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Choking on anxiety, Langdon made an eager convert to the spiritual movement known as New Thought, which, Hallinan reports, swept through his town in the 1890s as it did so many others. A cousin of Christian Science and the progenitor of the self-help industry’s more-secularized “positive thinking” gospel, turn-of-the-century New Thought was both a metaphysical doctrine and a self-improvement program. It promised followers the ability to tap into an infinite reservoir of cosmic creative energy churning just beneath the surface of things, where the ultimately illusory obstacles to our flourishing manifested. The movement’s earliest leaders, mostly middle-class white women, emphasized the deployment of divine energy — channeled by cultivating an attitude of expectant repose — for the purposes of physical and mental healing. By the turn of the 20th century, a more aggressively masculine breed of New Thought preachers observed that harnessing this power could also help you succeed at work. When opportunities seemed scarce, these New Thought success peddlers maintained, you could always create your own. No wonder Langdon was intrigued.
Langdon is a very minor character in Hallinan’s memoir, which I came across while writing a book on the transformation of the work ethic in American culture, and the slow, fitful triumph of a new focus on the virtue of creating work for oneself and for others. Today we ascribe this virtue to people by calling them “entrepreneurial,” but its origins predate the colloquial use of that word. They lie in Langdon’s world, in the consolidated corporate capitalism of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Men like Langdon depended on large corporations for middle-class employment, but those corporations faced an increasingly saturated marketplace. The economy was seen in terms of “surplus”: surplus production, which could feel like prosperity, and surplus labor, which felt more like standing on the edge of a cliff. For those who dreamed of breaking free and taking their economic security into their own hands, success experts influenced by New Thought had a slogan that proved remarkably enduring: Make your own job.
I became moderately obsessed with Langdon. His anxieties reminded me of my own and those of many of my friends, an identification that was discomfiting. I would rather have recognized myself in a keenly critical intellectual or perhaps a labor-movement activist, but I had to admit that this obscure petty-bourgeois worrier was holding up to me a mirror. Like Langdon, I had a good job. I was teaching at an extremely well-resourced research university, surrounded by wonderfully supportive colleagues and mentors and working every day with imaginative and courageous students. I had a working spouse and no kids, and lived more than comfortably on what I made. And yet, and yet. Working off the tenure track on temporary contracts, assured of eventual “nonrenewal,” I knew Langdon’s “perfect hell of worry” firsthand. If he lived three years at a time, I lived one year at a time, similarly incapable of conceptualizing the future — and I was one of the lucky ones. I knew lots of people living one semester or one quarter at a time. When I defended my dissertation, I didn’t yet have a job offer and didn’t expect to get one. My best friend in graduate school was turning almost as gray as Langdon, and he was in his early 30s.
The pervasiveness of precarity and underemployment has begun to penetrate the collective consciousness of the academic profession. Over two-thirds of instructors in higher education are employed contingently. Vanishingly small minorities of newly minted Ph.D.s will ever obtain tenure-track jobs, even in the sciences and engineering, and those lottery winners hail overwhelmingly from a small coterie of elite institutions. Apologists occasionally propose that these statistics are misleading because many Ph.D. recipients do not actually want to be professors; empirical evidence suggests that wishful thinking is as disconnected from reality as it sounds. We want permanent academic jobs; they just aren’t there. It is the monster under every graduate student’s bed, a specter haunting every conversation that young academics have about the profession and their future in it: The job market is a desolate landscape defined by a scarcity of work.
The jobs crisis is transforming academic culture in a thousand ways large and small. Some of the changes are heartening for those of us who see the problem as fundamentally political: a consequence of institutional and governmental austerity and the transformation of colleges into profit-maximizing corporations, with an attendant imperative to squeeze labor costs. Academic workers are unionizing to an unprecedented degree and forming cross-institutional coalitions to advocate for, as the American Association of University Professors puts it, “A New Deal for Higher Education.” But activism, with its inevitable frustrations, setbacks, and false starts, can only do so much to assuage personal anxieties. For a faster-acting remedy many academics have turned, like Langdon and other Gilded Agers bereft of stable work, to self-help authorities and the entrepreneurial work ethic they prescribe.
But most academics staring down the dismal job market have little hope of spinning off their research into a lucrative start-up. (If any venture capitalists out there have ideas about how to monetize expertise on U.S. intellectual history, I’m all ears.) For us, entrepreneurship means something more dispositional: being entrepreneurial. Academic self-help experts are emphatic that mindset, for the success seeker, is everything. Hard work and perseverance aren’t enough anymore, if indeed they ever were; there simply aren’t enough good jobs to go to everyone who earnestly applies themselves. Instead the key is to do one’s work today with constant attention to the task of securing more work down the road. Getting work requires as much skill and commitment as doing the work itself.
These refrains have been around since the Gilded Age, but they have insinuated themselves into academic culture with new force since the 2008 financial crisis, which simultaneously decimated hiring in higher ed and spawned a new coterie of bloggers, vloggers, tweeters, and writers who promise to help young academics find their way amid the ruins. Foremost among them was Karen Kelsky, a former tenured anthropologist and proprietor of the blog-cum-consultancy The Professor Is In. In her book of the same name, published in 2015, Kelsky argued that facing the reality of the post-crisis job market required prospective academics to embrace a ruthless attitude of career-opportunity maximization:
To avoid the Ph.D.-adjunct-debt spiral, you must first face the truth of the collapsing academic economy yourself. You must choose, consciously, an approach that minimizes risk and maximizes return on your investment of time and money in the Ph.D. enterprise.
Kelsky instructed readers to study a list of five “differences between the academic and entrepreneurial mindset,” sourced from the sociologist-turned-consultant Kerry Ann Rockquemore. “If you released your mind to embrace speed, problem-solving, exceptions to rules, selling your skills, and possibilities not authorized within an academic value system,” Kelsky writes, “you will find something, I promise.”
Those worried about whether they can have it all in academe can, for instance, procure the services of “The Effective Successful Happy Academic,” an operation run by Alexander M. Clark, a scientist and president of Athabasca University, in Alberta, Canada, and the “entrepreneur and workplace-effectiveness advocate” Bailey J. Sousa. Clark and Sousa run workshops, offer consulting and coaching services, and publish a newsletter (“#happyacademic”) that builds on their 2018 book How to Be a Happy Academic. In it, they explain that the key to thriving in academe, as in all of “the most competitive of fields,” is to change your “mindset”: to learn to see yourself “not as an endlessly progressing work colossus, but as a colossal work of endless progress.” This distinction may perhaps be somewhat obscure at first, but they helpfully clarify that the perspective shift they have in mind will bring you from a “fixed mindset” to a “growth mindset,” characterized by an “ongoing readiness to devote deliberative efforts to learning to improve.” Whether readers will find the prospect of being a “colossal work of endless progress” less enervating than being an “endlessly progressing work colossus” remains, however, hard to say.
If happiness seems too modest of a goal, consider the Australian geographer Iain Hay’s 2017 guidebook How to Be an Academic Superhero. In the face of “widespread redundancies, growing levels of casual employment, unrelenting pressures from an increasingly global marketplace, new forms of professional surveillance and mounting institutional ‘productivity’ demands,” Hay explains, it is not enough to strive merely to do a good job. Rather, successful academics must find a way to “respond fruitfully to growing expectations but in ways that allow them to work sustainably and well,” a tightrope the book is designed to help readers walk. Hay is frank that in adopting this approach he gives up on “protesting neoliberalizing tendencies,” deeming it more useful instead to simply “acknowledge the material characteristics of contemporary universities.” Getting bogged down in resisting the way things work in higher ed today will, presumably, distract one from all that must be done to attain superhero status. (A second edition of the book came out in 2023.)
This theme — that aspiring academic-success stories must not succumb to the temptation to think of themselves as victims of unfair forces beyond their control — pervades the academic self-help literature. “Academia is not a perfect meritocracy, but it’s not a lottery, either,” writes Jason Brennan in the perspicuously titled Good Work If You Can Get It. “Success today requires hitting the ground running, starting the first day of grad school,” in order to “professionalize right away and seek every distinction you can.”
Mindful of the fact that many of their readers are likely considering abandoning the faculty job search entirely, academic self-help authors emphasize that their advice is just as applicable to early-career scholars considering life outside the ivory tower as it is to those bent on climbing the tenure ladder. Like more-traditional self-help writers, academic-success experts are reluctant to promise specifics about exactly the kind of life readers can attain by following their instructions. Rather their message is typically that success requires us to introspect and figure out what it is we actually want to do with our lives, rather than thoughtlessly following some blueprint handed down from above. Whether your goal is to be a tenured chair, a prominent Substacker, a dean, or a museum curator, the important thing is that you, well, make your own job — which ultimately boils down to the mindset you cultivate.
In his book Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide, Christopher L. Caterine, an academic who became a corporate consultant, instructs his readers to “assume you can do anything.” By believing in yourself enough that you prepare adequately to seize unanticipated opportunities when they present themselves down the road, Caterine explains, “you make your own luck.” This proactive, self-affirming mindset is precisely what generations of success experts have claimed distinguishes the entrepreneurial person. The marketing copy for Ilana M. Horwitz’s The Entrepreneurial Scholar, a book coming out next month from Princeton University Press, claims it “empowers all scholars — particularly women and first-generation, low-income, and BIPOC individuals — to see themselves as proactive agents in their educational and career trajectories, despite structural constraints, unclear expectations, or unresponsive advisers.”
There are surely useful suggestions in these texts and throughout the forest of blog posts and YouTube videos and social-media threads that academic-success experts have cultivated to spread their message. And many of these authors have helped to raise awareness of the dire state of the academic job market and to prod early-career academics to question the messages they’ve internalized about what a good scholarly life looks like. But at a time when so many students, faculty, and staff are working to alter the material balance of power in academe — unionizing, forming autonomous faculty-governance structures, demanding financial transparency and principled investment approaches — we ought to be cautious about conflating “empowerment” with a mere shift in mindset, especially when the mindset shift in question has a lengthy and uninspiring track record in the working world outside the university.
Charles Hallinan, in explaining the appeal of New Thought in his Gilded Age childhood, observed that the members of his community felt “that the old traditional security, open to all thrifty, hard-working folks, had disappeared, and that in its place was a bewildering struggle to adjust rigid incomes to ascending prices.” Many academics today can doubtlessly relate. But to the extent that working Americans in the early 20th century were able to eke out a new security for themselves, it was through their struggle to build a powerful labor movement and a robust welfare state, not their faith in their ability to make their own jobs. It is true that we are more than our circumstances. We overcome them not by thinking on our own but by acting together.