The phone call came on my daughter’s first birthday. That night my wife, Teresa, told me, “Hope College called. ... They’re offering you a job!”
My lungs filled with helium, weights dropped from my feet, and I floated to the ceiling. “Hope!?”
My life had become the Pilgrim’s Progress. After years of despondency, I was going to Hope College in Holland, Mich.
Other offers would soon arrive, but it didn’t matter. I had the job I wanted. It was a conversion experience. Suddenly, I was an academic “born-again.”
My love for books returned. I began to overflow with topics for essays and courses. The faces of future students and colleagues framed my path to laurels at the end of a long, satisfying career.
Of course, this is a little disconcerting for someone who complained so publicly about the shortage of full-time academic positions. But at least now I can look back on the past 10 years with some detachment.
In 1990 my undergraduate advisers encouraged me to go to graduate school because of the pending shortage of humanities faculty. This was, of course, forestalled by the uncapping of mandatory retirement and the wholesale replacement of full-time faculty members with part-timers and graduate students.
When I was admitted to a Ph.D. program at Harvard University -- a mind-blowing experience for someone with my background -- my initial career expectations were completely out of proportion to the emerging realities of the new academic labor system.
Ahead of me, as wave after wave of exemplary graduates found nothing but underpaid, temporary positions, I began to lose faith in my advisers, my university, and the entire profession. No one, it seemed, was willing to admit there was a serious problem in the academy. I felt cheated and betrayed.
Even though I continued to publish and speak at conferences, I ceased to hope that my degree would lead to a secure teaching position. I assumed it would not. And this liberated me to begin saying the things I had previously repressed.
I began to attack what I believed was the complicity of tenured faculty members in the adjunctification of higher education. I was motivated by resentment, but I also believed my future was more likely to be improved by radical changes in the academic labor system than by competing with my peers in an escalating cycle of premature publication.
The next thing I know The New York Times was misquoting me as urging graduate students to “rebel” against their departments. Understandably, some of my faculty supporters began to distance themselves. One of them started calling me “Che,” after Che Guevara.
From a certain perspective, I look back on the last few years with regret. I wince at my apparent ingratitude and sense of entitlement. My home institution and my advisers provided me with a great deal of support, but I was so focused on the future that I could scarcely appreciate the present.
And yet, I still think the grievances expressed in my “First Person” columns needed airing. More than 1,000 letters in response to those columns confirm that belief. An academic labor system based on an embittered, part-time, underpaid, transient faculty without academic freedom does immeasurable harm to our students, our institutions, and society as a whole. Only a few years ago, such an opinion was viewed as the whining of professional failures; now it has become the central plank of almost every candidate for office in the academic societies.
I am grateful for my new life on the tenure track. But I believe that this opportunity carries some important responsibilities. An assistant professor at a small, liberal-arts college is not an extraordinarily powerful individual. But, over the course of what -- I hope -- will be a long career, I will do everything I can to raise the status of introductory teaching, to build bridges to non-English majors and the general public, and to reverse the 30-year trend toward increasingly exploitative employment practices.
I am sure my new colleagues -- all survivors of similar struggles -- will share these ambitions.
Bill Pannapacker will be an assistant professor of English at Hope College this fall and is a member of the Modern Language Delegate Assembly and the American Studies Association Task Force on Employment. He welcomes mail and can be reached via his home page.
