Life as a Disposable Academic

In the fall of 2019, I landed a tenure-track job in English at MacMurray College, a small liberal-arts college in central Illinois. After three years of being on the job market, I thought I had won the lottery by securing a job not far from my family in an area with a low cost of living. During my interview, the committee admitted the college had financial troubles but did not disclose how serious they really were. The glow of a hard-fought victory on the job market soon faded when I accessed my employee email account a month before the job was supposed to start. Emails from administrators about “the future of the college” alerted me to the fact that it was on the brink of closure. Hoping for the best and otherwise jobless, I decided to move downstate to take the position anyway.

In March 2020, MacMurray College announced it would close permanently at the end of the spring semester, thus ending my tenure-track career after a few short months. I was devastated and wondered why they were hiring faculty while in such dire financial straits. My health worsened to the point that I would gag and vomit before my classes. My hair was falling out.

Founded in 1846 as a Methodist women’s college, MacMurray went co-ed in 1969 and began a cycle of near-constant debt and recovery. Because MacMurray’s strengths were in fields like nursing and teaching, the alumni on whom they relied for donations did not make the extra millions of dollars in income needed to buoy the college’s endowment. Facing low enrollments in the 2010s, MacMurray cut budgets and slashed programs, including a popular one, elementary education. It experienced budget shortfalls each year between 2015 and its closure — information which, had I known, might have dissuaded me from even applying for the job.

The pandemic delivered the final blow to the college. A deal from a financier to purchase and re-lease the campus facilities was called off in March 2020. MacMurray did not have enough funds to cover operating expenses for another year and was forced to shut its doors. Faculty, staff, and students, who in large proportion were first-generation or people of color, were left without an academic home. (I felt especially sorry for students of mine who had recently transferred from Robert Morris University Illinois, another college that had just closed.) The campus buildings were eventually auctioned off in November 2020.

Despite my years of experience in teaching, editing, and writing, I now wake up every morning, like many others who have received Ph.D.s in a humanities field, feeling as if I am disposable. As an adjunct lecturer at a private university, I currently make less than $20,000 a year, with no benefits or health insurance, while suffering from multiple chronic illnesses. Because I took on so much debt in graduate school and after — moving continuously for what turned out to be short-term positions and investing in a career that never came to fruition — I need to live with my parents. I cannot afford my own home. Even though I was fortunate enough to win several research fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities after I lost my tenure-track job, I am undeniably much worse off than I would have been had I not gone to graduate school.

People in my position hear a lot of optimistic rhetoric about “alt-ac” careers, but the transition from academe to industry is not always an easy one. My decision to get a Ph.D. in the first place was driven by my experience of the micromanagement, surveillance, and arbitrary hierarchy inherent in corporate workplaces after completing my master’s degree. I worked in technical writing for a large corporation and made decent money, but I ultimately quit my job. After a severe storm created mold in the ceilings, I was having allergic reactions. My cubicle was moved beyond the surveilling eye of my boss and into the so-called “executive row,” where most of the top-paid employees sat. I would regularly get harassed by the administrative assistants for having “too much paper” on my desk, and a co-worker and I were even told not to drink from a certain water cooler because it was in front of executives’ offices. After I submitted my resignation, I filled up my water bottle from the forbidden cooler and left the building.

What arguments extolling the benefits of Ph.D.s in nonacademic workplaces miss is that these roles often lack the independence of academic jobs, sometimes to the point of major contention, as in my own case. Even though I vowed not to work for an employer like that again, I was still happy to accept a position as an editor at a medical nonprofit organization two years after losing my job at MacMurray. I was hopeful that I could carve out a place for myself in a nonacademic workplace, and I desperately needed the insurance. I had learned I had a tumor on my pituitary gland, and I was diagnosed with Cushing’s disease, which had been wreaking havoc on my hormones and my whole body for years. I survived brain surgery to remove the tumor and was fortunate enough to take a paid medical leave. I was grateful to have employer-sponsored health coverage, while many adjuncts are provided nothing. When I returned from leave, I could not handle the stress of the useless meetings and being required to use an online tracking tool that logged every moment of my workday. I had a stress-induced manic episode so severe that I was hospitalized for 14 days and resigned from the job. I regretted this for months until I saw the organization relist my exact position with a salary a whopping $20,000 higher than what I was making — showing that I was, once again, underpaid for my expertise.

My story is not unique. The current economic climate in higher education is taking some of America’s brightest minds, who have noble intentions to advance their fields of inquiry and to educate future generations, and casting them into poverty and ill health. When I started my Ph.D. in early American literature in 2012, there were around 60 tenure-track jobs in my field per job cycle; now there are a maximum of four or five per year throughout the whole country.

While I know no one can take the knowledge I gained during my Ph.D. away from me, it is painful to reflect on what might have happened had I followed my intuition and gone into writing, communications, or publishing after finishing my bachelor’s degree. Sure, maybe I would have had a low salary, as some of my professors warned, but at least I would have been banking years of income rather than years of debt.

I have decided that it’s best to cut my losses and finally move on from academe once I can find a suitable alternative. I have dedicated years to a dream only to see it fall apart irreparably. While a wide-scale renewal of the humanities may eventually happen with years of effort and unionization, I can’t wait that long. Had I known that getting a stable job as a professor would be about as likely as becoming a pop star, I would have chosen a more fun delusion.