Waiting tables is a classic side hustle for many students working to pay their way through college or graduate school. Matthew C. Batt was no exception: Through 13 years studying in various college programs, Batt worked at five different restaurants, mostly as a server. He loved the experience. When he tired of his own studies, he sought refuge in the culinary world, reading chefs’ memoirs and watching foodie TV (including at least two viewings of each of the 246 episodes of the late celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain’s television shows Parts Unknown and No Reservations).
Once Batt had all those degrees — a master’s, a master of fine arts, and a doctorate — in hand, he didn’t expect to return to his restaurant roots. Yet that’s exactly what he did as a tenured associate professor of English at the University of St. Thomas, a Roman Catholic institution in Minnesota. Midway through his sabbatical during the 2014-15 academic year, Batt took stock of his student loans (which, he notes, “just about rival Ireland’s national debt”), mortgage, car payment, and credit-card debt, and realized the 50-percent salary he was receiving during that time wasn’t enough to make ends meet. Contract provisions prevented him from picking up an adjunct job, so he decided to re-enter the restaurant industry.
Batt landed a serving job at a fine-dining restaurant and wound up enjoying it so much that he kept the gig even after his sabbatical ended. Then he wrote a book about the experience, The Last Supper Club: A Waiter’s Requiem, which is out this week from the University of Minnesota Press. Batt discussed his experiences as a professor and waiter, and how they intersect, with The Chronicle. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
So when you began your sabbatical in the fall of 2014, you were planning to write and maybe relax a little, not to get a second job, right? What about the restaurant business appealed to you?
In restaurants, you get the gratitude from guests almost immediately, both as a tip and as a way of them saying thanks, whereas often gratification in higher education, both as a field of study and also as something you teach in, can be delayed — not days or weeks, but years or even decades. There’s just something about the immediacy of working in restaurants that I really like.
Also, in my experience, education can be a little anemic from time to time. It’s hard to really express yourself just totally freely, totally openly, at least when you’re anxious like I am and are always worried about saying or doing the wrong thing. Working in a restaurant, your only objective is really to feed people and make them happy, and there’s something beautifully simple about that.
How did your colleagues at both the restaurant and the university react to your dual jobs?
Both communities thought that there was something really unstable or wrong with me. The folks in the restaurant at first regarded me as some kind of oddball; something must have gone very awry if here I was, nearly twice most of their ages, wanting to work in a restaurant once more. But as soon as I got past the initial hurdles of demonstrating that I not only wanted to do the job but that I could do the job, I felt like I was family almost immediately.
I feel like we overly emphasize this divide of people who are just performing jobs versus people with careers, and one of the things I figured out is that sometimes you might be happier just working a job than pursuing a career.
On the flip side, when folks at the university found out that I was waiting tables again, it almost felt like they were going to schedule an intervention or something. It seemed like that was backsliding as far as was imaginable. We think of our career trajectories as something that’s supposed to be always pointing northeast and upward. But to me, it felt like not a second childhood, but like a second young adulthood to be able to dive back into the world of working in restaurants. It was really invigorating and rejuvenating.
Speaking of rejuvenating, I wonder how that experience in the restaurant affected your teaching, your writing. Did you find it changed you as an academic at all?
What was eye-opening for me was, before very long, I realized that working three or four nights at a nice upscale restaurant, I was making as much as I was working on full salary as an associate professor — only, of course, working in a restaurant doesn’t even require a high-school degree. You can pretty much do all of your training on the job or in the onboarding process, whereas to get my job as a university professor, I incurred roughly $100,000 in debt, had to move across six states to chase whatever graduate degree or job was in the future. My debt load, I feel like, is astronomical. Then I think about undergraduate students right now. At my own school, if they’re paying full tuition with room and board, that’s, like, $65,000 a year. They’re basically racking up nearly a quarter of a million dollars in student-loan debt, if that’s the way they’re paying for it.
My experience of making good money but also being really happy working in restaurants made me want to ask my students, “Are you here intentionally? Is this really what you want to do? Or are you just here because it’s the 13th grade and you’re just doing what your classmates are doing, or what your parents want you to do?” But by no means do I intend the book to be an anti-university treatise.
Financial precarity in academe is more often associated with adjunct or non-tenure-track faculty members than it is with tenured professors on sabbatical. What was it like for you to be in that situation?
My wife and I were paycheck to paycheck after I was tenured, before I was tenured, while we were in grad school. It’s been that way until very recently. I think there’s an impression that we collectively have of tenured university professors being these fat cats with bags of money and stacks of books. It’s just not the case, in my experience, especially working at schools like mine that is not a state school, does not have a teachers’ union. We barely ever get raises. I expected the difference between being tenure track and being tenured to be profoundly different. I don’t mind admitting that I got a 0.5-percent raise when I got tenure. And that came the same year I published a book — so it wasn’t like I was not doing the job well or not meeting criteria for getting tenure. It’s just that the raises weren’t there. A lot of jobs in higher education are entry level when you start and they stay that way for years, if not decades.
What do you want fellow academics to take from your experience?
My main message is not that there’s something wrong with academia. I really love my job, and I love teaching. I love my students; I love my colleagues. But at the same time, I would want people to take away that it’s not this pie-in-the-sky job that I think a lot of us imagined when we were undergrads. It can be a lot of work; it can be a lot of drudgery. It can also be really lonely. I would hope that people find the beauty in other kinds of jobs, too, and don’t just put all of your hopes and dreams in working in a university.
I think of my own family, my wife’s family. Some of them went to college, some of them didn’t. And they’re all beautiful people that had interesting and rewarding and challenging and difficult jobs. I feel like we overly emphasize this divide of people who are just performing jobs versus people with careers, and one of the things I figured out is that sometimes you might be happier just working a job than pursuing a career.
