Humanities professors are very uncomfortable these days, and they want us to know about it. That’s a common thread running through the many think pieces on the plight of the humanities. Listing the assortment of woes, including programs cuts, the author of a recent essay, “The Beloved, Besieged Humanities Classroom,” wondered: “How am I supposed to do my day’s work when I’m not sure that it matters, or that it will matter years from now?”
I am not here to minimize the gravity of the situation facing many humanities practitioners and scholars. After all, I was in their shoes not long ago myself. But today, as a humanist-turned-coach, I work with faculty members who often come to my office at Duke University uncomfortable about some aspect of work and life. So I have some thoughts for humanists on coping in this prolonged, collective moment of professional discomfort, whether you leave academe or remain. How can you be productive rather than self-defeating? How can you navigate profound change, both within your profession and your own career?
Just over a decade ago, I left a tenured position as an associate professor of English because I saw the writing on the wall at my small, enrollment-driven liberal-arts college. A shrinking pool of English majors meant that I had ever fewer opportunities to teach my specialty (Victorian women writers). After I left, my college went through a couple rounds of layoffs, and the position I vacated eventually disappeared. For a few years, I held various higher-ed jobs with “humanities” in the title. Three years ago, I shed the “humanities” bit, and as a credentialed professional coach, I now work with faculty members and administrators at Duke; my charge is to help them flourish.
Most humanities Ph.D.s spend a great deal of their careers feeling uncomfortable. That was true decades ago when the faculty job market in many humanities fields was merely grim — as opposed to nonexistent. The “discomfort” of which I speak is not the awfulness of competing for a tiny number of jobs, but the numerous personal readjustments, realignments, reframings, and accommodations that most humanities Ph.D.s have long had to make as they settle into careers that look little or nothing like the ones their doctoral advisers and faculty mentors enjoyed.
I’m not talking about nonacademic jobs (yet). Higher education is having too few conversations, even now, about the ways in which humanities Ph.D. programs fall short of preparing students for any faculty position other than one at a large research university. The discomfort of adjusting to something you “weren’t trained for” or “didn’t sign up for” is baked into the career experience of most humanities Ph.D.s, and it is exponentially true for those who pursue careers beyond academe.
Imagine, if you will, the aggregate of Ph.D. career experiences as an enormous funnel. Clustered at the tiny end of the funnel is a relatively small number of Ph.D.s who hold jobs that allow them to spend much of their time on the pursuits that drew them to the profession. They do research and teach things related to their interests. Further up the funnel are other faculty positions that require different sorts of teaching, lots of service work, and few (if any) resources for doing research. At the widest end are jobs that require humanists to rethink their entire professional identity, in addition to acquiring new skills. As the funnel widens, so does the likelihood of discomfort.
In times of change, it’s critical for people to distinguish between what they have control over, and what they don’t.
For most of my decade as a faculty member, I sat at the midpoint of the funnel. By my penultimate semester, in the fall of 2011, I had experienced multiple bouts of discomfort of the type that Robert Zaretsky describes in his 2023 essay, “Humanities on the Cutting-Room Floor” — that of having to teach in areas well beyond my specialty.
I was, by that point, proud of my ability to stretch myself as a teacher. But I was also excited, that fall, about the chance to teach an upper-level seminar on the Brontë sisters — only the second time that I’d been able to teach it in 10 years. When the seminar did not attract enough students, I got reassigned to teach “Business Writing 101” in the Evening College Program.
Anyone who claims that the humanities prepares you for the business world has never stood before a classroom of working adults, just one page ahead of them in the business-writing textbook. I wish I could tell you that I found a way to make that course exciting and memorable for everyone involved. But in a rich twist, I paid especially close attention to our short unit on “writing job application materials.” I taught my students how to write great résumés, and then used that information to transform my CV into my first résumé. It helped me land my first nonfaculty job the following year.
I share this piece of my career history to help normalize the experience of career discomfort for humanities Ph.D.s, and to invite people to consider the full range of options available to them at moments when they’re thrust into situations where they realize — to quote Marshall Goldsmith — that the training that “got you here” (spinning your wheels in the tenure-track market) won’t “get you there” (finding a different future than the one you’d envisioned).
Change is deeply uncomfortable for people, and that may be especially true for academics. How many of us went to graduate school, in part, because it looked reassuringly similar to our undergraduate experiences? How many of us take comfort in the routines and rituals of academic life? How many of us complain loudly when we’re asked to do something different in regard to our research, teaching, or service? Our comfort with academic life means a lot of people don’t adjust well when that life disappears or fails to materialize.
It’s not uncommon for academics — faced with a career-altering challenge — to hunker down into defense mode, and attack the idea, person, or entity that seems to be generating the change. I am not saying that all change is good, and I am not, in particular, happy that fewer undergraduates have access to humanities training as time marches on.
Yet in times of change, it’s critical for people to distinguish between what they have control over, and what they don’t.
The late William Bridges, a bestselling author and consultant on change management, offered a framework to distinguish between change and transition: Change is something external to us, and beyond our control; transition is the inner process that people go through, as they adapt to the change. He started out as a Ph.D. in American civilization and a literature professor. After gravitating toward humanistic psychology, he was able to influence leaders well beyond academe via his consulting work, and his bestselling books have remained in print for decades.
A transition process, Bridges argued, always begins with a loss. In the case of a humanities professor, that could be the loss of status, the loss of income or opportunity, or the loss of meaning and identity. Loss generates many feelings, including denial, anger, and grief. People often respond by trying to manage the situation and ignoring the only thing they very likely can control: their own mind-set and behaviors.
Too many humanities commentators model the former — “defending the humanities” and validating a status quo that may no longer be sustainable — when they should be focused on what’s next for people in these fields. I’ve seen that play out many times in my coaching work: People experiencing change fixate on trying to control an impossible situation, rather than tending to their transition process.
Ph.D.s who choose to leave the humanities fold, or have no choice but to leave, have the opportunity to find arenas in which their passions and strengths more easily translate into measurable impact.
Most of the faculty members I work with now aren’t humanities professors (who, after all, don’t have a monopoly on professional discomfort). I coach faculty members who are trying to figure out their fit for departmental leadership. Or they may have recently arrived from a teaching-intensive campus, and now have to think of themselves as a researcher. Sometimes, the force of such changes makes them angry and defensive, and that’s normal. Yet they can’t move forward in a productive fashion until they process those feelings.
In Bridges’s transition model, a successful change means that people move from loss to discomfort to a “new beginning,” marked by feelings of reorientation and renewal. Does science back that up? I’m not sure, but I’ve had the privilege of seeing it happen time and again with many of the people I’ve coached.
So what does that mean for humanists caught in a period of intense collective transition?
Some humanists will remain inside the funnel, for the good of their disciplines and their intellectual communities. A great many academics in these fields toil for years on a single book-length project (or two, or three) that will influence the work of a small number of other specialists. Those projects have value. And clearly, those scholars could have accomplished other things, too, in the same amount of time, in a different profession. Ph.D.s who choose to leave the humanities fold, or have no choice but to leave, have the opportunity to find arenas in which their passions and strengths more easily translate into measurable impact.
For those who decide to adapt to change within the funnel, as well as those who leave the funnel entirely, Bridges’s books would not be a bad place to begin. His perspective may seem out of date to scientists and quantitative psychologists, but his career and books can serve as an example to academics who regard organizational change management theory as suspiciously “corporate” or “neoliberal.” These days, there are other resources for those seeking a more evidence-based approach to managing professional change. What are they?
First, start with yourself. A foundational assumption in coaching is that we’re working with people who are creative, resourceful, and resilient. If you’ve been butting your head against profound changes at your institution and within your discipline, you may have lost sight of your inner resources. Humanities scholars already possess some of the most powerful proven skills for navigating change. Those include the ability to engage in critical self-reflection and analysis, the habit of asking powerful questions, and the vision to imagine different outcomes.
If you can navigate one change, it’s practice for another. I took a huge professional risk in leaving a tenured faculty position in 2012, at a time when the whole “alt-ac” and “beyond academia” discourse was still in its infancy. People often ask me how I worked up enough courage to give up tenure. One big reason — I was also a relatively new parent, and the experience of bringing two children into the world through two high-risk pregnancies — made me brave. Not only did I better appreciate my own strength, but I also harnessed my determination to find a career that wouldn’t force me to grade reams of papers each weekend, away from my young family.
What changes in life or work have you already navigated successfully? What did you learn from that process? How can you apply those lessons to approaching your current career path differently, or choosing a new path entirely?
Learn more about change. As literature scholars or historians, we may study artifacts of seismic cultural or political changes. Yet we may have little awareness of what change means for ourselves, or for our students or mentees, who may be facing even more formidable changes than we are.
For more recent, evidence-based guides to handling change, you might take a look at Brad Stulberg’s recent book, Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything Is Changing — Including You. He provides a suite of tools for managing all manner of work and life changes, grounded in a deep awareness of one’s personal values. For humanists who want to remain “in the funnel” and effect change in their institutions and disciplines, I also recommend Alex Budak’s Becoming a Changemaker: An Actionable, Inclusive Guide to Leading Positive Change at Any Level. The book grew out of a popular course on leading change that Budak teaches at the University of California at Berkeley.
Even with support and resources for navigating change, it won’t be easy. No career transition happens overnight, and discomfort is a necessary but temporary condition. A successful transition can also take your life and career to places you’ve never imagined. If you’ve been trapped in a cycle of professional discontentment for years, what more generative discomforts have you been avoiding?
