John Lennon, "Working Class Hero" (Track of the Week)

I've written less for this blog in the past month than I have since I first started writing it. The truth is, I am just too tired most evenings to sit and write, or I have other work to do. The start of the school year this year has been especially rough. 

Music is seasonal for me, and every autumn I keep coming back to a playlist I made of songs from the Beatles' first solo records. The shift from summer into fall is mirrored in these songs by the kings of the pop music scene descending out of Beatlemania. In the words of one of Lennon's songs from the era, "I was the walrus, now I'm just John." Fall is a time of reflection for me, and these albums are full of reflective feelings about spending a decade in the eye of the pop cultural storm. Lennon's Plastic Ono Band is the most famously reflective of these albums, with literal primal screams. While most of the songs are painfully personal, he gets political on "Working Class Hero." 

Like the rest of his generation, Lennon was the product of the long post-war economic boom in the West, one still not over when he wrote this song. In Britain, it was the era where PM Harold Macmillan could taunt a heckler by saying "you've never had it so good!" The class struggles of the preceding decades seemed to have been drowned in a tidal wave of cheap consumer goods. This song questions what workers actually got in the bargain. Instead of the sunny vistas of postwar consumerism, Lennon sees children cowed by punitive schools, locked early into unfulfilling careers, and working unsatisfying jobs leavened only by the opiate of television at the end of an awful day. 

Lennon uses an old folk riff on acoustic guitar, sounding like the finger-pointing Dylan of "Masters of War." The first lines still hit me in the face, "As soon as you're born they make you feel small/ By giving you no time instead of it all." This month, when I just don't seem to have the time or energy to write, I am feeling it really hard. 

This song does not lay out any specific political plan, but encourages the listener to dump the ideology that keeps them from questioning and changing the system. That's the first, crucial step. In the past decade, I have noticed more and more people refusing to reduce themselves to their job, a process that accelerated during the pandemic. Whereas striking workers were once treated almost as outlaws by normie types, there has been an outpouring of support for the picket lines in recent strikes. Many people are realizing the raw deal that neoliberalism gave them once the "boom years" ended. Over fifty years after writing this song, Lennon smirks from the grave. 

The Great Revelation Behind the "Great Resignation"

Just realized I did not post last week's newsletter! I am back at school now and in the whirlwind of work have been neglecting some things.

My newest Substack is about what I call The Great Revelation. The whole "quiet quitting" thing and the so-called "Great Resignation" both stem from how the pandemic forced people to take stock of what really matters in life. It's perhaps the biggest moment of philosophical reflection in American history. I predict its effects will be felt for a long time. 

Love, Labor, and Exploitation

Like a lot of other people I have been thinking a lot lately about work and its meaning. After four decades of neoliberal propaganda proclaiming workaholism a necessary condition rather than a disorder, the centrality of work to our lives looks increasingly perverse and unbalanced. The fact that teachers like me in particular have worked harder under more stressful conditions than ever without any additional compensation or respect or workplace power has been especially glaring. 

Back when I was a callow undergraduate I had decided that whatever I did with my career, it would be something I enjoyed and that made the world a better place. Goodbye law school, hello grad school. Even after I jumped ship from academia I landed in secondary education. I know I am smart enough to have gone to law school and started making more money than I do now after decades of teaching in my first year at the bar. Despite that I opted to join one of the lowest paid of the educated professions. (I think only social workers have us beat.)

It is certainly true that despite the difficulty and stress of my job, that I enjoy it most of the time and feel like my hard work is having a positive impact on the world. At the same time, my older worries that educators are exploited through the love we give have only intensified. Last year I was an "essential worker" riding empty commuter trains, trying to juggle teaching other people's kids when mine weren't allowed into their school until May of 2021. The question thus arises of whether I would be better off in a meaningless job that I do not "love" with much lower stress and better pay. This is a calculation that a lot of teachers are making.

There is one thing staying my hand, however. While I am very sympathetic to the voices saying that we need to be working less and centering our lives around things outside of work, they sometimes miss a crucial fact. Work is the thing we do more than anything else with our waking hours upon this earth. When you have a shit job (I have had some in my day) you feel like the hours of your life are being stolen from you, spent in boredom and empty toil. It is an absolutely soul-crushing feeling, a kind of emotional torture. 

(Notice, of course, that the journalists and writers saying we should not look to work for fulfillment aren't quitting their writing gigs to become line cooks or HR specialists.) 

If I had to spend eight hours of my day (or more, most likely) doing something I didn't believe in I would probably fall into a state of suicidal depression. Having a soul only when the quitting time whistle blows is not how I want to go through life. 

In the meantime I keep asking myself how to stop my work from taking over my life. Last Saturday, for example, I decided I just wasn't going to do any schoolwork, I needed to rest. I wonder if I can allow myself to take longer to grade my students' work, to be more willing to recycle suboptimal lessons rather than spending several evening hours constructing a new one that may not even work. Teachers are always told to do these extra sacrifices "for the kids' but I never hear doctors being told to do uncompensated labor "for the patients" or lawyers to not bill for all their hours "for the clients." 

My hope for the "Great Resignation" is that all of these individual refusals can somehow add up to a collective reorientation around work expectations. I love what I do, but I will not be suckered. Those days are over. 

What Quarantine Has Taught Me

Every now and then I stop and think about how I have been living in quarantine for over two months. It's been such a long time, but at the same time, as recently as early March my life was going on in its usual fashion. In terms of the number of days, it hasn't been that long, really. But the basic contours of my life have been radically altered.

I spend a lot of time in despair contemplating the deaths, the uncertainty, and the knowledge that years of economic hardship await. I am dying to see my parents and have no idea when that will be a possibility. All that being said, my hour by hour existence in quarantine is far happier than what came before.

The challenge of having to teach online has been an invigorating one to rise to. I have a real sense of accomplishment over having done it. Before quarantine I was afraid that my teaching was getting stale, but now I feel like I have managed to stay fresh.

This transition has meant a lot of work on my part. I work many more hours in the week than I did before. However, I don't mind the tradeoff because I no longer have endure my awful commute. Not only have two and a half hours returned to my life, the stress of making trains, dealing with transit delays, and the overall grind are gone. This experience has taught me what a horrible burden my commute has become on my soul.

During the school year before quarantine I felt like I was about to crack under the strain. What made it worse was seeing my children so little. I would get back at the end of the day feeling completely wiped, spending the two hours before my children's bedtime frantically getting dinner on the table then collapsing on the couch. On those days I felt to tired to actually spend time with my kids. Now I get to see them all day. Despite the annoyance of having to get them to do their school work, I really treasure all of this time with them.

I have learned that my life before quarantine was less than ideal. After that knowledge I really don't know if I can go back to facing Penn Station on a daily basis again. I also don't really know what I can even do with this knowledge, since now is not really a good time to leave a steady job. This is a paradox I am sure a lot of other people are feeling right now.

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.

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.

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.

Washing Up

A friend of mine once told me that a sign of growing up working class is a father who "washes up" when he gets home from work.  Since class is just as much cultural as it is economic, that's always made sense to me.  When I worked factory jobs during my college summers, I'd come home covered in grime; "showering" could not begin to describe what I had to do when I got off work.

My own father had his own steady post-work ritual built up over years of labor: he would get home, "wash up," change into his casual clothes, and then sit down in his recliner and read the evening edition of the local newspaper.  (My hometown is so old fashioned that we still have an evening edition.)  He always washed up in the spartan basement bathroom, which until insurance money paid for renovation after a flood when I was in high school, consisted of an exposed copper water pipe, toliet, and metal shower spigots and pipes naked without tile or fancy fixtures.  I never used the shower without wearing flip-flops; the shower floor -really just cement with an industrial drain in the middle- was that dirty.

Around the time dad finished the paper after he had washed up, we'd eat supper as a family, and he would finally be ready to socialize.  His need for about forty-five minutes of quiet solitude after getting home subtly let me know that his job took a lot out of him.  My mother, on the other hand, always came home with an indignant story about a treacherous colleague, dumbass administrator, or disobedient student (she's a high school teacher).  She ranted and raved at the indignities of her job, but her anger and frustration reflected a real commitment to her profession.  As much as she complained, I knew she taught because that's what she loved to do.  If there has ever been such a thing as a born teacher in this world, she's it.  My father, on the other hand, seemed not to have any real connection to his work besides that of duty.  The duty to work hard, to not let the company down, and most of all, the duty to support his family.  Perhaps his stoic sacrifice, enacted each and every day for decades, was the reason why he was much more supportive of my decision to go to graduate school than my mother.  He knew full well what it was like to spend a life's energies on something he didn't want to do, and the need to pursue a dream.

Although he worked at a factory for over forty years until his retirement last year, my father had been a manager in the office, rather than working on the floor, since before I was born.  (He worked as a machinist while going to night school, and once he graduated the company promoted him.)  Despite the nature of his work, my father's working class upbringing never left him.  He very rarely wore a suit and tie to his job, usually a pair of cotton slacks and an open-collar patterned button-down shirt instead, both purchased at K-Mart.  Like his plain clothes. washing up might have been a ritual he maintained out of the very powerful force of habit among stubborn small town Midwesterners.

Now that I work at a high school rather than a university my work day has become much more rigid and ritualized.  One of the great perks of academia is flexibility.  I worked over fifty hours a week as a college professor (just like I do now), but I had a lot of freedom over when I worked those hours.  Some days I got up early, on others I woke and worked late.  Nowadays I get up at 5:30 every morning, get dressed, walk the dog, eat breakfast, walk to Penn Station, catch the train to the city, take the subway, walk to work, do my job, take the subway, ride the train, walk home, and walk the dog.  This week, perhaps out of some kind of intergenerational osmosis, I've started washing up after walking the dog.  It's quite invigorating; like a lot of rituals, it marks the transition from one state of being into another.

I guess I understand why my dad kept doing it, even though he no longer had to clean the grit of the factory off of his body.  I must say I also hope that some of my father's virtues rub off on me by imitating his rituals.  (To a point, of course.  I am just as likely as my wife to be the one making dinner.)  The older I get, the more I realize how much bullshit he had to swallow and how many dreams he had to defer each day he did his job, a job that allowed me to have a much more comfortable upbringing than the one he'd had.  That's a debt I can never even hope to repay; my only hope is to be able to sacrifice half as much for my own children someday.