Is the chronic morale problem in the humanities — and many allied fields — attributable to tenured professors feeling trapped in positions they no longer want?
Earlier this fall, I wrote about my decision to go on leave (from my tenured post at a midwestern liberal-arts college where I’ve worked for 21 years) in order to write, retrain, and look for new career opportunities in Chicago. The many responses that column received emphasized two themes: how unhappy many professors are (even the lucky ones with tenure), and how those professors feel unable to change their circumstances.
I raised this issue in a recent survey on Twitter: “What makes it so hard to leave academe?” Nearly 200 responses from a self-selected group are not solid data, of course, but they are suggestive and worth reflecting upon:
- More than 20 percent chose the sunk-cost problem: “I’ve invested so much.” You spend perhaps a decade in graduate school, probably accumulate substantial debt, and lose all those years that could have been spent gaining more transferable job-related skills and experience.
- Almost 25 percent chose the “It’s my identity” option. In many ways higher education is a total culture — some would say it’s a cult — and leaving it, especially after the many years and personal sacrifices it takes to earn a doctorate, can involve a substantial reframing of your sense of self. “Who am I, if I am not an academic?”
- The largest number of responses, nearly 45 percent, selected “What else can I do?” In other words, the process of becoming an academic typically involves narrowing one’s options rather than broadening them. I do not mean that the work itself must be limiting. In my case, I grew from being a specialist into a generalist and have held a series of leadership roles that could rival any of my generational peers who went into the corporate world. The challenge, for me, among others in my profession, was imagining that we could be valued outside of the academy.
- Perhaps the most-telling response: Not even 10 percent said they stay in academe because “My work matters.” What does it mean that such a small percentage of its practitioners feel that way about their work — especially in the humanities, where passionate engagement, not to say love, are exalted as the sine qua non of the profession?
I’ve written about the “life of the mind” myth for a long time: One reason that so many talented Ph.D.s toil away for decades as adjuncts is that academe acculturates them to believe that anything outside of higher education is stupid, immoral, and disgraceful. Academics are trained to judge other people by their status in the profession. Worst of all, friends, family, and partners can all be sacrificed in favor of individualistic goals. Work all the time, keep moving, abandon everyone outside the profession: Only affiliate yourself strategically.
How, then — having sacrificed so many human relationships to pursue this “calling” — does one simply walk away? And what can be done to change the culture of higher education and make academics feel less trapped?
The recent Netflix series The Chair dramatizes — honestly, I would say — the pathos of certain tenured professors who feel they have outlived their value to their institutions and become irrelevant, yet will not leave their jobs. Instead they spend their waning energies on thwarting the changes that might either revive their disciplines or eliminate them in favor of fields with more-vital prospects. Some months ago, while cleaning out my office, I ran into a professor nearly in his 80s, telling me that he would never retire. I think he expected me to congratulate him; instead, I saw him as a warning of what could happen to me.
At age 21, I had yearned to be an English professor: For whatever reasons, I loved American literature. I ignored how Mr. Keating in Dead Poets Society got fired for inspiring and challenging his students, and how he was surrounded by tweedy drones serving sentences until they died unmourned in their smoke-stenched offices. I might have been better served by repeat viewings of The Shawshank Redemption, which, unfortunately, came out in my third year of graduate school, when I had already become “institutionalized.”
How many of us understood what we were embarking upon when we decided to become professors? How could we even grasp the accelerating rate of change in higher education: neoliberal managerial approaches; part-time, no-benefit, transient adjunct teaching; the uncapping of mandatory retirement and the graying of the profession; the withdrawal of state funding; the endless political attacks from all directions; the unsustainable increases in student debt; and, with all that, declining enrollments in any field that does not lead directly and obviously to employment?
Even now, in my experience, if you point out these trends, you risk being accused by students of “crushing their dreams” and by colleagues, in effect, of “disrupting the Ponzi.”
While I was inspired by my discipline back then, I also was reassured in the early ’90s by “The Bowen Report” that prophesied massive retirements and growing demand for faculty members in all fields. That report was presented to me numerous times by multiple professors who urged me — then a first-generation student, seriously worried about earning a livelihood — that pursuing a faculty career in the humanities was a sound professional move. That advice was coming from professors who faced a very different job market (many of them recruited in the ’60s with only master’s degrees), who often came from more privileged backgrounds, and/or who benefitted by encouraging students to apply to graduate school.
I was skeptical, even at 22, but it was a recession, and how many of us choose graduate school because the so-called real world did not seem to offer better options for a B.A. in English. Mostly I could expect a series of part-time, minimum-wage jobs that I could have found with a high-school diploma.
Graduate school attracted a lot of people like me. We struggled financially, accumulated significant debt, worked a series of adjunct and visiting gigs, and — if we were one of the lucky ones — found an academic position at an isolated institution with a heavy teaching and service load from which there was little chance of moving elsewhere, especially once we had tenure.
And here I am, more than 30 years later, coming up for air, realizing that I have too much in common with Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, who said, “I’ve never done a single thing I’ve wanted to in my whole life!” Once again, I do not appear to be alone in that regard. A lot of professors would leave their tenured jobs if they believed that they could survive financially doing something else, while maintaining their sense of intellectual identity.
Consider: Academics who want to be employed do not get to choose where we live or teach what we would like to teach. Depending on where we teach, we do not have time to do research on what interests us (and if we do, we know that it isn’t read by many people, anyway). We do not necessarily work at institutions that align with our deeply held values. And, far from being well compensated for those sacrifices, many of us struggle financially with little savings and massive debts, and have not accumulated enough, even in our 60s, to comfortably retire.
I asked my Twitter readers: “If you could leave academe without worrying about money, what would you do?” Some of their answers were tongue-in-cheek: “pastry chef/lounge singer.” The more serious responses included: coach gymnastics, take part in political activism, write books, travel, teach less and read more, become a career coach, write fiction, “fix things,” bake, “go and live in the city I want to live in,” run a nonprofit, do stand-up comedy, farm, and run an art gallery. The list was extremely varied, but two themes stood out:
- In their postacademic life, many of the respondents said they would continue the work that drew them to academe (reading, writing, and teaching) but which they cannot do in their faculty job because there is not enough time, and what they value most is the least rewarded.
- Working in higher education actually doesn’t provide many professors with financial security: Adjuncts in particular could earn more outside of higher education, but they choose to stay, anyway. The gap between their aspirations and commitments — and what they think exists outside of higher education — is seemingly too wide to be bridged.
So much vocational energy is squandered by higher education. What if academe offered more career mobility for faculty members who are unhappy in their positions — and inevitably dragging down the morale and quality of their institutions — but who do not see any way out of that situation? What if professors were not indoctrinated to reject any other way of life as somehow lesser than the one that they, themselves, have come to dislike? What if they brought their commitments to the “outside world” and refused to allow their idealism to make them so easily exploited and unfulfilled by institutions that often are not what they purport to be?
An industry has arisen primarily to help doctoral students and adjuncts find their way into careers outside of academe. There is a library of advice books now: I am reading them (and may have more to say about them, later). But there also is a lot of skepticism. The alternative-academic (“alt-ac”) movement, for example, seems cynical to many long-time observers: a way for universities to sustain business-as-usual, treating Ph.D.s, as Marc Bousquet famously said, as a “waste product” of the system. No need to reduce graduate enrollments, even if there are no tenure-track jobs available, because we need teaching assistants and students to fill our seminars. Who cares what happens to them afterward? It’s not our problem; we are not an employment agency.
In a time of financial exigency and eroded faculty governance, the elusive “brass ring” of tenure offers less protection from arbitrary dismissal than most civil-service jobs, but it also locks professors into positions that many no longer want and some do little to deserve. One consequence is that personal misery is structural in the humanistic disciplines: feeling both entitled and powerless is one of the foundations of its culture of grievance, outrage, and despair.
I discussed this topic in September with Paula Chambers, the founder of the Versatile Ph.D., an organization that, for years, has provided a support network for academics looking for other careers. For Ph.D.s and faculty members, she said, “many of our choices are automatic based on choices we have already made.”
Describing her own career transition, she said: “When we change our lives, we must spend our time differently, and that takes time. Each day, I had to pry myself away from my old habit of prioritizing communication tasks such as sending emails, and instead say to myself, ‘First I will walk, stretch, or meditate. Then I will write the email.’ Sometimes something stressful would happen that would trigger my old ways of being (automatically jumping online to research whatever was bothering me), and I would again have to wrest the steering wheel away from my old self and with great effort steer my slow-turning ship in a new direction. There were many days when I failed. But over time, with repeated daily effort, my new habits did take hold, and my ship did change course.”
Changing careers is a process of unlearning old ways of being, as much as it is one of learning new ways of thinking about yourself.
When people ask me what I do, I now say, “I used to be an English professor. But now I am trying to be happy.”
