I'm also a believer in the revolution. Until then, it's a real problem. Luckily, people like you keep doing the good work. I'm not sure when the breaking point will be, but I think it might be in some realization that the world is a mess and building more of the humanities can help to sort it out. Because I guess the English academics would also look for the beauty that's still there.
Anyway, I 'left' academia in terms of career to return to work (of different nature, in which my degree was also valued) in secondary schools, as I found it more free for what I wanted to publish as well as more job stability and freedom (i.e. location). Not to say that this area doesn't have its issues as well! But I was certainly making more money. I say 'left' because I think another problem is this 'in' or 'out' thing about academia. I still consider myself an independent researcher, but not everybody likes the idea of this flexibility. It's also hard to gain access; I'm lucky that one of my institutions grants access to all alumni on JSTOR and the university in Basel allows resident access. If there were more nuance and flexibility, there might be other approaches to fixing the problem.
I've no doubt you're a great teacher based on your writing. Happy there are those who are sticking it out and persevering! There's such an interesting discourse around academia on Substack. Hope it will lead somewhere good.
Thanks, Kate. I agree that there are paths that we might take. I can’t quite see what they look like yet, but Substack is giving us an idea of some sort of vision. The work that you do is so valuable, and I’m grateful that there is a platform for it.
A great read John. I left academia straight after my PhD because I could see what the job looked like going forward and it wasn't something I could do to myself. I think I made the right decision.
Something Kate said just made me think: could we build a Substack university? I don't know what that would look like or how it would work, but when you look at the quality of writing, teaching and discussion on here – you have to wonder whether another model might be possible?
That’s really interesting, Simon. There is certainly potential for something; let’s think about it. “The Great Courses” has shown that there is a market for people who want to learn simply for the sake of learning. Perhaps we could think about something like that with more interaction--some sort of “Substack Humanities Consortium.” Your slow reading projects provide an attractive model.
Nov 6, 2023·edited Nov 6, 2023Liked by John Halbrooks
Very cool idea. I think of this in two ways -
1. Course-like offerings of an academic nature (I think we are each doing something like this) -- there could be something in the nature of 'Substack U' as a designation on a Stack, but I guess it would be self-marked? This could be a category or an extra tick box.
2. Independent research (usually more accessible in language, as well as often multi media in comparison to traditional journals) - I guess this is open to 'peer review' simply by nature of the comments, a bit like the way Wikipedia is apparently more accurate than other encyclopedias (obviously you have to follow up if you use it as research, but you know what I mean?). Of course you can also cross post research here, then perhaps summarize or extend the findings.
Happy to continue the discussion!
EDIT: I also think another starting point in thinking about the matrix of research and ideas reaching people who may work within different disciplines is in Mary Midgley's work - from Newcastle, Simon! Do you guys like her work? I'm thinking mainly of her last book What is Philosophy For?
I don't know Midgley's book either, but I will immediately look it up. Perhaps one of us should start a chat thread on this topic and leave it open? We should keep pondering this...
I don't know Mary Midgley's book. I've been out of the academic reading loop for a few years now, bringing up kids. I'd like Substack to be a means of getting back in. There seems a lot of potential here to connect readers (students) and writers (teachers) without the behemoth of traditional universities. I suppose one area of discussion is how you ensure quality, in teaching and research.
I see a lot of this as very long-term. What will the academy look like a generation from now? How can we create a space that supports the humanities, free thinking and working across disciplines. If we imagine a world in 30 years time where the trad. universities are no longer the centre of research: what does the alternative look like and how can we build it?
This question was what drove Sam Kahn, Mary Tabor, and me to start the collaborative Substack Inner Life. Of course, a Substack U would be a different entity entirely.
The main problem -- which I also keep getting tripped up on while thinking about growing my paid subscribers -- is that there's a strong trend AWAY from paying for humanities content, even as part of the liberal arts. "The Great Courses" is interesting, but it raises questions of scale, marketing, and such for any kind of imitative startup. I think there are people, as John says, who value learning for its own sake and even miss the kind of immersive learning they enjoyed as undergrads. But there are a lot of cultural pressures conditioning all of us to think of such things as "nice to have," not "need to have." I've told some friends lately that I never had imposter syndrome as a professor, but I do struggle with something like that on this platform whenever I think about strategizing for a meaningful income.
Despite the flagging confidence in higher education, colleges and universities still leverage credentials as their main recruiting tool -- and the promise of a more buoyant financial future with those credentials. I've contemplated creating a line of on-demand courses as proof of concept for my coaching practice. But I'm mindful of the marketing truism that you need to sell outcomes, not the product. For a Substack U to gain traction, I think it would have to offer a clear outcome or concrete value proposition in addition to intrinsic good.
Sorry if I'm leaping immediately to brass tacks, but I think this is relevant to all of us who see our humanities content on Substack as more than purely a passion project.
Thanks Joshua, you make some really good points. And don't apologise for being the voice of doom. We need a good dose of realism. I think you're absolutely right about outcomes. This is already restructuring academia as you say. I was perhaps in one of the last cohorts (early 2000s) where undergrad outcomes were something of a secondary concern. We picked courses that interested us, not ones that offered employability. I doubt I would feel so free making the same decisions today.
That being said, what unites us is a belief in the intrinsic good of the humanities and the need for it to survive in some form in the future. This creates all kinds of challenges in terms of funding. But if the situation continues to decline in higher education, I don't think we have any alternative but to find new spaces for the humanities.
I was enrolled into the English Department all by being chosen - yes, English was not my choice. I dreamed of going for Philosophy and tried the path to Directing before taking the tertiary admission examinations, which all lead to failure. Neither was I a good student in the English Department - I spent more time reading laws than Shakespeare all through my four years in the uni. Then I graduated. At the ceremony, our Dean told us: in English, here we are at a "commencement", as graduating from the uni is only to commence your real journey in life. I was deeply impressed. Many years later, I started to appreciate what I was bestowed in the English Department. That was when I moved to another continent, far from my homeland. I needed to use the language everyday, trying to earn myself a living. And I remembered what Dean told us about the commencement. And now, over 10 years after my first landing, all I want to achieve in my leisure time is to improve languages, especially my English to the next level, and to read as much as possible if I can, given my really slacky rhythm. I am not sure if English graduates can save the world, but I am sure they have greater capacity to enjoy their lives and the beauties of this world as human beings. Only if everyone is an English graduate in some way! Then this world will embrace peace and harmony. Again, thank you for this article with your devotion to Humanities. Prayge🙏.
Thank you for your story; it’s very encouraging. I sometimes have students get in touch with me years after they graduate to thank me for what they learned in my class and that they didn’t appreciate it at the time. Lots of my colleagues have the same experience.
Gosh, this hits home. Even though all the negative and exploitative employment trends were in place 30 years ago when I started university teaching as a doctoral student, there was room for things to get worse. You don’t touch here on the eviscerated classroom after COVID - the expectation that every class has a duplicate of itself online for on-demand access whenever. A lively discussion with warm bodies in a room - today’s students don’t have that expectation and don’t know what they’re missing. There is much to mourn. And, as with any mourning, the living must figure out how to remain human and alive. Thank you, Substack, for laying out the funeral baked meats so the mourners could gather. I wonder, what next?
That's an important point and could be the topic for an entire post. We have had a robust graduate program here for decades, and we place many of our students in decent jobs, but our numbers our now shrinking because students are looking for online programs. We have to decide whether or not that is the hill that we will die on. Since Socrates, there has been no better pedagogical model than people sitting in a room together and talking. No tech can improve upon it.
Thanks for mentioning me, John. I'll have to circle back for a full comment. Whenever I get a taste of teaching again, as I do with my coaching clients, I'm tempted to believe in that "last good place." I wonder if it ever was, truly, such a place? There's a much longer and more nuanced answer to that...
But I'll repeat the core and tragic irony that you express: experts who are increasingly tasked with helping students get lucrative jobs are finding that their own jobs are scarcely worth having. There are few other analogues that I know of in industry, where the people credentialing others for economic opportunities are, themselves, suffering from wage stagnation or a promotional ceiling. Kevin R. McClure is doing some good work in this area, but I fear that the scale of the problem is too great.
I’m sure that we are indeed looking back at a past that never really existed in the way that we envision it. And in some ways that past was worse: the profession was totally dominated by white men, for example, and while we are still not where we need to be in terms of diversity, that aspect of academia has at least gotten better. But at least in the 60s and 70s, universities were not minting so many PhDs with no job prospects in their fields.
To me it's less about the job market calculus, which has often been brutal (even if grad programs could, in Steven Pinker's words, exercise a little more birth control). It's more about the erosion of purpose even for those, like us, who beat those odds. When I began teaching in 2005, I dealt with plenty of the typical "how am I ever going to use this" skepticism from non-majors. But I was a happy evangelist for the humanities because I felt that my institution truly valued my field and the expertise I brought to the whole campus. By the late 2010s there was a nagging feeling that the institution didn't value me or my field, and then COVID just laid that truth bare. Even so, I'd probably still be there if family priorities hadn't forced the question. The pull of the examined life is still strong. I'm doing my best to continue living it outside of academe.
I went for a PhD not for the job prospects but because it afforded a short window of my young adulthood to dedicate to the examined life. (I've always assumed that I'd have to go "alt-ac" after finishing the degree.) As someone who is currently in academe, I would suggest that the university is not necessarily an environment more conducive to the examined life. It's a rat race, too. I easily spend over 40 hours per week on committees, meetings, side jobs, teaching technical or business writing classes, and so on. While this work has its satisfactions, especially the teaching, it's not really conducive to the kind of slow and deliberate thinking and reading I thought I'd be able to do in a PhD program. And, from where I'm sitting, it looks like it just gets worse on the tenure track. When I am working on my research, I'm spending far more time dissecting obscure periodicals than capital-T Thinking about Big Questions. Often, I wonder if I'd have a richer intellectual life if I just got a reasonably well-paid but less demanding 40-hour-per-week job that was not related to my intellectual interests. Wallace Stevens managed to write everything he wrote while working as an insurance executive, after all.
All I'm saying is--I don't know if we can say that working in the university really has much to do with the examined life. There are plenty of great intellects who have cultivated intellectual lives outside of the university. It might even be more possible. (I'm thinking of the Catherine Project, which shows regular people having real intellectual lives outside of the academy, and it's really encouraging.)
You make some very good points. I think that the ability to spend time in reflection and "slow reading" (to borrow from Simon Haisell) is possible in academia, but the possibilities vary widely depending on your university, job title, department, and where you are in your career. Again, I'm one of the lucky ones in that regard; after tenure, I no longer have the "publish-or-perish" mindset, and my course load is such that I can spend some time on personal projects. But, on the other hand, as our administration continues to ask us to do "more with less," this may be only a temporary condition. I have also worked 40-hour nonacademic jobs, and I found that my brain was fairly fried at the end of the day, but that may just be about my personal capacities.
Love it. Yes! As an academic who doesn’t really fit anywhere anymore but with an undergrad Lit major I’m trying to bring beauty and humanity back in my own writings. Thank you!
I’m also a recovering academic and will be sure to check out your recommendation. I went from the tenure-track line to adjuncting--which I have vowed never to do again (it’s just too outrageously demeaning) to private high school teaching and now back to freelance writing. The humanities have always been under threat, but never more than now. The sad truth is that with AI doing more and more of the STEM thinking for us, the study of art, literature, philosophy...may be the only things left that sustain our humanity.
I feel this (from the UK) as someone who is academic adjacent (I work supporting disabled students at my uni in developing study strategies), but who comes from a humanities academic background. UG, Master's and PhD, by the time I was approaching finishing my PhD (and near bankrupt), I'd already had experience of teaching at universities and colleges for 10 years. I could not afford to chase another 10+ years part-time temporary contracts across the country in pursuit of the vanishingly few opportunities whilst publishing regularly. So I took a job in my current team, which fortunately became full time and permanent (I've since dropped back to part-time, voluntarily). I've watched my doctoral peers fight the system, 3 months part-time here, 9 months full time there, a semester with 150% workload... With multiple published articles, even books, and STILL no sign of secure employment. It is beyond hard.
I'd also say that STEM is not necessarily easier, except in so much as there is a public perception of more money in the field. Grad students are still massively exploited, the need to chase funding grants is CONSTANT, and security/tenure appears as arbitrary as anywhere else. Governments and universities just shout louder about it...
Yes, I didn’t mean to suggest that my STEM colleagues have it easy, so thanks for mentioning that. The constant pressure to bring in grant money creates a lot of anxiety, and that is the only reason that the administration values them.
Oh I didn't think you were implying it's easier, more that the gulf is more in perception and administrative power edicts. Humanities is fighting a lot of challenges, but STEM has big money ones and appreciation is borderline at best (just it gets bigger headlines).
Lisa, I'm curious if you have seen a change in how grant monies are managed over the past 10 years or so? Maybe I was naive, but my sense in the 00s was that grants afforded a certain autonomy -- that grants were awarded to individuals, who then bore primary responsibility for them and enjoyed freedom in how they were allocated. When I won a major grant to launch a podcast in 2018, I was startled by all the internal hoop-jumping to get the thing, to get expenditures for it approved, etc. And it was a little dispiriting that it ended up being a grant to the college (and presumably a feather the dean could put in their cap). I've heard STEM colleagues talk about their universities losing tens of thousands of their grant funds, and so on. Am I right that this is a symptom of a more corporate university model?
I would 100% agree about the shift in the last 20 years. But I'd also add that a common feature of grants seems to be a baked in under-funding of roles for the projects. This reinforces the precarious casualised employment practices that now dominate HE. A 'more work for less money' model seems embedded, and primary academics are spending more and more time JUST completely funding applications. It's dispiriting for everyone.
After a troubled youth in the Deep South of the 1980s and 90s, I was good at two things: school (writing, to be exact), and apparently being the town slut (an unfair judgment, but that’s another story). The moment I turned 18, I hit the strip club stage. At the same time, I began what I believed to be my climb out of the gutter: getting a bunch of degrees. Three, to be exact: a BA, MA, and PhD in English. In the late nineties, we were all assured: GO TO COLLEGE! GET EDUCATED! THIS IS YOUR TICKET OUT! Fast-forward a decade-plus later, when on the very first day of my PhD program, our department head unceremoniously announced: “There are no jobs for any of you.” We all tried, anyway. Like you, I published an article--a beautiful and poignant piece of work--in a top journal at the end of my graduate career. Sadly, this did not earn me any dignified appointment--just more dumbass offers of “postdocs” and “temporary positions.” By that time, I was a wife and a mother in my thirties; making money was of some real consequence. So what did I do, after climbing my way out of sex work? Return right back to it. I made more money stripping AS A DOCTOR than I ever could as an academic. Sobering reality. Luckily, I was able to parlay my many years of experience stripping into a sensual movement business in which I provide safe, women-only experiences for ladies worldwide. Yet the lesson has never left me: my ass was worth more than my many degrees, and the academy is a professional wasteland.
Devoured this! Thank you so much for sharing! So, so many of us teachers, lecturers and professors feel the same way! I too love teaching, love my students - it's just what comes with it...
Powerful essay on what's happening, particularly to the humanities in academia. What a shame. And I suspect that our population's humanity, for those who still read, will suffer in ways we don't yet fully understand but that appear to be getting shown in the stand of the MAGA party, so politically far to the right that they ban brilliant books and risk the existence of the US Constitution. Leftists and progressives have problems, but the destruction of the democracy and book banning are not included--and that's a big difference that makes all the difference.
Nov 5, 2023·edited Nov 6, 2023Liked by John Halbrooks
Good read. Much of this resonates. You’re inspiring me to consider publishing an essay on my insights into academia. My recent experiences editing a festschrift for my advisor, sharing my reflections of my journey after PhD at my school’s 130th anniversary and 75th PhD anniversary celebrations, and seeing what’s happening at professional grad schools of library and information science most of which are now called iSchools are also why I started writing one of my Substack newsletters (Infophilia). I saw this coming - e.g. unhealthy org climate, drive to get more grants, etc. I left academia to be a stay at home mom. Later I started and closed a small publishing company and volunteered most my professional skills. Invited back as an adjunct. My English Lit undergrad major has been invaluable and is still cherished. I’m trying to get the creative spirit back, deeply grateful that the humanistic mind remains. Thanks.
Great if depressing read. Similar themes though slightly less mercenary are reflected in academia here in Australia. Humanities bear the brunt of any cuts, as does any anthropological discipline, or art. Poorer for society as a whole and sad to see.
Yes, I think that the trend is amplified in the American south, where football and moneyed interests reign supreme, but I agree that it is happening everywhere.
Wow great piece. I teetered on the edge of this when I graduated in 98 with a degree in anthropology. I regretfully decided to pay for graduate school at Cambridge. A loan that never did pay off career wise. I am glad that I left academia and never invested myself into it because as you aptly state academia will not love you back.
I should have taken my dad’s advice and been one of the 10% of women engineers in the 90s. C’est la vie.
Yes, and the sad part is that it doesn’t have to be this way. I just read an encouraging article from Emory’s magazine about how they are bucking the trend, doubling down on humanities, and hiring a bunch of new faculty. Hoping others will follow their example...
The academy is morally bankrupt, my mother’s friend went to the University of California Berkeley in the 1960s and paid nothing out of pocket. Now tuition is $35,000/year. The faculty has been replaced by a greedy administrative class with lavish benefits and salaries.
It is vital to hear the voices from within the US academy tell the truth about what is going on with the professors who are doing the essential work of educating and enlightening their students.
I'm also a believer in the revolution. Until then, it's a real problem. Luckily, people like you keep doing the good work. I'm not sure when the breaking point will be, but I think it might be in some realization that the world is a mess and building more of the humanities can help to sort it out. Because I guess the English academics would also look for the beauty that's still there.
Anyway, I 'left' academia in terms of career to return to work (of different nature, in which my degree was also valued) in secondary schools, as I found it more free for what I wanted to publish as well as more job stability and freedom (i.e. location). Not to say that this area doesn't have its issues as well! But I was certainly making more money. I say 'left' because I think another problem is this 'in' or 'out' thing about academia. I still consider myself an independent researcher, but not everybody likes the idea of this flexibility. It's also hard to gain access; I'm lucky that one of my institutions grants access to all alumni on JSTOR and the university in Basel allows resident access. If there were more nuance and flexibility, there might be other approaches to fixing the problem.
I've no doubt you're a great teacher based on your writing. Happy there are those who are sticking it out and persevering! There's such an interesting discourse around academia on Substack. Hope it will lead somewhere good.
Thanks, Kate. I agree that there are paths that we might take. I can’t quite see what they look like yet, but Substack is giving us an idea of some sort of vision. The work that you do is so valuable, and I’m grateful that there is a platform for it.
A great read John. I left academia straight after my PhD because I could see what the job looked like going forward and it wasn't something I could do to myself. I think I made the right decision.
Something Kate said just made me think: could we build a Substack university? I don't know what that would look like or how it would work, but when you look at the quality of writing, teaching and discussion on here – you have to wonder whether another model might be possible?
That’s really interesting, Simon. There is certainly potential for something; let’s think about it. “The Great Courses” has shown that there is a market for people who want to learn simply for the sake of learning. Perhaps we could think about something like that with more interaction--some sort of “Substack Humanities Consortium.” Your slow reading projects provide an attractive model.
Definitely something to ruminate on.
Very cool idea. I think of this in two ways -
1. Course-like offerings of an academic nature (I think we are each doing something like this) -- there could be something in the nature of 'Substack U' as a designation on a Stack, but I guess it would be self-marked? This could be a category or an extra tick box.
2. Independent research (usually more accessible in language, as well as often multi media in comparison to traditional journals) - I guess this is open to 'peer review' simply by nature of the comments, a bit like the way Wikipedia is apparently more accurate than other encyclopedias (obviously you have to follow up if you use it as research, but you know what I mean?). Of course you can also cross post research here, then perhaps summarize or extend the findings.
Happy to continue the discussion!
EDIT: I also think another starting point in thinking about the matrix of research and ideas reaching people who may work within different disciplines is in Mary Midgley's work - from Newcastle, Simon! Do you guys like her work? I'm thinking mainly of her last book What is Philosophy For?
I don't know Midgley's book either, but I will immediately look it up. Perhaps one of us should start a chat thread on this topic and leave it open? We should keep pondering this...
We should! I’ll think about how to frame it. Or if you start one, I’ll certainly join in.
I don't know Mary Midgley's book. I've been out of the academic reading loop for a few years now, bringing up kids. I'd like Substack to be a means of getting back in. There seems a lot of potential here to connect readers (students) and writers (teachers) without the behemoth of traditional universities. I suppose one area of discussion is how you ensure quality, in teaching and research.
I see a lot of this as very long-term. What will the academy look like a generation from now? How can we create a space that supports the humanities, free thinking and working across disciplines. If we imagine a world in 30 years time where the trad. universities are no longer the centre of research: what does the alternative look like and how can we build it?
This question was what drove Sam Kahn, Mary Tabor, and me to start the collaborative Substack Inner Life. Of course, a Substack U would be a different entity entirely.
The main problem -- which I also keep getting tripped up on while thinking about growing my paid subscribers -- is that there's a strong trend AWAY from paying for humanities content, even as part of the liberal arts. "The Great Courses" is interesting, but it raises questions of scale, marketing, and such for any kind of imitative startup. I think there are people, as John says, who value learning for its own sake and even miss the kind of immersive learning they enjoyed as undergrads. But there are a lot of cultural pressures conditioning all of us to think of such things as "nice to have," not "need to have." I've told some friends lately that I never had imposter syndrome as a professor, but I do struggle with something like that on this platform whenever I think about strategizing for a meaningful income.
Despite the flagging confidence in higher education, colleges and universities still leverage credentials as their main recruiting tool -- and the promise of a more buoyant financial future with those credentials. I've contemplated creating a line of on-demand courses as proof of concept for my coaching practice. But I'm mindful of the marketing truism that you need to sell outcomes, not the product. For a Substack U to gain traction, I think it would have to offer a clear outcome or concrete value proposition in addition to intrinsic good.
Sorry if I'm leaping immediately to brass tacks, but I think this is relevant to all of us who see our humanities content on Substack as more than purely a passion project.
Thanks Joshua, you make some really good points. And don't apologise for being the voice of doom. We need a good dose of realism. I think you're absolutely right about outcomes. This is already restructuring academia as you say. I was perhaps in one of the last cohorts (early 2000s) where undergrad outcomes were something of a secondary concern. We picked courses that interested us, not ones that offered employability. I doubt I would feel so free making the same decisions today.
That being said, what unites us is a belief in the intrinsic good of the humanities and the need for it to survive in some form in the future. This creates all kinds of challenges in terms of funding. But if the situation continues to decline in higher education, I don't think we have any alternative but to find new spaces for the humanities.
I was enrolled into the English Department all by being chosen - yes, English was not my choice. I dreamed of going for Philosophy and tried the path to Directing before taking the tertiary admission examinations, which all lead to failure. Neither was I a good student in the English Department - I spent more time reading laws than Shakespeare all through my four years in the uni. Then I graduated. At the ceremony, our Dean told us: in English, here we are at a "commencement", as graduating from the uni is only to commence your real journey in life. I was deeply impressed. Many years later, I started to appreciate what I was bestowed in the English Department. That was when I moved to another continent, far from my homeland. I needed to use the language everyday, trying to earn myself a living. And I remembered what Dean told us about the commencement. And now, over 10 years after my first landing, all I want to achieve in my leisure time is to improve languages, especially my English to the next level, and to read as much as possible if I can, given my really slacky rhythm. I am not sure if English graduates can save the world, but I am sure they have greater capacity to enjoy their lives and the beauties of this world as human beings. Only if everyone is an English graduate in some way! Then this world will embrace peace and harmony. Again, thank you for this article with your devotion to Humanities. Prayge🙏.
Thank you for your story; it’s very encouraging. I sometimes have students get in touch with me years after they graduate to thank me for what they learned in my class and that they didn’t appreciate it at the time. Lots of my colleagues have the same experience.
Gosh, this hits home. Even though all the negative and exploitative employment trends were in place 30 years ago when I started university teaching as a doctoral student, there was room for things to get worse. You don’t touch here on the eviscerated classroom after COVID - the expectation that every class has a duplicate of itself online for on-demand access whenever. A lively discussion with warm bodies in a room - today’s students don’t have that expectation and don’t know what they’re missing. There is much to mourn. And, as with any mourning, the living must figure out how to remain human and alive. Thank you, Substack, for laying out the funeral baked meats so the mourners could gather. I wonder, what next?
That's an important point and could be the topic for an entire post. We have had a robust graduate program here for decades, and we place many of our students in decent jobs, but our numbers our now shrinking because students are looking for online programs. We have to decide whether or not that is the hill that we will die on. Since Socrates, there has been no better pedagogical model than people sitting in a room together and talking. No tech can improve upon it.
I’m doing my best! It is inspiring to find such a supportive and passionate community here.
Thanks for mentioning me, John. I'll have to circle back for a full comment. Whenever I get a taste of teaching again, as I do with my coaching clients, I'm tempted to believe in that "last good place." I wonder if it ever was, truly, such a place? There's a much longer and more nuanced answer to that...
But I'll repeat the core and tragic irony that you express: experts who are increasingly tasked with helping students get lucrative jobs are finding that their own jobs are scarcely worth having. There are few other analogues that I know of in industry, where the people credentialing others for economic opportunities are, themselves, suffering from wage stagnation or a promotional ceiling. Kevin R. McClure is doing some good work in this area, but I fear that the scale of the problem is too great.
I’m sure that we are indeed looking back at a past that never really existed in the way that we envision it. And in some ways that past was worse: the profession was totally dominated by white men, for example, and while we are still not where we need to be in terms of diversity, that aspect of academia has at least gotten better. But at least in the 60s and 70s, universities were not minting so many PhDs with no job prospects in their fields.
To me it's less about the job market calculus, which has often been brutal (even if grad programs could, in Steven Pinker's words, exercise a little more birth control). It's more about the erosion of purpose even for those, like us, who beat those odds. When I began teaching in 2005, I dealt with plenty of the typical "how am I ever going to use this" skepticism from non-majors. But I was a happy evangelist for the humanities because I felt that my institution truly valued my field and the expertise I brought to the whole campus. By the late 2010s there was a nagging feeling that the institution didn't value me or my field, and then COVID just laid that truth bare. Even so, I'd probably still be there if family priorities hadn't forced the question. The pull of the examined life is still strong. I'm doing my best to continue living it outside of academe.
I went for a PhD not for the job prospects but because it afforded a short window of my young adulthood to dedicate to the examined life. (I've always assumed that I'd have to go "alt-ac" after finishing the degree.) As someone who is currently in academe, I would suggest that the university is not necessarily an environment more conducive to the examined life. It's a rat race, too. I easily spend over 40 hours per week on committees, meetings, side jobs, teaching technical or business writing classes, and so on. While this work has its satisfactions, especially the teaching, it's not really conducive to the kind of slow and deliberate thinking and reading I thought I'd be able to do in a PhD program. And, from where I'm sitting, it looks like it just gets worse on the tenure track. When I am working on my research, I'm spending far more time dissecting obscure periodicals than capital-T Thinking about Big Questions. Often, I wonder if I'd have a richer intellectual life if I just got a reasonably well-paid but less demanding 40-hour-per-week job that was not related to my intellectual interests. Wallace Stevens managed to write everything he wrote while working as an insurance executive, after all.
All I'm saying is--I don't know if we can say that working in the university really has much to do with the examined life. There are plenty of great intellects who have cultivated intellectual lives outside of the university. It might even be more possible. (I'm thinking of the Catherine Project, which shows regular people having real intellectual lives outside of the academy, and it's really encouraging.)
You make some very good points. I think that the ability to spend time in reflection and "slow reading" (to borrow from Simon Haisell) is possible in academia, but the possibilities vary widely depending on your university, job title, department, and where you are in your career. Again, I'm one of the lucky ones in that regard; after tenure, I no longer have the "publish-or-perish" mindset, and my course load is such that I can spend some time on personal projects. But, on the other hand, as our administration continues to ask us to do "more with less," this may be only a temporary condition. I have also worked 40-hour nonacademic jobs, and I found that my brain was fairly fried at the end of the day, but that may just be about my personal capacities.
🎯 Well said. And that is why you are such an excellent choice for John’s Stack of the Week with this post!
Thank you for speaking up. If we lose the Humanities we lose humanity.
Love it. Yes! As an academic who doesn’t really fit anywhere anymore but with an undergrad Lit major I’m trying to bring beauty and humanity back in my own writings. Thank you!
I’m also a recovering academic and will be sure to check out your recommendation. I went from the tenure-track line to adjuncting--which I have vowed never to do again (it’s just too outrageously demeaning) to private high school teaching and now back to freelance writing. The humanities have always been under threat, but never more than now. The sad truth is that with AI doing more and more of the STEM thinking for us, the study of art, literature, philosophy...may be the only things left that sustain our humanity.
Yes, and my colleagues who primarily teach composition courses are now spending half of their time dealing with papers that were written by AI.
I feel this (from the UK) as someone who is academic adjacent (I work supporting disabled students at my uni in developing study strategies), but who comes from a humanities academic background. UG, Master's and PhD, by the time I was approaching finishing my PhD (and near bankrupt), I'd already had experience of teaching at universities and colleges for 10 years. I could not afford to chase another 10+ years part-time temporary contracts across the country in pursuit of the vanishingly few opportunities whilst publishing regularly. So I took a job in my current team, which fortunately became full time and permanent (I've since dropped back to part-time, voluntarily). I've watched my doctoral peers fight the system, 3 months part-time here, 9 months full time there, a semester with 150% workload... With multiple published articles, even books, and STILL no sign of secure employment. It is beyond hard.
I'd also say that STEM is not necessarily easier, except in so much as there is a public perception of more money in the field. Grad students are still massively exploited, the need to chase funding grants is CONSTANT, and security/tenure appears as arbitrary as anywhere else. Governments and universities just shout louder about it...
Yes, I didn’t mean to suggest that my STEM colleagues have it easy, so thanks for mentioning that. The constant pressure to bring in grant money creates a lot of anxiety, and that is the only reason that the administration values them.
Oh I didn't think you were implying it's easier, more that the gulf is more in perception and administrative power edicts. Humanities is fighting a lot of challenges, but STEM has big money ones and appreciation is borderline at best (just it gets bigger headlines).
Lisa, I'm curious if you have seen a change in how grant monies are managed over the past 10 years or so? Maybe I was naive, but my sense in the 00s was that grants afforded a certain autonomy -- that grants were awarded to individuals, who then bore primary responsibility for them and enjoyed freedom in how they were allocated. When I won a major grant to launch a podcast in 2018, I was startled by all the internal hoop-jumping to get the thing, to get expenditures for it approved, etc. And it was a little dispiriting that it ended up being a grant to the college (and presumably a feather the dean could put in their cap). I've heard STEM colleagues talk about their universities losing tens of thousands of their grant funds, and so on. Am I right that this is a symptom of a more corporate university model?
I would 100% agree about the shift in the last 20 years. But I'd also add that a common feature of grants seems to be a baked in under-funding of roles for the projects. This reinforces the precarious casualised employment practices that now dominate HE. A 'more work for less money' model seems embedded, and primary academics are spending more and more time JUST completely funding applications. It's dispiriting for everyone.
After a troubled youth in the Deep South of the 1980s and 90s, I was good at two things: school (writing, to be exact), and apparently being the town slut (an unfair judgment, but that’s another story). The moment I turned 18, I hit the strip club stage. At the same time, I began what I believed to be my climb out of the gutter: getting a bunch of degrees. Three, to be exact: a BA, MA, and PhD in English. In the late nineties, we were all assured: GO TO COLLEGE! GET EDUCATED! THIS IS YOUR TICKET OUT! Fast-forward a decade-plus later, when on the very first day of my PhD program, our department head unceremoniously announced: “There are no jobs for any of you.” We all tried, anyway. Like you, I published an article--a beautiful and poignant piece of work--in a top journal at the end of my graduate career. Sadly, this did not earn me any dignified appointment--just more dumbass offers of “postdocs” and “temporary positions.” By that time, I was a wife and a mother in my thirties; making money was of some real consequence. So what did I do, after climbing my way out of sex work? Return right back to it. I made more money stripping AS A DOCTOR than I ever could as an academic. Sobering reality. Luckily, I was able to parlay my many years of experience stripping into a sensual movement business in which I provide safe, women-only experiences for ladies worldwide. Yet the lesson has never left me: my ass was worth more than my many degrees, and the academy is a professional wasteland.
That’s an extraordinary story. Thanks for sharing.
Whoa this hits hard. Thank you for sharing.
Appreciate you taking the time to read.
Devoured this! Thank you so much for sharing! So, so many of us teachers, lecturers and professors feel the same way! I too love teaching, love my students - it's just what comes with it...
Powerful essay on what's happening, particularly to the humanities in academia. What a shame. And I suspect that our population's humanity, for those who still read, will suffer in ways we don't yet fully understand but that appear to be getting shown in the stand of the MAGA party, so politically far to the right that they ban brilliant books and risk the existence of the US Constitution. Leftists and progressives have problems, but the destruction of the democracy and book banning are not included--and that's a big difference that makes all the difference.
Good read. Much of this resonates. You’re inspiring me to consider publishing an essay on my insights into academia. My recent experiences editing a festschrift for my advisor, sharing my reflections of my journey after PhD at my school’s 130th anniversary and 75th PhD anniversary celebrations, and seeing what’s happening at professional grad schools of library and information science most of which are now called iSchools are also why I started writing one of my Substack newsletters (Infophilia). I saw this coming - e.g. unhealthy org climate, drive to get more grants, etc. I left academia to be a stay at home mom. Later I started and closed a small publishing company and volunteered most my professional skills. Invited back as an adjunct. My English Lit undergrad major has been invaluable and is still cherished. I’m trying to get the creative spirit back, deeply grateful that the humanistic mind remains. Thanks.
Great if depressing read. Similar themes though slightly less mercenary are reflected in academia here in Australia. Humanities bear the brunt of any cuts, as does any anthropological discipline, or art. Poorer for society as a whole and sad to see.
Yes, I think that the trend is amplified in the American south, where football and moneyed interests reign supreme, but I agree that it is happening everywhere.
True and heartbreaking.
Wow great piece. I teetered on the edge of this when I graduated in 98 with a degree in anthropology. I regretfully decided to pay for graduate school at Cambridge. A loan that never did pay off career wise. I am glad that I left academia and never invested myself into it because as you aptly state academia will not love you back.
I should have taken my dad’s advice and been one of the 10% of women engineers in the 90s. C’est la vie.
Yes, and the sad part is that it doesn’t have to be this way. I just read an encouraging article from Emory’s magazine about how they are bucking the trend, doubling down on humanities, and hiring a bunch of new faculty. Hoping others will follow their example...
Thank you for this perspicacious piece.
The academy is morally bankrupt, my mother’s friend went to the University of California Berkeley in the 1960s and paid nothing out of pocket. Now tuition is $35,000/year. The faculty has been replaced by a greedy administrative class with lavish benefits and salaries.
It is vital to hear the voices from within the US academy tell the truth about what is going on with the professors who are doing the essential work of educating and enlightening their students.