Academia Will Not Love You Back

The Stack of the Week

Photo by Vadim Sherbakov on Unsplash

I have always loved academia. I am the only child of an academic, and I grew up thinking that the academy was the “last good place,” where there was intellectual freedom and inquiry coupled with a modest, middle-class income. I loved college. I admired my professors. I wanted to be like them. When I began graduate school in the 1990s, I was assured by my advisors that there would soon be a job boom: all of the faculty who were hired in American academia’s decades of expansion were about to retire. There would be a need for assistant professors in all fields, nationwide.

That did not happen.

Instead, as this older generation retired, university administrations replaced them with adjunct faculty, to whom they did not have to pay benefits and could pay a paltry wage, with non-tenure-track instructors, who would teach heavy course loads for low pay, and with graduate students, who cost next to nothing. As I went on the job market, there were often hundreds of applicants for every tenure-track job. (One very polite and considerate rejection letter informed me that the search committee was very impressed with my work, but that there were over seven hundred applicants for the position. I have since served on such committees, and it’s heartbreaking so see all of the wasted talent.)

The academic job market did not grow. It shrank—drastically.

It has since gotten much, much worse. I was one of the lucky ones—at least in one sense—because I landed a tenure-track job, one of the few available nationally in my field the year that I went on the market. I was fortunate enough to place an article in a top journal in my final year of graduate school, and that was just the edge that I needed. Since then the faculty in our department has aged in place, with very few hires. We have lost our specialists in the eighteenth century and British Romanticism to retirement, and these lines have not been replaced. With falling enrollments in the field, we cannot justify the hires, and we must cover those areas as well as we can with the faculty we have.

Our university administration clearly sees humanities faculty as a (barely) necessary annoyance, as is the case in most public universities these days. It is all about STEM fields and professional schools and grant money, especially as state appropriations for higher education have shrunk. The only values are economic. Students have gotten the message and are avoiding the humanities like the plague. We have had only one small raise in the last ten years (which amounted to less than one year of inflation), and we do not receive cost-of-living adjustments, so while I have no desire for great wealth, I find myself in the process of becoming poorer and poorer every year as I gain seniority in my profession, as my spending power diminishes to the point that a middle-class life seems to be slipping away. Again, I’m one of the lucky ones. My non-tenure-track colleagues are in even worse financial straits.

Meanwhile, the university has built a new football stadium and a deluxe football practice facility, has bought a second hospital, and has hired numerous vice presidents (don’t ask me what they do all day; they certainly don’t teach), all of whom make well into six figures. Our president (who does not hold an advanced degree and is not an academic but a former politician) is one of the most well-compensated of any regional public university in the country and makes a base salary of more than half a million dollars a year, not including perquisites. We have a brand new, luxurious alumni center. This is a national trend: see this recent article from The New York Times.

And here is the thing: our administration knows that they have us over a barrel. They hold all the cards. Pick your metaphor. They know that the job market is so bad that tenured faculty don’t have options if they want to remain in the field, so they don’t have to pay us a reasonable salary. And if we did end up leaving, they really wouldn’t care. Either they would replace us with even cheaper labor, or they wouldn’t replace us at all. (And I mean cheap labor. Our graduate students’ annual teaching stipends amount to $8000, a number that has not changed in over two decades. Adjunct pay is far below the poverty level, with no benefits and no health insurance.)

So what keeps me going? I love teaching. I love my students, especially my few graduate students, whose dedication to our ailing field continues to inspire me. I love my colleagues. They are amazing people, brilliant and generous teachers and scholars. We fight the good fight, even if we are destined to lose it. After all, as I have said before, if given the chance, English majors will save the freaking world. But until the revolution comes, we count the years until our modest retirements and hope that our departments will outlast us.

All of this to say that I greatly admire the writer of The Stack of the Week,

Joshua Doležal

, who writes The Recovering Academic. Joshua, as his stack title suggests, is a former academic who envisions a life beyond the ivory tower and is living it. He writes with great passion and insight into the shortcomings of contemporary academia, and he interviews PhDs and former academics who have successfully made the transition to other careers. He is an inspiration to those of my kind, and he is living proof that academia is not necessarily the last good place. He also writes eloquently on fatherhood, the craft of writing, and literature. There are many pieces that I could recommend, but I would start with his recent engrossing essay about the poet Phyllis Wheatley. (His archive goes behind a paywall after two weeks, so go ahead and read this piece now, and then perhaps you will consider a paid subscription.)

Phillis Wheatley: An American Genius

That’s all for today. I’ll be back on Wednesday with the beginning of the “Clapping Back to Misogyny” series.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Photo by Miguel Alcântara on Unsplash