If you don’t like your job, find a new job. That statement is so obvious, and so often repeated, it scarcely needs utterance. But what if you don’t like your job and the economy is terrible? Well, that’s simple: You should still look for a new job. But what if you don’t like your job, the economy is terrible, and you don’t find a new job? The answer to that question is not obvious, but for me it was still simple: Leave your job anyway.
I’ve been lucky in my academic career. Before I had my Ph.D. in hand, I had a tenure-track job at a Fine Southern University, with a light teaching load and a good salary. Because of those things, and because my university granted me a generous fellowship that allowed me to take a year off teaching, I was able to complete, revise, and publish my first book. My students liked my teaching, and my colleagues liked me.
But over the past couple of years I became increasingly unhappy. The first reason will no doubt seem foolish to many readers, but it shouldn’t be taken lightly. Fine Southern University is located in a state that is Very Hot: For four months of the year, the average temperature is well over 90. I wasn’t raised with that kind of heat, and after a few years of exposure, it simply became grueling.
I discovered, to my own astonishment, the central role played in life by what I’d call base-level habits. I couldn’t adjust to the high temperatures, or to the length of time those temperatures stayed around, so I spent four months of the year grumpy and miserable: I literally couldn’t take the heat.
But there were other difficulties, as well. My fellowship allowed me to go abroad for a year in 2008-9, but the United States I returned to was substantially different from the one I’d left. The economy had crashed, and I discovered that its nosedive had altered the mental and intellectual landscape of my country. When I tuned in to talk radio, the stories I heard were of unemployed people who had been forced to deplete their retirement accounts to pay unexpected medical bills, who had had to go back to full-time, minimum-wage work because that was all they could get, and who were now teetering on the edge. Those were the everyday stories. The uplifting stories were about people who had been failed by any kind of welfare state and only saved by the kindness of strangers.
The broad-based political response I saw to the crisis was not assistance but a creeping, self-centered conservatism in the guise of a return to the foundations of America. That distressed me, but what distressed me even more was the way in which that mentality drew support away from the very things that, in my opinion, make a country and a community strong: broad-based education, intellectual curiosity, culture.
The ramifications of this were clear in my own university and department. Perhaps the most distressing was our increased hiring of what we call “instructors,” meaning adjuncts. Now, I recognize that there are simply not enough academic jobs for the number of Ph.D.'s being turned out (that’s already been the subject of many an article), but even knowing that, I can’t reconcile myself to the increased reliance on adjuncts.
For me, it’s a system that has nearly everything wrong with it: Departments do themselves a disservice by teaching via increasingly non-tenure-track faculty members. Students often receive a poorer education because they are being taught by people who must teach five, or six, or more courses a semester for dishearteningly small wages. The adjuncts themselves become trapped, because their onerous schedules mean they don’t have the time to produce the fine work that could lead them to better jobs.
To say that I didn’t like the way I saw my department’s future going is to put it mildly.
Nor was that the only sign of ethical trouble. There was also the moment when the head librarian mentioned that the librarians had been told to refer to the students as “customers.” There was the discussion in which a member of the administration told me that the university was looking to increase summer enrollments “because we want to move these kids through as quickly as possible.”
I don’t much care for the customer- or cattle-oriented vision of education. And yet, this is the real world. Ethics and morals are good to have, but sometimes the world is not what one wishes it would be. Sometimes the world is in the process of changing radically, and one must adjust. Ideals are abstract, but the world is concrete, and part of being an adult is facing that.
And perhaps I should have mentioned that I was up for tenure in 2011-12. A job for life. A secure paycheck. I could buy a house, maybe even get a decent car. Those are not things to scoff at. I may work in an ivory tower, but I still have to live in reality.
For me, however, the reality was that I lived in a location to which I was physically unsuited. I worked for an entity (two, if you count the department and the university separately) about which I was increasingly dubious. And I lived in a political and social environment I found increasingly distressing.
That’s a lot of heat. So I got out of the kitchen. Or rather, I backed out of it slowly, then all in a rush. First I tried to get another job, but (that economy!) there weren’t many jobs in my field this year. Then I looked abroad, specifically at Europe, where I’d spent my fellowship year and where I’d hoped to return. Prospects were better there: I got five interviews, but my teaching schedule meant I couldn’t attend two of them, and the other three didn’t go my way.
At that point I learned the value of networking. I called or e-mailed every contact I had, and by the end of May I was able to put together two part-time jobs in Britain that would support me for at least the first year (I’m also a lucky academic in that I have dual citizenship). Interestingly, both jobs were in the teaching of writing—an area totally undervalued both in the United States and in Britain, but apparently necessary in both. I was also able to get some courses in my specialty area. Again, it wasn’t ideal. But it would keep me from starving in the street.
“People do quit,” Ms. Mentor once wrote in reply to an unhappy academic who asked her for advice. If you’re wondering why I remember those words so precisely, it’s because I chanted them to myself over and over as I walked down the hall to hand in my resignation.
But the act of resigning was not what I had imagined: I spent a long time in terror while I was thinking about it; a week or so in intense anxiety while I wrote the letter; and 30 seconds in fear of the irreversible as I handed that letter to the chair. But after that, it was just over. I wasn’t sad or glad; I was just a person who had done a thing, and now had to go on and do the next thing—perform the consequences, as it were.
So I sold or gave away most of my belongings, packed what was essential, and left both my former job and the country. I’m scared, but I’m also excited and determined. The world economy is terrible, the concept and purpose of a university are in flux, and I choose to hope that a time of such uncertainty brings with it not just negative prospects but also positive possibilities. In the end, either it will work or it won’t. That, too, is obvious and simple.
