It’s Just a Job, Right?

There is a wonderful moment in the Eddie Murphy movie Coming to America when Semmi confronts his boss, Prince Akeem of the imaginary African kingdom of Zamunda. Fed up with mopping floors at a crummy fast-food restaurant in Queens, Semmi finally asserts his rights. It’s one thing to pretend you are a poor student so your prince can find a bride who will love him for the right reasons. It’s quite another when the farce involves manual labor. Such slumming is beneath men of refinement. And look at the consequences. Just look, Semmi tells Akeem, “I’m badly in need of a manicure.”

Every time I read an essay by a tenured faculty member quitting academe, I think of Semmi, whining about his nails.

Is that unfair? Of course it is. Most professors are decidedly less entitled than Semmi. At the same time, reading over their inventory of complaints, one would assume that these academics were being forced to man the fryer, and not simply navigate a sclerotic university bureaucracy and deal with snotty undergraduates. Since the union of intellectual laborers fed up with their factories continues to take in new members, we should ask ourselves: Why do so many professors who quit feel the need to tell us about it?

In the past few years, the number of articles about giving up on a faculty career has grown to fungus-like proportions. As someone managing to survive in this business, who has been reading these pieces for a while, and who agrees wholeheartedly with their criticisms of higher education, I am nonetheless sick of hearing about it.

What pushed me over the edge was a jeremiad published in September on Vox by Oliver Lee, a former tenured professor of history. His diagnosis of what ails the American university system echoes many in the “Why I am quitting” literature. The arguments can be grouped into two main categories.

The first is old news: American universities have become uncompromisingly corporate. The result: a bloated administration and an emaciated faculty. While most teaching is done by adjuncts and graduate students who lack job security, employment prospects, and even a decent living wage, administrators’ salaries and tuition rise, and the quality of education plummets.

But what is disturbing about the articles by the tenured professors is not that you read them and think, “Wow, if someone who had it that good quit ….” It’s because you read them and understand that the writer is saying, “Wow, those of you who would continue to participate in this sacrilege because of job security aren’t just acting cowardly; you’re acting immorally.” Many of the Quit Lit writers emphasize that they have no intention to criticize colleagues. Nonetheless, they are most definitely criticizing colleagues.

The implicit criticism of my own foolish career goals is not what bothered me about Lee’s article. What did was a more self-effacing moment in the piece, which is indicative of the second argument behind quitting: They don’t care about us.

During a lecture, Lee notices a student watching Breaking Bad. What teacher wouldn’t be dispirited? It happens to all of us. Holding my tongue when a student laughed out loud at a YouTube clip while I was lecturing cost me more effort than the hours I had spent drafting that lecture. Hell, even Harvard’s Steven Pinker admits that he often encounters a half-empty lecture hall.

I don’t mind Lee’s frustration. I don’t mind that he thinks he deserves better. He does. What I mind is the blanket condemnation. For after Lee tells us about the slacker in the lecture, he quotes a friend visiting his class that day, who asks, “Why aren’t you doing something meaningful with your life?” As if to say, One person doesn’t care about what you care about, so what you are caring about so actively, and with so much devotion, is meaningless.

This sentiment runs rife in the Quit Lit canon: Other people don’t care about me as much as I think they should. Administrators don’t care about my research. Students don’t care how hard I’ve worked to prepare my courses.

My question is: Why should they? And in what alternate universe will you find some section of the population that is univocally concerned with what you do?

I have a bachelor’s, a master’s, and a doctorate, and I have been teaching for nine years. By most standards, I fit the description of someone who cares about learning. And yet in my undergraduate years I, too, was known to doodle away during award-winning sessions of pedagogy. I took an entire course on cancer with a professor who worked under the Nixon administration’s mandate to cure the disease. I think I was 19 at the time, and I thought the subject matter irrelevant to my life. Today, as cancer continues to prove more and more relevant to far too many of my loved ones, I think back at just how unbelievably stupid I was.

But it shouldn’t have been so unbelievable.

Academe has a special skill for turning intelligent, hard workers into Semmis complaining about their nails.

So many academics seem to be suffering from the reality effect. They are shocked and dismayed to find that the reality of this business is not as rosy as someone, somewhere, at some time supposedly assumed. Scholars want to pursue their research, unencumbered by headaches and heartache, and they want to communicate the results of their scholarship to the brightest and most interested students around. Is that so much to ask?

Yes. It is. At least if the person asking is an adult. Before grad school, I worked for a talented screenwriter. I watched her career get trod upon by Hollywood executives with stupid suggestions and even stupider commands. Likewise, a friend’s father had his law career stifled by office politics and collegial jealousy. The fact is that no profession is perfect. Young architects dream of erecting museums but spend more time redesigning kitchens. Even the “dream” professions are not immune: Aren’t movie stars always complaining about having to answer inane questions in pointless interviews?

The great irony is that so many of the academics who complain about the corporatization of universities run off to get corporate jobs, where all the problems these scholars link to corporatizing trends — one would presume — would be present. The same way I find it ironic that the colleague of mine who complains the most about the bureaucracy is the one who joined the ivory tower after quitting a lucrative management position at Amazon. His reasons for leaving Amazon resemble those cited by professors who are ditching academe for Silicon Valley. I think my colleague is just an idealist at heart, no matter how pessimistic he seems.

Maybe the answer is to just expunge the universities of that type of professor. Who needs idealists in classrooms? After all, being a professor, like anything else, is just a job, right?

Of course it’s not. This is precisely the problem. Never mind the absurdity of the Ph.D. itself. By now anyone paying attention realizes how slim one’s chances are at landing a tenure-track position — the same way one’s chances of surviving as a working actor are slim. And yet multitudes are using their tip money to pay for new headshots.

I am not saying we should start to look at the professoriate the way we look at movie stars. I am saying that if there are people out there willing to go for it — knowing full well the odds — then something in their personalities must be making them inexplicably idealistic.

We are all, in part, to blame for their delusions. We instill in the wide-eyed this unrealistic dream of a lifelong profession that you do not just tolerate but love, too. It would be like pretending that marriage is not about companionship or stability, but only about love. What a novel idea. If so many of these disgruntled former academics remind me of Semmi complaining about his calloused hands, it is only because of how much they also remind me of Akeem, who rejected the woman his parents chose to be his bride because of the “ridiculous” notion that he should have some say in choosing a wife.

Those of us who have had a rough time doing something we were passionate about know that it is a lot easier to dismiss the frustrations of our day if it is spent doing something we don’t care about. I know this; my idealist colleague knows this; anyone reading the Quit Lit articles comes to feel this.

I preach detachment to my colleagues, even though I am incapable of practicing it myself. The great moral dilemma of my workday is all about this. Mine is an especially pronounced case because I (yes, you guessed it) teach literature. And I do so at a university in Kazakhstan, where a humanities degree is valued as little as it is in America. Even so, brilliant young men and women gravitate over to the dark arts before my very eyes. They tell me they are willing to defy their parents, to risk poverty and isolation, because they cannot stand chemistry and economics anymore. It’s not that those subjects are uninteresting. It’s that different people are inspired by different things. Some people are strong enough to consign the great loves of their brief lives to the closet, others less so.

Whenever students tell me that my courses helped persuade them to follow their passions, I wonder: Was it immoral of me to have done this? Because let’s be honest: It’s not like I wasn’t trying. Is it wrong to use all of your learning — your own little bit of success and all of that failure you have enough of to spare — to attempt to impress upon students the nimbleness with which a mind versed in literature can operate? Is it wrong to do to them what a high-school English teacher did to me?

I am not sure how much longer I will be able to make a living doing this. And a life spent working with what you love is destined to be a life of frustration, disappointment, perhaps even resignation. Is it immoral to attempt to be the ideal that any rational mind must realize is unrealistic? Or would it be better to add myself to the list of people who gave up because their ideals, in practice, were just as realistic as their fears?

As my idealist colleague says: “To sustain ideals while warring against your own hopes takes a special kind of moral arrogance — or love. When that arrogance finally breaks and it becomes ‘just a job,’ so many of us feel a need to chronicle the battle, to mourn what we lost by ultimately winning the battle against ourselves.”

Love stories need not end badly. Just take your queen back to Zamunda and show her what a wonderful life awaits her. It’s like Cinderella, whom we all know assumes that she will live happily ever after precisely because she doesn’t have a clue if the palace is creeping with villains.