How To Leave Your University Job--And Why
The academic world I grew up in is actively dying. That's OK. Let's take our ideas and education somewhere else
This is a somewhat personal, and speculative, post. But believe me, it’s going somewhere. And if you are a free subscriber: perhaps you have noticed that I am no longer paywalling—but that does not mean I do not want your support. If you like my writing:
In a few weeks, I will end my life as a tenured full professor of history, shifting to full-time writing and podcasting. Of course, I’m open to doing other jobs that interest me, too—I just don’t want to be tied to the academic calendar anymore, nor do I wish to be responsible for other people’s lives and careers. I don’t want to work on the weekends instead of spending them with my partner and family members. I don’t want to work at night or get up early in the morning to prepare for a class. I don’t want to be on committees. I don’t want to give grades.
I want to do what I went into this for in the first place: Think. Write. Make change. And I don’t think I can do that from an academic position anymore.
Given the collapse of the history job market in the last decade, it can seem somewhat frivolous to walk away from one. One of the most common questions younger people ask me is: “What did you get?” In other words, what did you bargain for to give up your tenured position? And one of the most frequent responses from age peers and above (who know there isn’t anything to get, or they would retire too) is: “But you are too young!”
Too young? People, I will be 65 in May, a perfectly respectable retirement age, and still one year older than in France. My Medicare starts in three weeks. And I have had a long and glorious career to boot.
Yes, it’s a luxury and a privilege to say goodbye to a regular paycheck and give up the kind of job that thousands of emerging scholars and part-time faculty (hundreds at my own institution) trained hard for and may never have. But, on the other hand, it is also the reward for 40 years of hard work, presuming you begin counting in 1983, the year I entered a Ph.D. program at New York University. Like everyone else back then and now, I began my life as a scholar by cobbling together money from various sources: taking out loans, a fellowship that was well below the poverty line, and a variety of interesting jobs.
In addition to being an adjunct lecturer in history, some of my hustles as a graduate student were bicycle messenger, housing organizer, word processor (that was a thing before everyone had personal computers), newspaper stringer, and fact checker for Interview magazine. I was a researcher for a company that did architectural digs to document sites in lower Manhattan where my university was tearing down historic houses and replacing them with shiny new academic buildings. I was the photography critic for a prominent gay newspaper until it was driven out of business for insisting (falsely) that the cause of AIDS was untreated syphilis and that the disease could be cured by massive doses of penicillin.
My best-paid job was as an assistant to a university administrator who commenced to have an emotional collapse and then fired me in a rage one day when I discovered he was paying many of his personal expenses out of the college budget. Being fired led to my second-best paid job: being on federal unemployment compensation. For the price of reading while I held up a pillar at a run-down office in Chinatown once every two weeks for several hours, I received a bimonthly check that was less good (approximately a third less good) than being in university administration and far better than being a teaching assistant. That allowed me to finish my dissertation.
One thing that few people who criticize my generation for its “unearned privilege” ignore is that we earned it. It wasn’t luck, chance, or a gift. I paid my dues on my path to becoming a tenured professor of history—and then I paid them again, working 60 to 70 hours a week, on weekends, evenings, and in the early morning hours for 33 years.
Unearned privilege, my a$$. But my other point is this: had I not gotten a tenure-line job, all of those things I did (except for bicycle messenger and unemployment) were possible career paths.
Yet, in today’s anxious academic employment environment, I see my generation not only described as clueless about “the real world,” the recipients of unearned privilege but as failing to put that privilege into service at the end of our careers. It is not enough, for example, that I am giving my job up so that some lucky younger person may eventually fill it.
Amid the congratulations, kind notes from former students, and expressions of envy from age peers, is the insistence that I use this singular moment to change the narrative for others. A talented young historian, who is well-published and teaches off the tenure track at the university where they got their Ph.D., exhorted me to negotiate an exit that would make my departure contingent on being replaced by “a junior scholar in a secure TT line.” Another agreed and said I should not sign the paperwork until I had secured guarantees that my position would not be replaced with “temp gigs.” Mid-career scholars chimed in virtuously: they would never retire without securing such guarantees!
That such an arrangement could be enforced, or that faculty even have the power to go all hardball on deans and provosts, is speculative fiction. Those of us who have spent decades sitting in rooms with university administrators know that they are notoriously resistant to being pressured by anyone, least of all those who are already negotiating with the Social Security Administration. Moreover, I think that if administrators cared whether tenure-line faculty retired, they would incentivize retirement—which, by and large, in the absence of a fiscal crisis, they don’t. The number of people teaching well into their seventh and eighth decades suggests that retirement isn’t a priority for most university administrations, even though full professors must be budgeted at two to three times the cost of a tenure-track assistant professor.
Nevertheless, there’s a subtext here in these appeals to use my retirement to change the world: the pervasive belief among contingent faculty that a tenured elite has, over time, abetted the job crisis by failing to act as teaching labor, particularly in the humanities, has become casualized. And it isn’t just horrible working conditions and lousy pay that we have supposedly failed to reverse over the last several decades, but every indignity and disappointment that leads to becoming a disappointed academic job seeker. Those harms include the miseries of graduate school, the job application process, the indignities of interviewing, and the journey through a wilderness of post-docs and visiting positions that, for too many, never end in a well-paid job in a chosen location—much less the economic security that allows a person like me to retire at an age when I can still imagine taking on new projects.
What lurks just behind these rebukes is that we who chair departments, serve on dissertation committees, run job searches, and live lives of unbelievable (and often imagined) privilege at the expense of an academic precariat are the face of a much larger conspiracy to prevent able, well-trained young people from getting the tenure-track jobs they deserve.
I use the word conspiracy deliberately. So much of what emerging scholars and long-term, contingently employed faculty are dealing with is a bewildering and incoherent tangle of economic and political decisions made over almost six decades that have radically altered the face of academic employment for the worse. And it is reasonable, particularly for those trained to think critically and look for patterns, that these miseries must be part of a plan—call it austerity, neoliberalism, or the corporate university.
Indeed, the academic labor market--from recruitment into grad school to assertions that graduate assistantships are not jobs but apprenticeships--has all the marks of a classic grift.
Anyone who has taken a labor history course believes they can discern the purpose of the grift: creating a pool of teaching labor that is as cheap and powerless as possible. Yet, unlike something cooked up by the Trump Organization or a multi-level marketing scheme, who is in charge of the grift and why it has higher education in its grip is less clear. And who benefits?
Activists often point to administrative salaries, fancy dorms, and athletic programs as the primary beneficiaries of the casualized academic labor that now accounts for 75% of college and university teachers in the United States. But the older I get, the more I realize that we have very little evidence that the calculus is that simple or that we are witnessing a simple transfer of resources. To speak in the broadest terms, it’s less than clear why, if the true purpose of radically reducing or eliminating the tenure track is to save money, why politicians and trustees would then turn around and spend all that money on other things.
No one can answer these questions. And frankly? That may be a sign that they are the wrong questions--that we aren't going to make anything better by making the same old demands as if they were new. That we need to make universities compete to keep us, not educate us into paths so narrow that we have no choice but to return to them—on their terms.
Now that I am retiring, it is no longer my business—in a formal sense. Yet, there is one thing I know. Too many people imagine that the answer to a broken academic employment market is to rebuild the old university as we knew it—thirty, forty, even fifty years ago—doubling down on traditional models of graduate education that are currently leaving too many people stranded.
I think that’s wrong.
But what historical examples do we have of institutions (other than the Republican party and the Vatican) succeeding by returning to, and resurrecting, the past? Because there is one thing we haven’t tried on a broad scale, so busy have we been looking for the architects of the grift.
Insisting that the university look beyond the university, creating a Ph.D. for the future that makes its recipients useful and engaged in many public settings--not just those traditionally associated with work beyond the tenure track. And if university teaching can’t, or won’t, support those new scholars, let’s find and cultivate the institutions that will.
Short takes:
If you live in a city, you are going to want to check out the new special issue of Public Seminar, “Rats: A Cautionary Tail.” Curated by senior managing editor Evangeline Riddiford-Graham, the issue examines the place of this (perhaps wrongly) despised animal in our lives, culture and imagination. “We are, after all, so close,” Riddiford-Graham writes about the ties betwee rats and humans. “Rats and humans share such similar tastes that they follow us wherever we go (except to Alberta—too cold). Rats work hard. They keep pace with our peanut butter, our crops, our garbage pickups, our excessive consumption, our systemic injustice. Where the human social contract fails—in public housing with crumbling walls and dilapidated plumbing, for instance—rats thrive.” (March 6, 2023)
Idaho is perhaps the most radically right-wing state in the nation, and no one cares—perhaps because it only has four electoral votes. But on Wednesday, while the Donald Trump arraignment was still dominating the news, Idaho became the first state in the nation to implement an “abortion trafficking” law. As Huffington Post reporter Alanna Vagianos reports, Governor Brad Little signed legislation banning “anyone transporting a pregnant minor without parental consent within Idaho to get an abortion or abortion pills.” This “could apply to a grandmother driving a pregnant minor to the post office to pick up a package holding medication abortion or target an older brother driving a pregnant minor to a friend’s house to self-manage an abortion at home.” The law does not apply to adults—yet. (April 5, 2023)
How are Democrats planning to take back the House of Representatives? Expect special effort to go into states that Joe Biden needs to hold in 2024—and one of those is my own home state of Pennsylvania. And who better to target than Republican extremist Scott Perry (PA-10), who tried to help Donald Trump overturn the 2020 election? They are also going after moderate Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-01) who, although he had ties to January 6 organizers, managed to stay on the straight and narrow when it came to an actual putsch. “Perry, a York County resident, beat Democrat Shamaine Daniels 54% to 46% in November amid a federal investigation into his role in trying to replace the U.S. attorney general in 2020 with someone who would support former President Donald Trump’s false accusations about election fraud,” writes PennLive’s J.D. Prose. “The leader of the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus in the House, Perry is still fighting to prevent federal investigators from gaining full access to his cell phone.” York County is a heavy lift, but if the Dems can pull it off it would be a sign that the extreme wing of the GOP has lost momentum. (March 5, 2023)
Yes: I actually have something cooking on that fresh new model--which may be part of the next chapter!
You got me the job!