Thank you LeftieProf, Suzie’s World, Cathy Yungmann, Harriet Jackson, and many others for tuning into Julian Zelizer’s show! You can subscribe to Julian’s Substack, The Long View, here.
Earlier this month, everyone I knew was talking about Tyler Austin Harper’s essay about why he left his job in environmental studies at Bates College in Maine (“Why I Quite the Tenure Track: the Insufferable Hypocrisy of Academia,” The Atlantic, August 10, 2026.) In it, Harper, who is Black, discusses issues familiar to me from my two decades at Wesleyan University: the complex objectification of heavily recruited Black faculty, the frailty of interdisciplinary programs, curricular integration (or lack thereof); and the work underrepresented faculty are expected to perform that simultaneously tokenize and represent real values that those faculty support.
Harper left Bates to become a staff writer at The Atlantic: the essay we are all talking about has its own history. Similar books and essays that signal a turning away from a naïve self and towards an unknown future use and reuse the title “Goodbye to All That” (see: Robert Graves, Joan Didion, Robin Morgan.) In recent years, these essays have been dubbed “quit lit,” a phrase not accidentally lifted from the addiction memoir genre, in which young academics, after years of temporary positions, give up on their dream of tenure-track employment and……do something else.
