tenure or a longer CV to take with me on the job market.

I also miss the resources and trappings of academia, like access to a research library and my own office.  As a lowly teacher, I've got a desk and a bookshelf to myself, and that's it.  I research at the New York Public Library, but that's different than having a library a few hundred feet from my office.  I still remember the day I finally moved my books into my first, small office as a visiting assistant professor.  I felt like I had finally "made it" and become someone.

At times I long for the flexibility of time that professors have.  As a teacher, I probably work a few fewer hours per week then I did as a prof.  However, I had a great deal of flexibility over how to use those hours, even at an institution that demanded ten office hours per week amidst a heavy teaching load.  I never had classes on Friday afternoons, which I usually spent poring over research and writing articles at the local coffee house.  It's different being a teacher.  From 8:30 to 3:15 every single day, I have to be ON.  It's a physically and mentally exhausting job, I normally pass out on the train on my ride home.  We don't have summer "off," we have summer so that we are able to survive the next school year without dying or going insane.

Last and certainly not least, I miss the prestige.  While administrators and politicians sometimes treat humanities professors at the enemy, there is probably no more besieged and denigrated profession today in America than teaching.  I dread telling strangers what I do, lest they expound on their ignorant opinion of schools, displace their hostility for their own former on me, or act like I am some kind of layabout loser.  ("I'd just love to be a teacher and get three months off" is something you should never say to me.)  When I was a professor, revealing that information often meant that people treated me like someone special, even when I was a VAP.  Now what I do is looked down on, not least by folks in academia.

I keep hearing people promoting post-academic careers saying things like "you can do more than 'just teach' with your PhD."  That's right "just teach," as if shaping the minds of America's youth was some kind of piddly, useless job, as if all the work, care, and mental, physical, and spiritual labor it takes to reach teenagers is not all that meaningful or difficult to do.  I'll let you in on a secret: teaching high school is harder than being a professor, at least on a day-to-day basis.  Sure, I don't have to read antiquated sources in a second language and lead discussions of academic monographs with grad students, but those were all things that years and years of grad school had prepared me for.  It is difficult to prepare for a room of engaged yet hyper teenagers going in a million directions at once.  In fact, nothing can really prepare you for that.  Anyone who says I "just teach" can just kiss my ass.

Make no mistake, I am a lot happier than I was before.  I am living in a place where I actually want to live, I am with my beloved wife, I am getting paid more, I am treated as if I have value by my employer, and I am a father, something that might not have happened had I stayed in academia.  It's not like I want to go back to being a prof, I think I've managed just to see it as an interesting job that didn't work for me, not a religious calling demanding infinite sacrifice, as so many seem to treat it.

My Baggage At The Grand Budapest Hotel

I had off work today because of Passover, and my wife only had a half day at her school.  This meant that with the girls at day care, we would actually be able to go out on a date by ourselves.  We saw a matinee of The Grand Budapest Hotel, which we both enjoyed.

My enjoyment was bittersweet, however.  The historical Central European setting reminded me that I had once studied German history (and European history more broadly) for well over a decade.  I developed a real love of the lesser known period of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and while the film takes place in the early 1930s, the main characters (Zero and M. Gustave) both long to return to the world before the Great War.  That sense of having been ripped away from a more comfortable world feels very real to me.

In recent years my bitterness towards my time in academia has infected my feelings towards my former field of study.  I read a lot of American history these days, and little European history, mostly because it reminds me that my dream of being a scholar of nineteenth-century Germany ended in disaster.  I teach mostly American history at my school, and I'm just fine with that.  I've dreaded ever having to talk about my dissertation ever again, and find myself feeling actual loathing towards it.

Watching The Grand Budapest Hotel reminded me that I still do truly love Central European history and literature.  (When I heard that the film had been inspired by the works of Stefan Zweig, I knew I had to see it.)  I've written some book reviews on my field in recent years, and each time I felt my mind working in familiar and happy ways.  Despite those positive experiences, I haven't been able to stop transferring my bitter anger towards my old profession towards what I used to study.  I really and truly would like to continue some of my old research (I've got a long-completed journal article gathering dust), hopefully I can unburden my baggage and allow myself to enjoy something that once gave me such pleasure.  The film is in many ways about holding onto what's good in the past when life and fate conspire against us, I think I can gather some inspiration from that.

The Loaded Meaning Of My Grad School Newsletter

It's been almost three years since I have left academia, and my happiness with my current life is so total that I rarely, if ever, feel bad about being gone from it.  However, there are strange, mundane events that have the capacity to trigger regret and bitterness in ways that I just can't seem to control.  One such event happened yesterday, when my mail contained the quarterly newsletter/magazine (it's way too glossy to be a newsletter) from my old grad program.  I was initially going to toss it aside, but for some reason started flipping through it, and I was powerless to stop the tide of ill-feeling washing over me.

I generally actually have very positive feelings about my time in grad school.  I made an amazing group of friends, learned a lot, broadened my mind, and lived in a place with plenty to do which also happened to be livable on a TA's salary.  There was even some sweetness to match the bitter taste in my mouth when I flipped the pages of the newsletter.  It was good to see the familiar faces of the professors, and sad to read the obituary of a prof whose classes I never took but knew well because he was just an all-around good person.

All the same, I could not get over the fact that I was holding in my hands a clear erasure of reality and the lived experience of so many people so close to me.  Turning newsletter's glossy pages you'd never guess that so many of the department's graduates are suffering so badly right now.  I don't begrudge my old department their need to promote themselves, and of course they want to project an image of success.  However, that newsletter was a vivd reminder that my grad program, like so many others, sent scores of its graduates straight into the maw of our Moloch-like academic job market, only to be quickly forgotten about if they ended up quitting the life or mired in contingent hell.

Everyone back there remembers the success stories, the students who have gone on to good jobs and impressive institutions.  Nobody remembers the failure stories, despite their mounting number.  One article focused on this year's crop of incoming graduate students, and as I looked at their faces, I wondered what they were being told about their chances, and whether my experience and those of so many other of my fellow graduates had simply been erased.  I get the feeling that such willful forgetting is happening in a lot of graduate programs, which will no doubt reap another bitter harvest in the years to come.

Self-Promotional Interlude

In case you guys don't know, I have a new piece up on the Professor Is In about my decision to leave academia for a teaching at a private school.  I am honored to be featured there, and happy to be a member of the PII crew to offer advice for others wanting to make the same transition.  To be honest, I have had multiple panic attacks today due to the intense memories writing the piece has sparked, which stem my old fears of being attacked again by those who wronged me in the past.  I have been heartened by the support and kudos from so many friends on social media that those fears are subsiding.  Soon I will be writing some follow-up pieces, so stay tuned.

Stop Telling Young People to "Follow Your Dream"

Being an educator, I have sat through my fair share of graduation speeches and presentations.  The phrase I have heard the most often in them is one that sticks on my tongue like a burnt piece of popcorn "follow your dream."  I heard it plenty growing up myself, and I kept listening to it despite what the pursuit of my dream was costing me.  That phrase is one of the great propaganda slogans of American society, akin to the maxims taught to the little babies in A Brave New World.  It's a slogan, not a cliche, because it makes an implicit statement about American life: if you pursue your dream and put in enough work, you will eventually achieve it.

I have a crown on one of my molars, and I occasionally feel it with my tongue and get wistful.  That molar is a my constant reminder of what it really means to follow your dream.  I cracked that molar at the end of my time in grad school, but did not have the money to get it fixed.  When I left grad school for a job on the contingent track I still didn't have dental insurance, and had to opt for a temporary fix that lasted me until I was out of academia and had a dental plan that actually did its job.  (I used to get blinding toothaches when I was in the latter days of my tenure-track gig, but knew that my crummy dental plan wouldn't really cover anything.)

The dream meant more to me than my health or financial security back then.  I remember lean end of the month weeks in grad school where I feared spending any money lest I bring on an overdraft.  I remember driving cars that were practically falling apart, including one whose automatic seatbelt was busted, which wasn't exactly safe.  I remember the 80 hour weeks and sleepless nights.

I followed that dream to a contingent position in Michigan, then to a tenure-track gig in the pine forests of east Texas.  It meant being separated from my wife and living in place where I felt like a lonely outcast, lost and unable to find my way home.  I endured a toxic work environment and bullying that nearly broke my spirit.  By the time I left academia for a private school gig in New York my confidence was so shattered that I wondered if I was capable of trying anything without failing at it.  I had put so much of myself into my identity as a professor that I felt like I had been expelled into exile.

Luckily, I managed to land in a great job.  Unfortunately, the emotional investment I had made in my old career did not immediately go away.  For about a year and a half I mourned the death of my academic dream, as if I was mourning the death of a loved one.  Or more accurately, mourning the death of part of my soul.  I am only finally getting over it, but occasionally a memory of my past life will trigger a stinging emotional pain.

At least I met a lot of great people along the way and cultivated my mind in the bargain.  It wasn't a total loss, but I now know that I can never tell a young person to "follow your dream" and leave it at that.  It's pretty easy to follow that dream right into the abyss.

I Wanted To Be George Brett, Turns Out I'm Tom Brookens

The sport of baseball has provided many useful metaphors over the years. Some people have two strikes against them, some throw you a curve ball, others hit a home run in their career, or strike out, if they're unlucky. Unprofessional behavior is "bush league." High school boys still grade their sexual encounters by what base they happen to reach, or at least claim to have reached. (Stand-up doubles very easily get stretched into triples or homers in the retelling.) Baseball is so entrenched in our metaphorical language that some folks find it cliched to talk about baseball as a metaphor for life. You might say that, but cliches are cliches for a reason.

I was reminded of this today in an email conversation with a close friend. Like me, he's been buying old wax boxes of baseball cards from the 1980s (they are surprisingly cheap), and has been noticing the career trajectories of the various players. He saw a parallel with his academic career, likening himself to Steve Balboni and perceiving a similar career decline.  (I think he is being too hard on himself, and also forgets that Balboni hit clean-up for the 1985 World Series-winning Royals.)

During my brief academic career, I never managed to stick as a big league starter. I was a solid journeyman who never played for the right team, and now I am out of the game as a player. Working as a "visitor" for a regional state U was like riding the bench on a fifth place team. Moving from there to my job as a tenure-track professor, where I was not allowed to teach in my specialty most of the time, was like hitting seventh and being switched from a left fielder to a third baseman. My current job teaching high school is almost like becoming a minor-league manager. The best player metaphor for myself that I could come up with was Tom Brookens (he managed the West Michigan Whitecaps, one of Detroit's class A teams, when I was living in the area. He also wore glasses as a player.) Then again, maybe I never played in the majors at all. My old institution was the very definition of bush league.

Baseball stings hard because like life itself it is so dominated by fear of failure. One line in the movie Moneyball has really stuck with me: "at some point, we all realize that we can no longer play the boy's game." As I crack open my packs of baseball cards, I see names that I had forgotten about, and players whose accomplishments have all but disappeared into oblivion: Calvin Schiraldi, Ken Phelps, Chet Lemon, Kirk McCaskell, Atlee Hammaker, Sid Bream, Oddibe McDowell, Mark Wasinger, Floyd Youmans, and on and on and on. Some were pretty damn good for awhile, others only managed a season or two in the majors. Then again, they did make it to the bigs, their names are in the Baseball Encyclopedia and they've been immortalized on very own bubblegum cards, something that can never be taken away from them. Baseball greatness, like greatness in any walk of life, is pretty goddamned hard to achieve.  Perhaps its pursuit, rather than its attainment, ought to be emphasized in this cruel, failure-laden world. After all, we all can't be George Brett.