Old McDonald

Why are children's songs so frightening? Is it the child's mind that makes them so? Old McDonald had a farm. Who old? Is farming an appropriate career for an old man? Why not make him young? I imagine a senile, decrepit codger wandering forgetfully around many overgrown acres looking for animals that moo and cluck at him from the tall weeds. A cluck cluck here and a cluck cluck there, here a cluck there a cluck everywhere a cluck cluck. Old McDonald stumbles through the bushes. A duck hiding there quacks as he goes by, frightening him. The old man falls, breaks a hip. Moo moo quack quack bark bark baa baa. He struggles on the ground, surrounded by a cacophony of animal noises. E-i-e-i-o. And suddenly, they are upon him.

A New Phase, and Why You Should Never Ever Adjunct, Ever

Wow, it's been a while! I've been away from this blog living my life, and as much of the post-PhD rage and confusion has shifted into something softer and more manageable, the drive to put pen to paper (or fingers to keys, as it were) has eased. But I also have realized that writing my story has a role other than just crisis intervention. It's like the marks on the wall a parent makes as a child gets taller: it lets me see how far I've come and know that, even with all the ups and downs, I'm still me.

Where I've Been

So here's some stuff that happened in the last four years (in no particular order):

• I started teaching high school
• I got laid off from said high school, and spent a year adjuncting
• I learned that NO ONE should adjunct, EVER (see exception below)
• I got a job at another high school to get me out of adjuncting

So yeah, lots has happened! I may need to unpack these in several upcoming entries. I'll start with adjuncting and why no one should ever do it.

But First, the Exception

As far as I can tell there is only one type of person who might feasibly adjunct: If you are independently wealthy or have a spouse who makes a lot of money, and thus any income from adjuncting is purely optional--kind of like the employment equivalent of finding loose change in your sofa--then by all means, knock yourself out. Adjunct away! For the rest of us, i.e. those who actually need to make a living, be self-supporting, take care of their health, and not live off credit cards, we should never ever adjunct ever. Here's why:

Adjuncts as Academic Day-Laborers

Say you were a highly trained professional, let's say an MD, and you are offered a job at a hospital, doing the same things the other doctors at the hospital do. However you are going to get paid very little and also very irregularly. Sometimes you will make as much as a busboy at your favorite restaurant, sometimes closer to what illegal day-laborers who hang outside of home improvement stores make. And you'll never know when you have work or when you don't until the last minute. You'll work without a contract, or if you get a contract you'll get it after you've already been working for several weeks. You may think you have a job but then at the last minute they tell you you won't be working for four months because there aren't enough patients. And if there are too many patients, and you ask your boss to hire you full-time, you'll be told that that's not going to happen because they will instead hire another person like you and cover the patient load with multiple underpaid underemployed doctors instead of rewarding your time and devotion with a real job. But don't forget that you have the same responsibilities as the other doctors, and should be producing the same quality of work as the ones who actually have a living wage and job security. AND if you ever want to be one of those doctors, who actually can support themselves doing the same thing you're doing, you have to do all this extra unpaid work on the side conducting medical research that you finance yourself and somehow get published in top journals, while you are eating cat food and your teeth are falling out because you can't afford to go to the dentist. What do you get in exchange? The right to hang around the hospital and pretend you are a real doctor.

Sound like a great gig? Do you know any MD who would sign up for that? Then why would you sign up to be an adjunct instructor??

Assistant to the Assistant Professor

At my institution, let's call it ASU (Adjunct Slavery University) they have come up with something very clever: they actually give us the job title we have worked so hard for.... "Assistant Professor P/T". Aren't they clever? I wonder what overpaid MBA pretending to be a dean came up with that one? The trick is that the title doesn't come with anything other than just, well, the title. We are paid like adjuncts, receive (no) benefits like adjuncts, have no job security like adjuncts, but we get to strut around the halls of ASU and call ourselves Assistant Professors and pretend we aren't getting royally shafted by an exploitative system. We get to tell our friends and loved ones that we are professors while they wonder why we drive cars that were built in the Reagan era and ask for rides to the free clinic when said cars break down and we need to get someone--ANYONE!--to refill our psych meds.

"But Dr. Now-What, I'm Working on My Book and If I Leave Academia I Won't Get Back In!"

This is a pseudo-reason for adjuncting. Emphasis on the PSEUDO. And unfortunately there is some truth to this logic. I was a finalist for a big-deal tenure track job and, though I'd been actively publishing and doing other stuff (I still cared at that point) I found out later that the reason I didn't get it is that I had been working for a year outside of academia. TO PAY MY RENT. Jesus H. Christ. They know their system is broken and that people can't make a living, and yet they penalize you when you take the action of a sane human being and get other employment rather than adjunct. So what should you do if you fit the above description? Unless you fit into the exception (i.e. are independently wealthy) then go find a real job.

HIgher Education is for the Independently Wealthy

My conclusion is that, unless you are one of the lucky few who lands a tenure-track job right out of the PhD, then the only way to stay in academia is if you are independently wealthy and/or supported by a spouse, because if you take other employment some dean somewhere will put the kibosh on your C.V. whenever you get close to a tenure-track job and claim you don't have the fire in the belly needed for tenure (i.e. the willingness to sacrifice your health, sanity, relationships, and future via adjuncting). Thus I conclude that academia is designed for the independently wealthy, intentionally or not because, for the majority of academics, that's the only way to make it past the barriers that stand between the PhD and that first tenure-track job.

Why Academics Like to Talk about Race, but Not Class

This leads me to the topic of a future post: "Why Professors Like to Talk About Race but not Class." I'll give you a sneak-peek of my argument on that one: it's because talking about class would invite a critique of higher education and its firm ensconcement in and active reproduction of the class system in America. Through our vaunted institutions of higher learning, wealthy parents open doors to wealth for their children via a system which requires wealth for full participation. Yep, that's right, our universities--supposedly bastions of social mobility where the American Dream becomes a reality--are actually fortresses built by the 1% to keep the rabble out. More on that later...

The Drama of the Gifted Scholar

It's been a loooooong time since I've posted so I thought it would be good to return to the blog a bit. I am now comfortably settled into my alt-ac job (more on that later) and rereading my posts see how things DID get better and how there IS life after higher education--a very rich and satisfying life, I might add. Certainly a much saner life, anyway. I have a new interest in psychology (perhaps based on untangling all the mind-f*%king that we called grad school) and came across the following passage in Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child. I think it speaks for itself. Especially the third paragraph:

Then there are the people who can be very friendly, perhaps a shade patronizing, but in whose presence one feels as if one were nothing. They convey the feeling that they are the only ones who exist, the only ones who have anything interesting or relevant to say. The others can only stand there and admire them in fascination, or turn away in disappointment and sorrow about their own lack of worth, unable to express themselves in these persons' presence. These people might be the children of grandiose parents, with whom these children had no hope of rivalry, and so later, as adults, they unconsciously pass on this atmosphere to those around them. Now those people who, as children, were intellectually far beyond their parents and therefore admired by them, but so also had to solve their own problems alone, will give us quite a different impression. These people will give us a feeling of their intellectual strength and will power, and they also seem to demand that we, too, ought to fight off any feeling of weakness with intellectual means. In their presence one feels one can't be recognized as a person with problems—just as they and their problems had not been recognized by their parents, for whom they always had to be strong. Keeping these examples in mind, it is easy to see why some professors, who are quite capable of expressing themselves clearly, will use such complicated and convoluted language when they present their ideas that the students can only acquire them in a fog of anger and diligence—without being able to make much use of them. These students then may well have the same sorts of feelings that their teacher once had and was forced to suppress in relation to his parents. If the students themselves become teachers one day, they will have the opportunity of handing on this unusable knowledge, like a pearl of great price (because it had cost them so much).

Faculty Indifference

Something I've been confused about is the reaction I get from tenured faculty when I tell them about my struggles finding a job. There seem to be a few different reactions I get. 1) Saccharine reassurances that everything will work out fine. 2) Glib advice about my job search that is usually completely outdated and pertaining to a market situation that no longer exists. 3) Stories of other students who were unemployed or underemployed for years before landing their supposed dream job. 4) Silence.

The silence is the one that really intrigues me. When I talk to faculty about my job search struggles, I expect some offers of tangible help. After all, I've made immense contributions to the department as a grad student. I've taught a ton, done service, you name it for nearly a decade. And yet the indifference of the faculty to my struggle (measured in terms of tangible help received, not saccharine reassurances, etc.) is startling. Its like they knew from the beginning that this would happen, that people would get out and not be able to get jobs. And now that they are faced with me coming to terms with my situation, its only really a surprise for me, not them.

New Year's Answers #2

I've been away for a bit, dealing with the job market and my current job. It looks like another year has gone by without a permanent gig. Not only this, but the funding for my current job is in question. I'm facing unemployment in the fall, and honestly that is mixed with a lot of sadness, anger, and fear, but also a huge chunk of relief to finally be out of academia and ready to get the hell on with whatever happens next. I was going to renew the postdoc if I could, which would have let me lay low a bit longer, but I guess the Universe has bigger plans for me than hiding out in a job I don't really like anyway. In the coming months I'll start looking at post-academic employment in Southern City and Hometown. I'll need to buy a car too, as I live in one of the few places in the country where you don't need one. How this all goes is going to depend on my attitude. I can make it into BIG SCARY OHMYLIFEISFALLINGAPART, or I can make it into an adventure in coming out of a long difficult journey through grad school into a new better life that I can hardly even comprehend yet. I love reading JC's blog on leaving academia because ze is both very angry at the academic racket (yes, I think it is a racket, see below) and very glad to be out of it and in something that makes hir happy.

So in the spirit of new living, I'll get back to my New Year's questions:

2. Are all professional environments soul-sucking, not just academia?

I'm going to have to go with a big fat NO on this one. Academia is soul sucking in a very particular way, especially in a down market.

When we compare the actual things we're doing in academia versus other jobs, of course this varies a lot. One way academics often frighten would-be leavers is with the scary scary world of alienated labor that is out there awaiting them. This assumes that all non-academic jobs are the same, but I'm going to argue that there's a vast difference between, say, working an assembly line maintaining some hand-mangling machine and working for a non-profit on energy policy. The other thing wrong with notions like this is that they disregard the fact that academia IS alienated labor. But more on that in a minute. Aside from questions about what the work entails, the real soul-suck in academia is not about what we're doing, but the ways we're rewarded for it (or not).

If we think about grad school and academia in general as just a job, then a lot of that comes clear. Its when we start thinking of it as some pseudo-mystical calling, some priesthood into which we're being initiated, that things get rough and we get sucked in, only to come out disillusioned, bitter, and possibly unemployed. But say you were offered a job where the boss told you that you would be working all hours for hyper-critical supervisors, under constant pressure and stress and that you would not even be paid a living wage for doing this and then after five or so years you'd be fired, with no definite prospects of being able to get another job in the field you've been in all that time? Oh and don't forget that you have to relocate across the country for this job, leaving behind family and friends for the isolation of a workplace where everyone is your competitor and you can't really ever let your guard down completely. Would anyone in their right mind accept such a job?

The problem is all the pseudo-religious trappings that go with academia and the "life of the mind" that confuse us into thinking its something more than what it is: a really crappy job. There's even Harry Potter robes and funny ceremonies and fake Gothic architecture to help us stay confused about this.

But what is academia really? A very very underpaid, overworked career with crappy job security and awful narcissistic exploitative bosses. And grad students are the cogs in the machine, the canon fodder that faculty hire year after year, knowing that after five years of often soul-crushing work they're going to then struggle to find jobs. But faculty keep bringing them in as the cheap and docile labor force that they are, to work on the front lines teaching the classes which pay the faculty's inflated salaries while said faculty are freed up to write their books so they can get paid even more and hire even more grad students to do their teaching for them. This may have been somewhat okay ethically speaking back when people were more likely to get jobs at the end of it all, having paid their dues in grad school. But now its just exploitation, plain and simple, to give someone a grueling apprenticeship without a job at the end, just to handle the day-to-day teaching of the department only to kick them out when its all over with dismal prospects for continued employment. Its absolutely unconscionable and wrong to use young people like this, young people who trust and look up to their elders and hope to be nurtured, not exploited, by them.

Damn. Get out while you still can.

PTSD (Post-Tenure Stress Disorder)

As I wrote in an earlier post, I keep thinking about the similarities between Stockholm Syndrome and the way academics turn over their lives to a punishing and often baffling system that infantalizes you, leaves you feeling like you're never good enough, takes away many of your options in how you lead your life, and leaves everyone so desperate for more that they rush off the cliff (aka PhD programs) like happy lemmings.

I make a point to read blogs and articles, looking for anyone saying how much they love being an academic, how great it is to have tenure, how amazing their life is, and so on and so forth. And yet what I keep finding is how disillusioned everyone seems to be. How the things they thought would make them happy (a tenure-track gig, tenure, promotion, etc.) do not actually make them happy, and quite often make them depressed.

Before the PhD, I kept telling myself, "if I can only get a tenure-track job I'll be set," and then after getting that job I'm sure I'll be telling myself, "if I can only get tenure I'll be set." Turns out that the crisis of faith I'm having after this major milestone (getting my PhD) sounds pretty similar to the crisis of faith that is de rigeur for academics who have just gotten tenure. They stop their frantic publishing and conference presenting, look up, notice the sky, the trees, the spring buds about to burst, and feel like they've been missing something really important. They stop running in the hamster wheel of their chosen profession and realize they are exactly where they were when they started.

I've come across several articles recently that document post-tenure depression of various sorts. A quick search of the keywords "tenure" and "depression" turns up the following on the Chronicle, among others:

"I've Got Tenure. How Depressing."

"Grateful for Tenure, but..."

"Winning Tenure, Losing the Thrill."

"Feeling Let Down After Getting Tenure."

"The Academic Therapist: Treating Post-Tenure Depression."

And that's just on the first page of search results. So you mean to tell me that even if I could somehow magically skip the whole process of the job search, landing a tenure-track job, publishing, teaching, and working my ass off for the next five years and have tenure right now, that I would have to face (another) crushing depression, identity crisis, and sense of let-down? No thanks.

The one upside to it all, the silver lining that all of the professors tout is that they now have virtually total job security and lots of vacation time. I certainly hope to be able to say better things about the peak of my career than job security or how much time off I'm getting. 

I suppose if I were into challenge for challenge sake I could just take one of those jobs, get tenure, and then leave academia to go do something else challenging rather than sit on my laurels for the rest of my life. And apparently there are a good number of academics who do exactly that.

Yes, Sir Edmund Hillary may have climbed Mount Everest "because it was there," but I think I'd rather just hang out at the ski lodge, play cards with my friends, and not get frostbite.

New Year's Answers #1

I've really got to remember to keep this blog going, because its one of the things that may preserve my sanity in this time of transition and career-related anxieties. Time to try to answer some of my New Year's questions.

1. Was my experience about being in a particularly toxic department in a toxic school, or was it a more universal experience of the culture of higher education? (I.e., if I got a job somewhere else, could I be happy?)

Good question. I'm not sure about this one. I do think, for the record, that my department was particularly toxic as far as departments go. Only thing is, I think that toxic departments are fairly common, maybe not the rule necessarily, but not as infrequent as one might guess. I can't say how many times I've listened to grad students and professors complain about the politics of their respective departments. I think this may be partly because of the way academic jobs work, that you get tenure at a place and then stay there FOREVER and it is virtually impossible to move to another institution. This means that people stay in departments where they are miserable, their souls shrivel up and become hard lumps of hate, and they take their frustration out on the other faculty and their students. I don't think this is that uncommon of a situation. Am I wrong? I think this is what happens when you have basically no mobility in your professional life.

I do think there are different types of schools where I could probably be happier, places where the focus is more on teaching, for example, and the faculty do not see working with students as a burden to be foisted off on someone else so they can focus on their next book. But I do think that there are structural things about a career in higher education that may still be deal-breakers for me. As a single gay man who has aspirations of domestic bliss and perhaps even a family, I'm just not too keen on moving to Lower Mongolia for my career. I've been reading a bit about academics who move into secondary education, and this definitely seems to address a number of my problems, such as the pressures of research, the discounting of teaching, and the geographic mobility. Here's a great article about somehow who made just the switch I'm talking about. He even is doing what I've always dreamed of doing since I was a little boy: writing novels.

Good for him.