The Anguish of Academia 2020
Tags: Academia, History, Society, Work, Education

I am an accomplished failure in the American meritocracy. Where do I go from here?

Almost exactly one year after receiving my Ph.D. in History, I was ready to down an innocuous-looking bottle of green-and-white pills to try to end my life.

I was never a straight-A student growing up and had been diagnosed with a learning disability very young, so earning a doctorate was perhaps an even brighter moment for me than it would be for some others. Still, I knew it was no golden ticket to a good life and career. I was aware of the horror stories of adjunct instructors living in poverty and literally dying from lack of healthcare. All along, I had read published articles in publications like The Chronicle of Higher Education about how even hardly glamorous teaching positions at state universities are being monopolized by people coming out of the Ivy Leagues. And early on, I learned about the torturous realities of academic journal publishing, where placing an article can take months to over a year, yet university hiring committees still demand proof of strong publishing records from even early-career scholars. One job ad I saw a few years ago asked for early-career scholars while also stating that applicants should have a record of published articles in top journals. Joseph Heller’s titular joke is bitterer when it’s being played on you.

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Still, throughout my career as a graduate student I had been careful to rack up a resume with experience working as a freelance writer, being an “office grunt” for various college departments, and volunteering as an office assistant for an arts non-profit. Plan A would be winning the lottery and getting a full-time teaching job with a college or university. My Plan B would be quietly working in an administrative or communications capacity for some small college somewhere. I fell in love with the entire environment of the university, and even if my Ph.D. just led me into some entry-level job as a student success counselor or a copywriter for one of those alumni magazines no one really reads, I would have still been content.

Instead, Plan A and Plan B both went down in flames.

Not counting an adjunct job that I had to turn down because it didn’t pay well enough, the best I could pull off was what was essentially a gig economy role writing for a for-profit education company. Eventually, I had to move in with family. It did not take long before I would start jokingly referring to my “typical millennial sob story” as a kind of preemptive apology. As someone who would be considered pretty far left in the United States (and left of center in a lot of other countries), I constantly read articles and tweets and watch videos soaked in statistics on how economically precarious life is as a millennial. If interrogated about my politics, it would quickly become clear that I completely reject the conservative and libertarian doctrine that anyone can pull themselves up by the bootstraps — an expression that was, as any good leftist on Twitter would tell you, actually meant to highlight its absurd impossibility. And yet I carry with me a palpable sense of failure.

Part of my work as a historian is studying the ways social and cultural forces shape our daily lives and how we perceive ourselves. For example, I could probably explain how cultural products like The Secret fit with the development of the prosperity gospel and neoliberal economics in five minutes or less. And I know of the many barriers even hard-working and intelligent people have faced and of the head-starts highly successful people often received. Yet, despite knowing all this, the idea that I am completely and absolutely culpable for failing to etch out a real career and living is hardwired in me. No amount of reading about how underfunded higher education is or about the career and financial hardships faced by people ranging from journalists to teachers to video game designers can change that.

My breaking point came around the holidays. I was the first person in my family to earn a Ph.D., yet was chronically underemployed. How was I going to face that news and share it? That became the proverbial straw. My sadness and anxiety and frustration all gave way to a numbness. The day after Thanksgiving, I found myself enjoying leftovers not with relatives, but with strangers at a crisis intervention center. In this cramped, visibly crumbling ward, there wasn’t much to do except attend endless group therapy sessions, eat, pace the hallway, and read. One night there, staring at the empty city streets through a barred window, I cried because I thought I glimpsed a future of nothing but failure and depression. It was an awful feeling, but, in hindsight, it counted as progress because at least it meant I was no longer numb.

Since then, my millennial sob story has had its ups and downs. I moved to a new city to start a new job, and I fell in love with the place. Despite being a somewhat specialized full-time job that required months of training, it paid barely enough for me to afford my one-bedroom apartment in the furthest outskirts of the metro area, and I had to continue taking extra freelance gigs. (And, even then, I was painfully aware that being able to afford just a one-bedroom apartment anywhere close to a city is a lucky thing for many in my generation.) Then I was fired and rehired as a part-time contract worker to do basically the same job.

Through all this, I never quite gave up on academia, even though the reports of catastrophic budget cuts and tales of the broken dreams of grad students on social media have been mounting. I got a book based on my dissertation published. Two of my essays were included in collections published by Routledge and Cambridge University Press. Also, I recently published a pop history book, The Fall of Empires: A Short History of Imperial Collapse. (It’d be a lie to say the way I felt about the world around me and the topic I chose were unrelated.)

These have been successes, but none able to land me a full-time job — in academia or elsewhere. Once more, it’s back to filling out the same application forms and checking my e-mail account 20 or more times a day for absolutely anything tangible and enjoying the “freedom” of working a plethora of part-time and “gig” jobs. Since the COVID pandemic hit, even the few interviews I was getting have evaporated. Still, at least in mental-health terms, I’m handling the struggle better than before. Yet, there is still that voice lurking at the edges of my consciousness, pulling me the wrong way, toward nothing.

Should my sense of failure be helped by knowing the stories of others in similar or even worse situations? One former colleague in grad school is a talented writer, studied under one of the top scholars in their sub-field, got to speak about their research on NPR, and had a diverse teaching portfolio. That led to a job loading boxes. Another friend was downsized from their dream job teaching at a small, private college near where his family lives because of “budget reallocations.” Granted, a few of my other colleagues have gone on to receive decent positions in academia, but each year that goes on it seems more and more like trying to hit the center of a dartboard while dangling upside down.

I’m left scolding myself over things I can’t go back and change, and that shouldn’t foreclose a life of the mind in an academically accomplished adult. Maybe I should have taken my early education more seriously. In high school, I didn’t join the Honor Society because I didn’t like most of the people I knew who were in it. Maybe toughing it out would’ve helped with college placement. But I wouldn’t give up the path I’ve chosen. I love writing. I’m good at it. I fit in well in academia and greatly enjoy the atmosphere of a university community. If every person is indeed “meant” for a purpose, I have found mine.

Still, I’m sure some would tell me I’m entitled, or that I should “learn to code.” But a literal reading of that advice has its own shortcomings, as learning how to code is not much of a guarantee you’ll get a job (ask anyone in the video game industry). Applying it figuratively, as a suggestion about going wherever market opportunities happen to be, it’s fine but similarly fraught with pitfalls; there are always problems and uncertainties in a market. I could become, say, a nurse, a potentially promising path to steady employment. But given my track record with anything involving technical equipment, you really wouldn’t want me to tend to your parents or grandparents, unless you’re hoping for a nice inheritance. Healthcare is a wonderful field, but it is not for everyone. Ideally the people working in life-and-death fields would have gone into it because they were drawn to it, not because they settled for it.

There is one sense of entitlement that our culture encourages, and that perhaps I take part in. I grew up learning that one of the perks of living in a capitalist, democratic society is that, as long as I work hard and perform well in a field that interests me, I could have a career that suits me. Now, I don’t think most people really grow up believing that as long as they get good grades they can become the next Stephen King, the next Oprah Winfrey, or what have you. From what I hear, the next generation of Americans below me has been taught not to dream this way by the cruel reality my generation experiences. But for us, the expectation was that things would work out reasonably well as long as we didn’t completely screw up. Getting a doctorate and publishing a book doesn’t seem like it should lead to flaming out.

These days, what I hear from internet trolls and even some left-of-center people is that you have to shut up and take “x” career, regardless of what your strengths and weaknesses actually are. What on earth is the point if, after paying your dues, it’s a rarity — that is, not merely difficult, but rare — to attain even a middling career that reflects your actual talents and interests? One might as well go back to medieval serfdom. At least serfs are bound to the land! If you’re American, you would get more days off, and you would have actual job security.

Rationally, I know the fundamental problem I’m facing is a social one, not an individual one. We live in a nation that minimizes the arts, the social sciences, the humanities, and general education in favor of business, finance, and entertainment (or, at least, certain kinds of entertainment). According to the New Faculty Majority, just over half of all college instructors are adjuncts. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the average pay for adjuncts is about $3,000 per three-hour course while, in 40 states, college football coaches are paid more than any other state employee with annual salaries in the millions.

This is not just a problem for academics cast into the wilderness like me. If you ask anyone, being able to make a living just as a writer of your own work is now highly unlikely unless you catch lightning in a bottle and capture the attention of the right editor like J. K. Rowling or you’re born or marry into the class of Ivy League legacies and media dynasties. In an article for The Atlantic, Andy Horwitz wrote, “Large, mainstream arts institutions, founded to serve the public good and assigned non-profit status to do so, have come to resemble exclusive country clubs. Meanwhile, outside their walls, a dynamic new generation of artists, and the diverse communities where they live and work, are being systematically denied access to resources and cultural legitimation.” American journalism is in no better shape. The recent history of print and even online journalism has been a dirge sounding off a long list of shut-downs and mass layoffs.

It is true that being an aspiring writer or artist or even academic has never been easy. However, whenever I look around at news articles on the state of the media or just the Twitter accounts of struggling creatives and academics, the stories I often see are quite similar to my own. Even people with sterling resumes and impeccable credentials and actual jobs still have to resort to “the hustle” of freelancing, side gigs, podcasts, crowdfunding, YouTube shows, and small businesses.

Things are still not quite as dire as Jules Verne predicted in his novel Paris in the Twentieth Century. Verne anticipated a soulless technocratic society where all popular art, literature, and even music is based in science and engineering and centuries’ worth of classics are left to rot untouched. Today, one of the most successful podcasts is Jamie Jeffers’s The British History Podcast, a chronological telling of British history, and a glimpse at social media shows people are still very much invested in film, music, and literature (although one wonders what Verne would have made of slash fic). Also, one of the biggest cultural milestones of the past decade was a hip-hop stage musical reinterpreting early American history, even if it was until recently accessible only to the very well-off. Essentially, we are not heading toward a future devoid of creativity and the humanities, but going backwards to a rigidly unequal past, where a creative career depended upon the whims of a wealthy patron and, save for a lucky few, a life of scholarship was meant only for those who came from rich families. That much is illustrated by the fact that the majors of History and English are still thriving, but only at places like Harvard and Columbia.

As for me, I did something I vowed I wouldn’t do: go back to school again. I enrolled in a Library and Information Science graduate program because I have seen that archivist and digital humanities jobs are relatively well-advertised (at least until the pandemic hit). It would be a career I would find satisfying and that would draw on my interests and skills and my past degrees. However, taking this path will mean taking on more debt, and there is still no guarantee I’ll get a well-paying, full-time job with benefits when I graduate. A couple of former colleagues of mine have gone into K-12 teaching, but even that requires a grueling, expensive process that leads to one of the most essential yet underpaid professions in America.

I also started my own history podcast about the Medici — a family that perhaps didn’t have to wonder so much about what their place would be in society.