Deadspin and the Power of Quitting

Deadspin is no longer. Rather than assent to the stupid priorities of their new corporate overlords, the staff and editors quit the site en masse, effectively destroying it. The name their owners bought will still be there, but that will be meaningless because Deadspin's readers came for their writers, not the site itself.

I am sad to see Deadspin go, since it was one of the last vestiges of that great moment in internet history after universal broadband and before social media dominated it. Back then (when I first started blogging) I had my daily rotation of favorite websites and blogs and Deadspon was one of them. It still was until this week, the lone survivor of my old internet routine.

However, I am taking heart in how Deadpsin went down. American workers are under the thumbs of their greedy, stupid bosses. Just about every frontline worker has experience being good at their job and knowing back to front before some clueless higher up comes in to tell you what to do. Deadspin's new bosses said "stick to sports" without understanding that the site had distinguished itself by doing the opposite. Those of us (like myself) in education have innumerable instances of some administrator implementing a bad, asinine program so they can put it on their resume and leave for a better job before their lackluster initiative is exposed as bullshit.

Union membership is as low as it was in the dark times of the 1920s. Wages are stagnant and employers keep turning the screws to squeeze more profit from their businesses and more labor from their workers. In this hellscape American workers have only one weapon at their disposal: quitting. Like going on strike, it deprives your boss of your labor.

We have all worked in dysfunctional workplaces and dreamed of everyone quitting at once, the boss left with a problem they can't solve. When I quit being a professor two of my colleagues left that same week, and it felt like for the first time the higher ups in my department and college actually paid attention to the problems they were ignoring or actively causing.

Good on the Deadspin writers for pulling off the fantasy that so many of us have. And let that be a lesson to the rest of us that in depriving our bosses of labor we can have real power. I fervently hope workers in this country can start using that tool as a more effective weapon.

Quitting (A Labor Day Reflection)

Andrew Luck was in the news last week when he abruptly decided to quit being an NFL quarterback. Predictably, a lot of armchair macho men judged him for daring to value his health above their fantasy football teams.

I was happy for him. He's financially secure, why should he destroy his body and mind for the profit of billionaires and the entertainment of others? Although Luck is a millionaire by virtue of his profession, he got to experience one of the greatest thrills the typical American worker ever gets: quitting their job. 

In the modern American workplace the toilers have little leverage and less power. Organized labor gets weaker with each passing year, while the bosses find ways to drive their workers harder with the rallying cry of "efficiency." The film Office Space came out twenty years ago, and the trends it documented have only worsened. That film highlighted what I call "underling fatigue": the accumulated drag of being treated like a peon by people who are no better than you. The one surefire thing a worker can do is to quit, especially when it's inconvenient for their employer. That's certainly what Andrew Luck did.

I quit that way twice. Once was my worst job ever, as a telemarketer one summer in college. I took on part time evening shift hours at the rubber parts factory for a month so that I could quit the telemarketing job and work part time the rest of the summer and still make enough money. My telemarketing bosses were a little shocked to see me go well before summer was out, and it felt good.

The next was leaving my job as an assistant professor. This was the thing I spent seven years in grad school and two years in a "visiting" position fighting to have. It turned out to be a nightmare, but it was the job I was supposed to cherish. Plenty of other people out there still cling to their tenure track jobs, even if they never bring the fulfillment they promise. I decided that my life was meant to be better than that. I have never felt more free than the day I told my chair that I was gone.

Despite the thrill that quitting brings, and the positive changes to life that can come with it, it is a weak power. We all fancy ourselves irreplaceable in our jobs, but we are pretty easy to switch out. I love my current job and have no desire to quit. I also know that they'd be able to get a good teacher to take my place without much fuss.

And that prompts me to remember another time I felt powerful as a worker. It was in grad school when I went on a walkout with my fellow teaching assistants and we picketed the quad. That eventually led to getting a union contract. American workers are stuck having to get their shot at power by telling their boss to take their job and shove it. It'd be far better if they could get it in solidarity with their coworkers creating a workplace that doesn't make them want to quit. In today's climate that seems downright fanciful.

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.