How do you know when it’s time to leave a tenured position and find something else to do?
In Born Standing Up (2007), Steve Martin writes about no longer finding creative fulfillment in his comedy act and sensing that it was already on the downward slope: “I was not self-destructive, though I almost destroyed myself. In the end, I turned away from stand-up with a tired swivel of my head and never looked back, until now.” He went on to pursue a more satisfying career as an actor, producer, writer, and musician.
While I have experienced nothing remotely comparable to Martin’s success, his memoir resonated with me because I am facing a similar career decision. After more than 20 years on the tenure track at a liberal-arts college — climbing from assistant professor to endowed professor — I have decided to go on unpaid leave to write, retrain, and look for new career pathways.
If you’re a long-time reader of The Chronicle, you might remember that I was a regular columnist, beginning in 1998, when I was a graduate student at Harvard University, where I earned a Ph.D. in the history of American civilization. For nearly a decade, I wrote under the pen name of “Thomas H. Benton” for reasons explained here.
But, under any name, the columns stopped in 2014. I was increasingly feeling the conflict between being a provocateur while trying to develop academic programs with large institutional grants. I also was exhausted by the intensification of criticism that public writing began receiving — back then in comment sections and now on social media. While I never experienced any direct curtailment of my academic freedom as a result of anything I wrote, I often felt that my employers and colleagues were uncomfortable with my writing — particularly with my criticisms of graduate education in the humanities. And, perhaps, I had simply run out of things to say. Whatever the combination of reasons, after more than 150 contributions, I found myself unable to continue.
Now, seven years later, The Chronicle invited me to write about my career shift. Apparently, I am part of a trend: professors leaving academe even though faculty positions are so difficult to obtain and seemingly so secure. To walk away from a tenured position, especially in the humanities, is to accept that you probably will never work in the profession again. If I leave, and my faculty line isn’t discontinued, hundreds of highly qualified people will apply for my position.
As a working-class, first-generation college student who somehow ended up in a doctoral program at Harvard, I will be forever grateful to those who helped me find my way into an academic career. But I also want to reflect on some generalizable reasons why — after 18 months of pandemic life — some tenured professors are leaving to find other careers. I am even hearing that a growing percentage of new Ph.D.s are skipping the tenure-track job market entirely — and not simply because those jobs are so scarce.
Higher education has stopped being an attractive place to work — if it ever was, for most — and its prospects for improvement were bleak even before the pandemic.
After months of online and hybrid teaching, there’s ample evidence that many faculty members — especially women with small children — feel overworked and underappreciated. Added to that is a common perception that online and hybrid approaches are less effective than traditional, face-to-face teaching, especially for first-year and at-risk students.
At the same time, faculty members have been returning to the classroom under awkward and depersonalizing circumstances: face masks, screens, difficulty hearing and being heard. Moreover, many professors, especially the older ones, are immunocompromised or otherwise vulnerable to Covid-19, or they have family members who are. A forced return to working on the campus — with so much uncertainty and ineffective enforcement of vaccinations, masking, and social distancing — seems reckless to many of us. Already, tenured professors are resigning over what they perceive as a moral issue, as well as a public-health one, in higher education’s handling of Covid.
Other faculty departures have been motivated by administrative inflexibility about remote work. Many professors have found working from home too productive to face returning to the campus, and once again incurring the costs of commuting, professional attire, and child care. (Of course, there are plenty of academics who have disliked the isolation and 24/7 responsibilities of making one’s home into a venue for stilted, alienating, and endlessly proliferating Zoom meetings.)
It’s not just about flexibility and costs, however: Being away from the campus has made many of us realize that we are unhappy — for a host of reasons — and do not want to return under any circumstances. The decision often focuses on academe’s culture of overwork and rigid status hierarchies. What might it be like not to work every weekend and holiday grading papers, applying for grants, preparing for meetings, and answering work-related phone calls, email, and text messages? Not to worry constantly about what senior professors and administrators think of you? Not to feel like a failure because you are not tenured at a leading research university?
On the other hand, from an administrative perspective, the pandemic and widespread faculty discontent may be a cleansing fire.
The last few years have imposed unprecedented costs on institutions that were already fiscally strained and facing uncertain futures. Higher education in the United States is facing a “demographic cliff” — especially in the Midwest and New England, owing to a decreased birth rate during the Great Recession that started in 2008. Colleges also are threatened by a shrinking middle class while costs continue to rise from a combination of declining state support and their own inability to contain costs.
Some administrators may see the departure of a lot of faculty members — especially in the senior ranks — as good timing, enabling colleges, finally, to get their expenses under control. Public acceptance of online learning, spurred by the pandemic, may enable savvy leaders to quietly reduce the size of the faculty roster and increase class sizes. The functions of teaching can be unbundled, deskilled, and outsourced to maximize cost effectiveness. Whether that will be good for learning is a complicated question entangled with fiscal realities.
For administrators, then, the question is: What cost savings and compromises now seem possible that were unthinkable before the pandemic? But as faculty members, we are left pondering: Is this a context in which we want to work?
If dealing with such uncertainties and pressures were not enough, professors are being made the targets, once again, of political attacks with uncertain support from administrators — or even from fellow colleagues — leaving many of us feeling unprotected. The stakes have changed: Now a person with whom one disagrees — even over a seemingly small matter — is not only misinformed or wrong but deserving of personal condemnation and professional destruction. Many faculty members — especially the adjunct majority — feel pressured to teach and write in a crouch of defensive self-censorship. Engaging with the public or taking on controversial topics in the classroom works directly against your professional safety.
Tenure is often the reward for having confined one’s activities to relatively uncontroversial topics. And just because your point of view is approved at this moment in our history does not mean that the tables won’t turn later. If you went into higher education because you valued freedom of thought and expression, lately you may be feeling as if you chose the wrong profession.
Enrollments in humanities courses are declining nearly everywhere. Parents and students think we have little to offer for career preparation, which has become the primary reason to attend college. Many humanities departments have so many faculty members relative to their number of majors that the professors mostly teach general-education courses. I have not taught in my areas of expertise for more than three years, and — while that is partly owing to my administrative duties — I see little but service courses ahead for the foreseeable future.
Those courses are important, and everyone should teach them. But seldom teaching courses in one’s research field has consequences for sustaining scholarly productivity. Why would that even be necessary, one might reasonably ask, if this expertise is not used in the classroom, except in the most general ways — for example, teaching students how to frame arguments and do research? Why not forgo publication expectations in favor of increased teaching loads? But is that what you wanted when you joined this profession?
One of my graduate-school advisers told me that the hardest part of the profession was just keeping up — and that came from someone who taught only three specialized courses a year and had a team of teaching assistants. It seemed easier when I was fresh out of doctoral studies, but now the profession is evolving faster in terms of topics and critical methods than at any time I can remember.
While my teaching has reflected the increasing engagement with race, gender, class, and sexuality — as well as an expanded canon of texts — it will never be adequate for the long-overdue re-envisioning and expansion of the curriculum that is now arriving. New Ph.D.s are better prepared on that count than I am ever likely to become, even with support, and, of course, I cannot embody the demographic changes that are needed on the faculty.
I have always felt like an outsider in academe, an impostor. That has been a powerful motivation to work harder, and it gave me empathy for those who also feel that they do not belong. But I do not look like the students that higher education most needs to attract and retain.
Many faculty members don’t feel adequately valued, but there are good reasons for it. At this point in my career, at age 53, the costs of employing me are becoming greater than what I am likely to contribute. I am an impediment to solvency, diversity, and innovation for my institution. Tenure could keep me in this position until my 80s, while most new doctoral graduates went jobless. Tenure should not have become a lifetime appointment for a shrinking percentage of the profession subsidized by everyone else.
It’s not fair. And it is rife with professional hazards for those who receive it. Administrators talk about “dead wood,” and professors talk about “golden handcuffs.” If you’re an aging professor, like me, why not choose to set yourself free to explore more-challenging possibilities?
I don’t want to be the professor who is no longer relevant, who has outlived his value, who is resented by younger faculty members, who draws a disproportionately large salary, who drags down the economic viability of his department, who pontificates in meetings about the way things “used to be,” who bogs down the curriculum with outmoded preoccupations, who refuses to adapt to new technologies, who clogs the pathways to new ideas and greater diversity, who prepares a dwindling number of students for a world that no longer exists.
I don’t want to be that professor, and I don’t see any way to prevent it, with possibly 30 years of tenure ahead of me. Perhaps I could avoid some of those tendencies to stagnate, but for me, the power of complacency and pride, and, more than that, fear, probably are stronger than the motivations not to become that professor.
Instead, building on what I already have done through external grants, I am hoping to contribute in other ways to humanities education, through fund raising, multi-institutional collaborations, public-facing project development, community-based partnerships, consulting and speaking, and publication across a variety of accessible platforms. I also want to explore ways to support the preservation of the academic humanities without majors or departments (more on that soon).
While the humanities are languishing in higher education, I see them flourishing in the larger society, especially in big cities like Chicago, where I now live. All kinds of people go to festivals, museums, theaters, and galleries; they buy books and paintings, attend poetry readings, and drink craft beers. It is often standing-room-only at those events and places, despite the pandemic, while many college courses barely attract enough students to break even. The public understands that the humanities enrich our lives, foster deep conversations, and make people happy.
Willie Sutton said he robbed banks “because that’s where the money is.” The humanities are no longer thriving in academe, but they are alive and well out here.
This year, if it turns out that it is time for me to end my career as a professor, it won’t be just because of the reasons I’ve described. It will also be because there are better opportunities to explore, belong, and grow — and possibly fail — rather than remaining in a relatively secure position that lacks any comparable potential.
Thoreau said he left Walden because he “had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”
You leave a job not just because you are no longer flourishing but because you believe you can find more-fulfilling work somewhere else.
Perhaps it’s a leap of faith that more longtime professors should be taking.
