Where do I go to lament my ten useless years getting a PhD which has impoverished my family and I for a decade? No one cares that I am now a shell, making it up for the fam, they can’t know… So empty today and the nine month job search is starting to grind on me hard.
With Incredulity “WHY WOULD YOU MOVE FROM ACADEMIA TO CORPORATE?!?!?”
So, I had a job interview for a corporate job doing data analysis for customer experience measurements – with a corporation where I think I might be able to find a long term research scientist job – not in customer experience, but in public health. But hey a foot in the door is a foot in the door.
And see, the family is hungry this week. This PhD mama can’t feed her kids and it makes me so hopeless and so sad that I invested so much time in something that feels pretty worthless.
The interviewer who asked the question above waited for the “co-interviewer” to leave the room and then hit me with it…
Why can’t, because my family is hungry be an acceptable answer?
So I rattled off how I want to stay in the area and how academia is not what it used to be (my husband and I later mused that this second part to the answer made it look like it was second choice for me – which it is but can’t say that OUT LOUD). Her dad, and she was older middle age, was a prof so she had a different idea of what that world was like.
Anyhow, I’ve read my share of advice columns etc etc and I’ve become quite embittered with a constant stream of pithy and or already taken and seemingly not effective advice that has not seemed to help me for MONTHS NOW AND THE FAMILY IS HUNGRY. So, here’s yet one more alt-ac bit of advice that I hadn’t seen previously – if you go alt-ac, you might get the question above, and the corporate environment is not yet ready for us, I think, and they will wonder why we’ve left such a sweet deal. They WILL NOT CARE that temp-teaching positions have risen by 50% while all of the tenure track has basically stagnated so that the cushiness of academia, not that it is even cushy anymore as I see my recently employed colleagues struggling for work life balance, but I digress…. Just say, “I don’t want to be in academia, I want to be in the corporate world for reasons X, Y, and Z.” BE PREPARED FOR THAT QUESTION.
We’re also out of coffee – that’s always a bummer.
And now, for information on why Marxism doesn’t work, for all you financially secure Marxist-wannabes (I’m one, but have lost all hope) out there: I atone! I apply for all these jobs! I’m a great worker, I work so hard, I gain strength from employment and stable financial security! I JUST WANT TO WORK! SOMEONE PLEASE VALUE MY SKILLS AND HIRE ME!
Paralyzed by the job hunt
I couldn’t have known… Here’s the data and supportive statement from the National Women’s Studies Association. “The MLA Academic Workforce Data Center reports that the number of part-time faculty went from 379,700 in 1995 to 757,700 in 2011; in comparison, there were 393,500 tenured and tenure-track faculty in 1995 and 430,600 of the same in 2011.” (See their footnote below, full statement included.)
I couldn’t have known, because there were jobs when I started my PhD-dream but they went away while I was “in”… And I’m left negotiating this sinking feeling of failure and taking a job that makes me feel underutilized, though at this point I will take anything that I can (except adjucnting – I’m so done with that, I will not be a cog in that machine. Also, I have one course I contracted to teach, and I’ll do it, but my heart is no longer in it.)
There are days when I can dream a different route – that seemingly ever-illusive “alt-ac” route but today, I am so filled with regret for the choices I’ve made, sociologically understandable or not. Yes, the MACROFORCES altered my trajectory, but it still hurts to be a failure.
“NWSA Contingent Faculty Solidarity Statement
As the largest feminist academic organization in North America, the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) is dedicated to leading the transformative and critical field of Women’s Studies. Our members recognize that systems of oppression are interlaced and take seriously the material conditions of knowledge production, labor commodification, workforce stratification, and structural inequities in educational practices.
The NWSA urgently calls for wider recognition of growing inequality in academic labor practices, and, in particular, the rising number of contingent faculty.[1] Contingent faculty colleagues often face heavy teaching loads, commute between multiple positions, and lack basic support in the academy. Such disparities have adverse effects on higher education more broadly. Given their critical role in higher education, contingent faculty need fair wages and benefits, professional development opportunities, structural and contractual protections for academic freedom, and due process protections.
The NWSA also underscores that the devaluation of academic labor, wage inequities, and disparities in hiring practices has been longstanding in the academy and connects to wider material and political contexts. Race, sexuality, social class, age, disability, gender, and citizenship are all factors that impact contingent employment. Comprehensive data on contingent faculty in the U.S. is unfortunately limited as the Department of Education’s National Study of Postsecondary Faculty ceased in 2003, and nothing comparable has replaced it. Thus the NWSA calls on the Department of Education to reinstate this critical survey in order to make the issues surrounding contingency more transparent.
As feminist scholars, educators, and activists, our members actively pursue a just world in which all persons can develop to their fullest potential. Given our deep commitments to an inclusive feminist vision and to contesting and dismantling multiple systems of domination, the NWSA is in solidarity with contingent faculty colleagues and issues this call for wider recognition of labor stratification and structural inequities in higher education employment practices. We are steadfast in our commitment to eradicating injustice and to fostering educational opportunities for all.
[1] The AAUP reports that more than 50% of today’s total professoriate (across institutional types) is contingent and non-tenure-track positions account for 75% of instructional appointments in U.S. Higher Education. The MLA Academic Workforce Data Center reports that the number of part-time faculty went from 379,700 in 1995 to 757,700 in 2011; in comparison, there were 393,500 tenured and tenure-track faculty in 1995 and 430,600 of the same in 2011. In addition, a June 2012 survey by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce [CAW] found that more than 60 percent of respondents who provided information about their gender were women, compared with 51.6 percent of faculty nationally. While nearly 90 percent of contingent faculty who responded to the CAW survey were white, the survey found that respondents who identified as black earned 25 percent less per course than those who identified as white.”
2 hours till lecture
…and I am sitting here, tears streaming down my face, because I’ve made such a big mess of this career and I have to smile through it. I don’t want to be a happy woman! I want to be an angry woman – but oh, the power of the sanctions that would comedown upon the angry woman. Academia sees me, and they think I’m not worth the anger and they look through me and I just can’t bear being here in this rented office, not mine to place my books in lovingly, but one filled with tons of books left by people just like me. But apparently they aren’t sad.
Why am I the only sad one?
Why did the department that cancelled my contract then HIDE IT from my view? Why can’t they just pony up and pay me what I’m owed? Get me through these months so I can get a real job.
Oh, how economic stability is linked to a feeling of HUMANITY. And here I am teaching about the absurdity of borders and the travesty and tragedy and sometimes triumph of immigration, and I have THE NERVE to think that I’m work more than this warm office and health children with a roof over their head?
I applied for a job today
I got my PhD in May of 2015 and have been applying ever since. I’m in a good state to do this – Minnesota has a thriving research and evaluation industry. I started quite cocky I guess. I’ve got a motherfucking phd! But then months of nothing, no interviews and no rejections, quickly cut me down. That’s fine. Not that my job hunt has yet been unsuccessful but that my ego was reduced a bit. Ego’s a rough ride…
So a bit into the process I started halfheartedly contacting people for “information interviews” – and the information they gave me was overwhelming. Such a different world, this non-academic space… But I was a non-academic before I started my PhD so I plowed forward, each application bolstering my belief that I was a good job candidate!! And I kept applying, and heard nothing. The state of MN actually does send rejections, I found out – that nice. They always tell me I didn’t meet the qualifications… I know that’s not true but job hunting in 2015 is WAY DIFFERENT that job hunting in 2002 (which was the last time I did this).
In 2002, I would sign up with a university-based temp agency and then would be hired on officially by the department within a few weeks. I tried the temp route, but I don’t think the University uses it anymore… Anyhow, haven’t gotten any calls.
But I’m at the point [kind of freaked out but my pal gave me some essential oils for the freak outs and I’m on the requisite anxiety and depression drugs] where I’m realizing that the informational interviews are not for immediate gratification. The job I just applied for was actually SENT to me via a woman I’d conversed with over a year ago. It says, “We’d like you to apply”….. “We’d”!!!!!! I don’t know who we are, but at this point I don’t care. I just want that first job in my alt-ac life and so fingers crossed.
No sociological analysis today other than there was a big “recession” aka DEPRESSION which altered my career trajectory and it sucks but systemic impacts can’t be wished away…. My therapist told me to start yoga, so I have to go join the Y (scholarship!!!) and indulge in self care so my kid stops asking if I’m stuck!
I’m intellectually working on a piece about stigma (mental health and poverty and is my response to it REALLY that irrational?). To the adjuncts out there, or the alt-ac’ers who had to slowly process the transition from academe to NOT-academe, are you sad? Are you poor?
Mommy’s stuck
Mommy, are you sad?
How do you know, child, how do you know.
I am trying to act normal
But this heartache will crush me if I don’t sit here for a second
Before I go on to fold the little’s pjs.
Mommy’s stuck.
He brings daddy to help me off the bed,
piled high with a week’s worth of laundry.
They pull with exaggerated noises
and I rise from my pile and satisfy the boy
by walking down the hall with them.
See, mommy’s no longer stuck.
But to satisfy the man I say,
quiet voice, “lovely metaphor.”
And he says, Mommy’s stuck…
And I say, no, you pulled me out.
He and both know that no one can pull me out.
But damn if their love isn’t gonna get me through…
On leaving precarious adjuncting
I just have to get it off my chest. I haven’t told many people because they either wouldn’t understand, or they wouldn’t respond correctly and neither is sufficient for this moment in my life. The picture above is what I looked like after crying for a day – this is what the cancelling of a contract looks like.
See, my contract was cancelled. No biggee, right? Part of the deal of being an adjunct – we all *know* it’s precarious. Why should I be in any less of a precarious spot than the next person? But it flattened me in a way I’ve never been before. See, that contract had been signed – one class for spring semester. Down from three, then two, but still with the one class I’d picked up at the neighboring school, we could afford daycare and we’d make it another semester. Summers are always tough, but we’d cross that bridge later. First, food in the mouths for Winter and Spring, and bills and rent… And after the contract was signed, we bought Christmas presents and I was settling in to my state of obliviousness just fine. Why, I even got myself a couple of Christmas gifts – some sweaters from Target and matching Pjs for Christmas eve.
It was the last day of class – a Friday – and so it was my swan song. I brought in donuts and was happily closing out the semester. This last day is where I have one last moment to push the value of seeking empirical data and a variety of voices in order to understand all social phenomena. At the very last minute of my first class (I had two in a row), I realized I hadn’t shown an amazing you tube video that a student had made for his class project. I quickly went online, into my email to get the link he’d sent me, and there it was: subject – contract canceled. I found the video, and dashed out of the room to catch my breath. What the fuck?
I read the email again from the office computer. Contract cancelled – I’m sorry – budget reasons. So short, so sweet. As if it was just a minor problem. “Sorry.”
I have two analyses for why this was such a crushing blow. The first is that I’d believed that this place, this university, this department, this chair, CARED for me and wouldn’t hurt me. I mean, she’d been honest with me, and had been the whole time that I might not be offered all the contracts she’d originally thought, but once the contract was offered and I’d signed it… I breathed a bit easier. See, that contract means survival to me and my family. It’s not fun and games ; I tried hard to get a job before the fall semester, once I had my PhD. I don’t want to be here and I know adjuncting is so hurtful to people, me included, so I’d already sworn never again, but then the classes were offered on a silver platter, the pay was better than food stamps and so I took it. And the chair was amazing. Supportive, funny, kind. Halfway through she’d asked me if I could teach three classes in Spring – but then it didn’t look so good. First one was gone but it would have required the most prep so I didn’t mourn it. I also was talking with two departments at a different college to try to get some work there. I could have negotiated three classes there, but with my commitment to the first place, I decided to take just one. I didn’t want to take on too much…
And then the second class was taken. A different prof’s course hadn’t filled and well, tenured faculty get first dibs. And then I waited, nervously, but finally I had the numbers and my class was a go. With one class from college #1 and one from college #2, we’d survive. And looking on the bright side, I convinced myself that I’d have more time to look for jobs! Why, I’d have enough money coming in, I could volunteer somewhere, make much needed connections and build additional skills needed to transfer from academia to what we in academia call “alt-ac” – meaning all jobs that are not professoring.
Anyhow, back to the first reason I was so devastated. I FORGOT how brutal academia is. I FORGOT that that nice department chair really didn’t care about me at all. I FORGOT that I was disposable and completely employed at their mercy. I forgot that, in the world of academia, I was not a human, but an inexpensive number. And I do blame myself. I noticed how, when I attended functions at the U in the first few weeks, how when I introduced myself as an adjunct, people looked uncomfortable. I was a reality none of them wanted to be face to face with. I brushed it off… Why, I’m so damn good at my job, I am surely their equal. Just smile, push on, be present. Make connections, find a way to stay here. Work in administration – just get a job. Any job. Cause really, I’d given up on being a professor – at this point, I knew I just needed a job, but the full façade of what I’d trained ten years for hadn’t really been tumbled to the ground yet. It was cracked, and bound to come down, but I was still pretty brainwashed by my years in academe. That’s another post… So anyhow, when I got that email, it took about 15 minutes and then I began to cry and I cried for days. That email was the moment I remembered (cause, I’d forgotten, see…) that I didn’t get to be a part of their club. Good as I was at my job, they didn’t really want me. (Another post, as well, WHY they didn’t want me in the first place…)
And I don’t think I’m a bad person for forgetting. Rather, I was someone caught in a changing industry. It was different when I started, before the recession, but impacts of the hiring freezes of 08 and 09 never really went away. I had a colleague who finished the year I started; in 2005 she’d decided she wanted to live on the East Coast and so she only applied to select schools and that was fine and she got a nice job. But these days, only the Ivies really have that choice and not all the Ivies, at that. The rest of us professor wannabes, from schools like big 10 R 1s (save Berkeley and Wisconsin), have to cast a net far to get a job. Anyhow, at 44, that was something I wasn’t willing to do (again, long story, complete with sociological analyses) so I’d “resigned” myself to “alt-ac” – but if you’ve been in the academy, you know that making this decision is not very honored or respected… It should be! I mean, I want to go public with my social science self but the true mark of post-phd success is a tenure track position (at an R1) or, these days, just about anywhere. So that’s reason number one: I was devastated because I’m SMARTER than that! I’d already made the decision to leave academia but the socialization of what “success” was still had its claws in me, and so for one semester I pretended I was a professor and I was so, so happy.
But then there’s number two – the second reason for why I was so devastated: I’m caught in the” iron cage” of bureaucracy (and so is everyone else). For this, I turn to Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). See, Bauman suggests that the atrocities of the Holocaust weren’t born out of massive anger but rather due to seemingly benign social forces inherent in bureaucracies. One force is an adherence to progress – he writes of scientific progress but I would extend his analysis to budgetary progress. The progress of the whole far outweighs any individual’s morals or beliefs. A second force is the dehumanization that comes with bureaucracy. Each of us plays our part and it is our action in the bureaucratic whole, rather than our humanity, that becomes conflated with the person. (I could go to Marx and alienation, too – but I’m looking to implicate not the worker with no power but rather the people who look away so I’ll save my Marxian analysis for another day.)
This is what it looks like in real life then – this process which Bauman warns us about: The Dean “forces” the Chair, both sociologists who in my opinion should know a thing or two about dehumanization, to cancel my already issued and signed contract due to “budgetary issues” and do so just a week before the holidays and a few weeks before the start of a new semester. I end the semester a babbling mess, unable to teach the final class because I can’t stop crying. They avoid or have never met me, so they have no idea. Oh well. Too bad.
Meanwhile, my anger and confusion grow. HOW COULD THEY DO THIS TO ME? And then the façade of academia cracks and shatters and I know I am done so I go to the one place I can express this, a facebook page for sociological teaching resources, and tell the 2000 profs and teachers on that site that I am done because they canceled my contract and nice knowing you. GOOD BYE. I removed myself immediately from the facebook group, and hide all sociologists from my facebook feed because I don’t want to see ANY of it. I need a clean break. I need to be done. It feels heathy. It feels good. I’m at bottom, but I can see clearly now.
Back to Bauman. See, just so happened the Dean who cut my funding was on that facebook page… And a dear friend had outed the offending school (though I had not, for whatever reason, I didn’t feel comfortable naming them) with the following (I found this out days later because I quit the site the moment I wrote my farewell): “XXX should be ASHAMED of themselves.”
Upon seeing the shaming message, the Dean then wrote to me and told me of her agonizing decision to cut my contract, and how it just wouldn’t be fair to NOT have done so (I’ll save you her excuse because I think it’s irrelevant to my point), what with all the concessions she was asking from all the departments… Why, even the tenure track professors had to increase their enrollment levels! And she CCd the Department Chair who is not on FB and didn’t need to see this. And I am left in the MOST UNCOMFORTABLE POSITION of having to respond to THAT.
I am a human, with children and bills and if I don’t find work MID FUCKING SEMESTER MY FAMILY AND I WILL LITERALLY BE HOMELESS BOO HOO FOR YOUR PROFS WHO HAVE HIGHER CAPACITY IN THEIR CLASSES. I’m sure your recent raise from one livable wage to an even better one stayed nice and intact. I don’t say that though. I have to be “professional” which means let her live in her delusion that she’s some great fucking martyr for cutting my contract. “I’ll be fine… It’s best for me…” I know that that $5,500 won’t balance the budget of that school, the adjuncts will only in the long term make the bloated administrations of higher education function longer, but it’s all just an unsustainable bubble and I’m getting out before it implodes.
And the department chair. She sits in my office a week later and sees that it still makes me cry and is a decent human, most sociologists are. But the fact remains that they issued me a contract and they should have honored it. Every last one of the tenured faculty should have stood up for me: the least powerful and most precarious. SOMEONE should have asked ME how that decision would affect MY life and MY family. But no one did. And they’ll all look away. And I write this mostly anonymously so that I don’t have to watch all of my colleagues look away from my plight, and the plight of the adjuncts in their own schools. Just trying to make it to tenure or whatever, but they’ll all forget about the humans in front of them, instead making up fancy theories about humans elsewhere that allow them to forget their complacent role in the unraveling of academia.
Its not another holocaust in this case – I’m not making a case for that. Rather, it is indicative of a society where people cease to be humans and instead are budget lines. And this hurts.
I’m not sure what my role is, going forward. I don’t think there’s a happy ending, though my fingers are crossed that there’s a new chapter ahead. I mean, first things first I just need to find a way not to become homeless. I will scramble for a job first and foremost. I just pray that I get to work somewhere where I get to impact the common good – someplace where I will never EVER forget the humans that hold me up, and I them. But that’s the thing: as a sociologist I know that not ONE of those humans is really to be blamed. The Dean, the Chair, me…. We’re all just players in the bureaucracy of academia, and society more broadly. So I can’t escape this dehumanization, and I’ll either work or be fired, and the Dean and the Chair, they chose to work, and me, one day I’ll choose to work, and someone will be fired at my expense… We’re powerless to the neoliberal institution and our own survival/greed. You are too, so let’s all look away.
“Wendy? Yes, Lisa. Is the water warm enough? Yes, Lisa. Shall we begin? Yes, Lisa.” – Prince, Wendy and Lisa
It is January 2nd and I am sick, so sick. I’m having anxiety attacks too, because I’m so weak I keep almost fainting but I don’t want to tell my husband and I can’t let the kids know. I’m afraid I won’t be able to care for them and I wonder how it came to this…
You can call me Dr. AutoSoc. Instead of writing an autobiography I’ll be engaging in autosociology here in this blog. I’ve been looking for a way to bridge the pain and fear that is my post PhD experience with the knowledge that I’ve cultivated for so so long. Et voila! Autosociology is born.
I’m trying to dig out of a deep hole of 10 years of bad decisions coupled with 10 years of wonderful decisions! Much of both the good and the bad can be explained through an individual’s placement within the broader social road maps of social class, race, gender, sexuality etc. That’s the sociological imagination for those of you that don’t know much about sociology. It’s when a person (me, in this case) takes a look at a personal trouble, for example, and seeks to find larger explanations for the presence of that trouble.
For example, I am jobless and freaking the fuck out. That’s a personal trouble. But the reasons that i am jobless are not because I’ve been lazy. No, I work about 40-50 hours a week – to no avail. It’s not because I don’t have the drive to be a good sociologist, oh I do, I do so much, but a shitload of macro forces converged to push me off path one too many times and so now, here I am, PhD after 10 years with nary a pub and thus nary a chance at being a prof… (probably).
I’m a GREAT prof, too. But teaching isn’t enough, wanting it isn’t enough, working as hard as life circumstances warrant isn’t enough.
But you know, I’m also a human and I just recently forgot this… And the pain brought on by the betrayal of my discipline is still ripe and aiding me in losing about 10 pounds because the grief makes it impossible to eat. There’s a lot more sociology in that trend too – but I’ll get to that.
First, the betrayal.
autosociologist 