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Only Human: My Experience in Higher Education

The truth is unbelievable, not because it is untrue, but because no one wants to believe it.

I am living proof. Despite gloomy accounts of the academic job market, I earned a PhD and

became an academic. Unlike many of my fellow PhDs, I have an academic job as an instructor at

a private, religiously affiliated, liberal arts university where I occasionally teach Shakespeare,

my specialty. Nevertheless, my work bears frustratingly little resemblance to the professorial job

that my PhD program led me to expect and still less to the position that it prepared me to hold.

True, I was unprepared for the intense teaching load, complicating personality conflicts between

colleagues, and faculty-administration tensions. Still, these surprises paled in comparison to my

astonishment at the way that institutional demands, professional expectations, and personal

responsibilities contest over the human faculty member. This battle occurs in the discipline of

English, no less, which revels in the complexities of humans and their stories.1

From the beginning, I knew that this job would present challenges: the English

department had never hired a PhD in English; faculty taught four/four loads—that is, not only

four classes each semester, but usually four different classes every semester, as well; and

administrators often “redistributed” resources away from student learning and professional

development to meet other budgetary demands across the university. Yet, I wanted to live close

to my aging grandparents and my mother, who needed assistance with their care. Additionally, I

believed that the job offered me a chance to shape a developing major rather than endure one

entrenched in traditions. I believed that my disciplinary background would ease my way; that I

could balance teaching, research, service and caregiving tasks; and that I could manage the lack

of resources. I was wrong.

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The fact that the English department had never hired a PhD in English was, I quickly

discovered, a marker for broader institutional issues. The university had started as a Bible college

and had grown into a four-year liberal arts university. The English department, developed out of

this transition, is relatively new. Still, change, even without the added burden of traditions, is

hard. Bringing a young PhD into a department that has not had one (or perhaps has not hired a

new scholar in many years) will create discord, and for me, tensions arose most openly in the

area of expectations. I expected to see resources regularly devoted to professional development

and student learning. I anticipated publication requirements in order to keep my job. I supposed

my colleagues had been empowered to develop their curriculum in ways that mirrored English

departments at similar institutions, and I thought they could and would do so without having to

justify every change to the entire faculty and administration. My colleagues, on the other hand,

expected me to do as they did, to accept a lack of resources, to give up my budding research

agenda, and to worry only a little about a curriculum that they felt little power to change. Their

goal was (and is) survival, an unsurprising stance given the heavy teaching loads, student

advising, committee memberships, required church attendance, and a lack of resources so

profound that at one point the English department supervised three semesters‟ worth of dramatic

productions.

Bulky as this task list is, especially coupled with the changes I had to make in the ways

that I thought about my job, my biggest surprise was yet to come. It lay not in any of the

curricular, professional, or service expectations, but in the financial ones. Despite my small

department‟s enviable flexibility in scheduling, the university had continued to demand more and

more of its faculty, at one point approaching the faculty for donations although it had not

increased pay in two years. The following year, faculty received a blanket request to re-negotiate

their contracts to take a 6 percent pay cut in order to help the university cover a $3 million

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budget shortfall. Although a donor saved the faculty and staff from having to take such a cut, the

budget remained tight, and the university was only able to offer a small raise the next academic

year using the remaining donor monies. Although appreciated, the pay increase does not offset

the growing number of faculty responsibilities.

Still, my colleagues and I have managed to make small but significant changes. Our

department schedules meetings around caregiving responsibilities, and we allow parents to bring

their children to meetings if necessary. University committees do not, but faculty have recently

negotiated for earlier starts—and thus earlier conclusions—to required meetings. This small

change has allowed faculty and staff members to attend better to their family responsibilities.

Although course releases for administrative responsibilities (the only kind now available) and

professional development monies may be taken away at the last minute, faculty representatives

are now working toward ways to make faculty labor more visible and explicitly negotiable.

These improvements, however, may come too late. I know that the issues—conflicts of

expectation, tight budgets—repeat at schools both small and large. But human faculty, I fear,

cannot survive the contest between public demand for outstanding but inexpensive education, a

back-breaking load (however structured), and personal responsibilities.2 I did not believe that

when I started, but I am living proof that it is true.

But who am I to speak against the system? I entered graduate school in the early „90s.

Despite predictions that aging faculty would retire and academic positions would open in the

wake of retirements, those jobs did not materialize in full-time, tenure-track form.3 At the end of

my academic program, I saw what others now decry: graduate students are cheap labor for

universities, particularly in first-year undergraduate courses.4 So, universities continue to admit

graduate students, teach them, and grant them tuition breaks and small stipends. Many graduate

students leave their programs unfinished, and the ones who finish likely do not find steady

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academic employment.5 This is old news. Every dark job forecast for academics reinforced my

understanding that I bet against very poor odds for finding an academic position. Consequently, I

learned medical technical writing and worked as an editor for a major health education firm

while attempting to research, write, and edit my dissertation. I hoped that this additional skill set

would pay my bills if I were unable to find steady academic employment. Still, I wanted to

complete my degree and realized that I would be unable to research, write, and edit full-time

during the day, then research and write nights and weekends as a PhD student. Concurrently, my

mother needed help to transition her two elderly parents from independent living to an adult

family home. Although they lived about 2,500 miles away from my graduate school, the family

theory was that I could move, help with the family transition, work as an adjunct, and write my

dissertation. Once I finished my dissertation and we had settled my grandparents, I would find a

full-time job. To me, moving to a large city—home to multiple universities of varying size and

major employers in technology and manufacturing—felt like the best way to maximize my job

opportunities. With my academic and professional background, I calculated that I had increased

my odds of finding work. I sent my current CV to the institution of higher education closest to

my new physical address, and they forwarded my CV to a private, religiously affiliated liberal

arts college where, as an adjunct, I would teach the usual first-year composition and create a

Scientific and Technical Writing course. I was delighted.

My delight quickly turned to dismay. Little about my job was what I expected, and

although adjuncting provided me with the time I needed to meet my family obligations, the pay

and resources I received to do my job were embarrassing, and my Earned Income Tax Credit

from the IRS was only one of the surprises awaiting me. Entering the college‟s English

department, I expected at least a general direction for the writing program, but the department

lacked even a coherent set of first-year writing outcomes. When I asked about textbooks for the

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Composition courses, I learned that I could choose one—from all of the Composition books

available. I asked for course outcomes, but the chair could not provide them. I asked how many

essays the students should write; his only response was that students should produce thirteen to

fifteen pages of written work. I asked what the Scientific and Technical Writing course should

accomplish; he could not answer my question. Instead, he directed me to the Dean of the Nursing

School and one of the science professors. Until that moment, I had not fully grasped exactly what

the then English chair meant when he told me that this was a service department. The Dean of

Nursing and science professor happily answered my questions, but their responses clearly

indicated that, despite generally recognizing their students‟ writing needs, neither department

had considered what students who passed my course should know and be able to do. Moreover,

neither professor had the time, resources, or training to “deal with” student writing in their

respective majors.

Other signs that I had crossed into an alternate reality quickly followed. The fact that my

writing course served three educational tracks (English, Nursing, and Science, and now also

Psychology and Business) was my first clue that my “normal” expectations no longer applied.

The English chair who hired me had a PhD in Communication, although most of his coursework

was in English. However, for the Dean of Arts and Sciences, that coursework clearly positioned

the chair in the English department. I discovered that I was the first PhD in English ever hired in

the English department, perhaps at the university. Additionally, the English degree program had

deep issues with coherence: the degree stemmed from courses originally designed to meet

general education requirements; no one had asked the department to develop a vision of itself as

an English department; and its leader could not supply such impetus. In addition to the chair, the

department had only four permanent faculty members: all women, all with masters degrees, but

only one in English. Having developed the English major, they exerted little effective upward

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pressure to increase resources for student writing tutors, personal professional growth, or further

cultivation of the major itself. Continuing to fight what they saw as a losing battle was simply

beyond their very limited professional resources, time, and energy. Furthermore, the sex of my

colleagues outside the English department gave me pause—at the time, no women chaired

academic departments, and no women worked as C-level administrators, only as administrative

assistants. In fact, no women even held the rank of full professor, and no woman would until

2007. Moreover, most of my colleagues across the institution researched very little to

supplement their teaching. Instead, many professors had second jobs to make ends meet. Some

picked up extra courses as adjuncts. The Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences had a parallel

career selling shoes. (After 30 years, he retired from that job.) One or two professors did creative

work; a few more managed some research. The similarities between the department in which I

was finishing my PhD and the department in which I found myself were its title—English

department—the students, and complaints about rising tuition. Everything else was different.

The Education Money Can Buy

The laments about rising tuition are many, and a wide variety of writers have discussed

the costs of higher education in greater depth and complexity than I have space to do here.6 For

my purposes, I want to make a few observations regarding tuition as it relates to students‟

expectations of professors. At both the institution where I finished my PhD and the institution at

which I now teach, my students and other signers of tuition checks were and are concerned about

educational value for dollars spent. To some degree, therefore, students see education as a

product they can buy, despite the reality that the value of these purchased educations may not

appear until many years in the future and that educational consumers cannot always measure

value with a quantitative outcome set, course grade, or first job. If education is a product, then in

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their minds, they plunk down the money to purchase it, an assumption with practical

ramifications apparent in some surprising but occasionally outrageous student, administrative,

and faculty behaviors.

Many students want to buy the education that will result in their desired jobs at the lowest

possible price, and they want to save time in the process. Thus, I regularly receive emails time-

stamped at midnight that contain requests for me to review the attached written material for an

assignment due at nine the next morning. Or, I open my inbox five weeks after the end of the

semester to see emails from students who failed to revise submitted, written work during the

semester but who are now begging me to allow a rewrite of a different assignment, a rewrite

specifically disallowed in the course syllabus. These behaviors are common and indicate how

little students understand the educational process, which leads them to forego the real

educational value they have purchased. For example, upon receiving an “F” for a paper that was

two pages short of the requirement and showed none of the skills she was to learn in my class,

one student promptly held her breath until she fainted. Another student skipped class to be his

father‟s “driver” during his two-week speaking tour of Germany and wanted those absences

excused. Still another student felt entitled to sleep through class because his father was a state

senator. Although each student had rejected parts of the learning process, each wanted me to

reward their lack of effort with a grade of “A” or “B.” All expectations to the contrary, education

is not about the grade. It‟s about developing the ability to think, which is priceless.

Nonetheless, monetary expectations also color the ways in which administrators treat

faculty. Administrators want to keep their jobs, which means keeping students happy, and that, in

turn, means extracting the most from every tuition dollar. Faculty are, as one former

administrator told the assembled faculty at my institution, the most expensive line on the budget.

Professors are not assets; they are deficits. As my Dean informed me when I attempted to make a

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case for an additional full-time, tenure-track faculty line in English, hiring a secretary or student

assistant is far more cost effective than hiring a professor. Surely, he asserted, a student worker

could perform some of the tasks the faculty found burdensome.7 The crosshairs of administrative

need for cost control and student expectation for lower-cost education intersect over the faculty.

So, faculty become the target of demands for both great education—measurable, of course—and

greater efficiency.

Practically, the intersection of student and administrative expectations drives professorial

behavior. For me to offer great education at exceptionally high efficiency, I must become a

“superprof” who lives for my students‟ needs, not my own. Particularly during the summer when

faculty contracts are not in effect, I must remind administrators and students that my time is my

own, so any response to requests for my professional time will have to wait for a new contract—

either a supplemental one or the one beginning the next academic year. Some struggle more than

others with the concept that I am occasionally unavailable to them. For example, seeing me in a

grocery store with cart at hand, one student gasped, “You eat!” “Yes,” I replied; “I sleep, too.”

Like the midnight emails about papers due at nine, moments like this one remind me how

skewed my students‟ views of instructors are. For some students, I do not eat, I do not sleep, and

I read minds: I am available to answer questions 24-7-365, and I somehow just know what they

meant to say in their essays. Responding to the superprof perception, I now routinely remind my

students that I will not answer their emails during my 20-minute lunch, reply to emails during the

night, or mind-read their papers. I specify in my syllabi that I reply to emails at a specific hour of

the day and will not read what they meant to say or wish they had said. Still, I meet students

during that 20-minute lunch, apologize for eating in front of them, and discuss their papers,

grades, their schedules for the next semester, or their current career plans. I do these things in

great part because I like my students and want them to succeed, but I also know that I trade time

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on class preparation, grading, research, or committee assignments for those 20-minute meetings.

Administrators seem to have come to expect me and my colleagues to give lunch hours or

volunteer over the summer. But some students recognize those costs and thank us. Others

students (and their parents), however, expect this time commitment, partly because they see

themselves as paying for it.

I admit to more selfish motives, too: at a tuition-driven, teaching institution, student

evaluations and my documented responses to them drive promotion and tenure to a far greater

degree than does publication or service to the profession. This is true despite conventional

wisdom that “research, teaching, and service are the defining trinity of a university professor‟s

job.”8 An effective, efficient professor, I create an advantage for myself by pretending

availability 24-7-365. I am not alone. Indeed, some university development departments tout

professors such as Cynthia Fitch, who takes her advisees‟ information with her to her son‟s

soccer game so that she can “check” on them.9 She accrues in/tangible benefits from an article

highlighting her university service as her requests for a particular teaching schedule or

recommendation for promotion are not so easily ignored. Moreover, her students benefit from

her work: their high acceptance rate into healthcare graduate programs—in 2006, an impressive

97 percent. She, her son, and her students pay a high price for her dedication, however, as her

focus during soccer games is not on her son‟s play, but on her students. Such constant

availability not only prevents efficient sustained attention to a single task, but also suggests an

absence of less structured time for the brain in which such a professor might envision or create

new knowledge.

Teach or Perish vs. Publish or Perish

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Student, administrative, and professional expectations are as much about teaching and

collegiality as they are about availability. Academically, decent teachers live; poor teachers

perish. I planned to teach and live, but all my reading about adjuncting and memories of adjuncts

I had seen as a graduate student could not prepare me for the instructional and collegial

challenges I was to face. As a new adjunct, I anticipated that the full-time professors would

ignore me and provide me with no academic resources. To my surprise, I found myself sharing

the office of a professor on sabbatical with two other adjuncts; we had an office computer,

phone, and easy access to the department copier. I had no required office hours and could design

my own courses. The Dean also invited us to a department meeting where he asked our opinions

on curricular changes. “Perhaps,” I thought, “I‟ve arrived at a department that sees adjuncts as

people, not warm bodies teaching.” I was wrong. Shortly, I faced openly hostile full-time faculty

members who had no compunction about yelling at me three inches from my nose for “taking”

their courses. Appeals for some mitigation in the face of such unprofessional behavior fell on

deaf ears. Still, my schedule was flexible, and I met excellent colleagues who balanced the

effects of others‟ enmity. And when the department member with a masters degree in Education

moved to the School of Education, I became her replacement.

In my shift from adjunct to full-time professor, I again revised my expectations. Because

I worked at an accredited liberal arts four-year institution, I anticipated honesty in salary

discussions. I found myself entirely unprepared for the less-than-honest negotiations regarding

terms for my full-time employment. Before my hire, a full-time faculty member took me aside

and told me to negotiate my salary; another said she wished she had negotiated herself. So, I

went to the contract meeting prepared to negotiate. I wanted credit on the tenure clock for my

time as an adjunct because I had created and taught courses new to the department, my course

was full every semester, and I had produced scholarly work after completing my PhD, somewhat

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unusual at this institution. For the same, I asked to start at $2,000 more per year than the base

pay for a beginning assistant professor. The then-Provost promised both, but I made the mistake

of not demanding this agreement in writing. The same year, a man was hired in a different

department, but one that required academic credentials similar to those in the English

department. He had not finished his terminal degree and had no publications, but he had

“connections” and field experience. The institution hired him as an associate professor, a rank

that came with $4,000 more than I was offered, a fact that rankled.10

The institution did not have

an office of minority affairs (it still does not), and the only people to whom I could appeal for

fair treatment were men. So I confronted my dean, who agreed to close the pay gap after I

suggested that we take our disagreement before a judge. Still, the university demanded that I earn

the rank it had granted to the man. Apparently, as I learned firsthand, my record of superior

teaching, professional writing experience, and publications was insufficient to warrant an

increase in rank. My graduate experience with its emphasis on merit had not prepared me for an

environment in which stated criteria merely cover for “connections.” While working women

have long fought perceptions that their work is not quite sufficient for advancement, the problem

remains particularly acute for women in the academy. Women faculty at campuses across the

United States can testify to their difficulties progressing through the academic ranks, in part

because of experiences like mine.11

But this episode only marked the beginning.

Already quite unlike my graduate-student experiences, my teaching experience at this

new institution became increasingly disconcerting. I had pursued my graduate degree in a

relatively large English department with two clear tracks: publish-or-perish for graduate

professors and teach-or-perish for undergraduate professors. This department ordered itself to

manage full- and part-time professors as well as graduate student instructors in the composition

program. Each instructor was the teacher of record; graduate students did not serve professors as

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teaching assistants. The Director of Freshman Composition and the Freshman English

Committee designed the first-year writing program and chose textbooks. The director provided

training and established mentors for graduate-student instructors; and the Writing Center

Director oversaw tutoring provided by graduate-student tutors. Composition instructors received

desk copies, and the graduate-student instructors designed the final exam in one sitting. This

conscious structure provided two advantages in planning classes and managing students. First, all

the composition courses used the same basic texts and the same grading standards, published in

the Guide for Freshman Composition (written by the Freshman English Committee). Thus, all

instructors knew the course outcomes, a fact which made course planning relatively simple.

Second, students who complained about their grades knew that standards were not specific to

any particular instructor, which defused many grade disputes. Suffice it to say that, having had

the freedom to design lessons that worked for me and my students as long as they met the

outcomes, I was unprepared for the relatively unstructured academic department in which I now

found myself.

An adjunct in this department for two years, I had identified my institution as one of

teach-or-perish. I assumed that a full-time tenure track position would clearly resemble the teach-

or-perish track I had observed as a graduate student. Despite working on a university committee

helping to found the English Graduate Student Association while in graduate school, and having

embraced the ethos of teach-or-perish, I found myself unprepared for the deluge of ancillary

work attached to my full-time position, the first of which was committee membership, unusual

for new hires. Somehow, the typical first-year-free-of-committee-work provision did not apply to

me, as the university needed a “non-science” faculty member on the Institutional Review Board.

In addition, my contract required my presence for regular office hours, department meetings, and

university-wide faculty meetings once per month, as well as other thrice-weekly meetings (sign-

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in required). The professional expectation of research and publication still in my head from

graduate school, I thought I should probably keep my research going, too, but with four different

classes every semester, I had to shelve my research projects in order to survive. My decision to

defer scholarly research was due to my need to prepare for classes outside my area of specialty. I

had prepared to teach British Literature I. I found myself teaching World Literature I and II. The

July before I started teaching full time, the Dean called me at home to inform me that I would

teach Literary Theory in the fall—the fall beginning in August that same year. My first thought

was, “Thank God I have the educational background to teach this class!” My second thought:

“Oh God! I have only one month to prep this course!” Nonetheless, flexibility in teaching

assignments meant my survival as an academic. I thought I just might find a way to become

Superprof.

On the tenure-track, I quickly learned that my experience would not match any

expectation, even if it were academic survival. I anticipated that the department would have its

own budget. It did not. Instead, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences must review and

sign every budget request from every department in his college. This practice reveals two

fundamental beliefs: administrators know best how to disburse the university‟s money, and if

funds remain in larger pools, administrators can more easily redistribute monies as needs arise.

Thus, depending on the needs of other university departments—not all of them academic—

administrators may cut or freeze monies that the Dean reserves for the English department. This

budgetary practice has far-reaching, unpredictable ramifications. For example, I had applied for,

received, and then paid for national conference registration. As I was about to buy my ticket, the

Provost—by voicemail—asked me to return my conference money because “the university

needed it.” I could not afford the conference without university funding, so I wrote the

conference organizers to request a refund. I was embarrassed, and because of tenuous funding,

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my research became more cautious. I chose only projects that I could fund myself. I shouldn‟t

have been so worried. Such practices are increasingly common, despite the fact that conferences

provide valuable opportunities to learn and discuss new and emerging research and strategies for

teaching. Unfortunately, I suppose that refund requests are becoming more common because my

Generation-X peers and I cannot afford conferences without institutional support. Indeed, the

Modern Language Association conference in December 2009 made headlines for a paper

presented in absentia by a young adjunct who could not afford to attend.12

The conference itself

has now changed in character and scope, including sessions on alternatives to academic

careers.13

Once expectations came to hover at the survival level (one Christmas, bonuses were

frozen turkeys), many of my colleagues adopted resigned attitudes and became unwilling to

engage much beyond the minimum requirements of the job. Teaching meant survival; anything

more was not worth the time or effort. As a result, some of my colleagues behave like the

traditionally pictured professors who teach from their early-career class notes, and despite

several administrators‟ attempts to convince them otherwise, they repeat those lectures to

successive classes of students. Moreover, the system does not require that these professors

engage in scholarly activity to earn tenure. My colleagues, both young and mature, resist

investigating ways to enhance their performance because no one believes that individual efforts

to improve will net any tangible reward. Quite the opposite. The more efficient the professor, the

greater the load. To make ends meet on salaries negatively correlated to the cost of living in the

area, my colleagues have had to order their lives more efficiently so that they can take on second

jobs. For some, these second jobs are full-time. Others simply—courageously—become super-

proficient teachers, to the point that they can teach up fourteen to sixteen classes per year. One of

my colleagues taught twenty classes among three different institutions in one academic year and

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plans to do so for three successive years as he struggles survive economically in the wake of a

divorce and to prepare for his future. Another colleague jokes that she teaches enough to be her

own partner, making the equivalent of a second income although she is single. Certainly taking

on extra work is the faculty member‟s choice, but to ignore the financial, psychological factors

driving such decisions is simplistic. We teach or perish.

I live and teach, but professionally, I publish just above “perish.” I quickly discovered

that few professors across campus engaged in any research, presentation, or publication. They

kept their scholarly activity relatively quiet because the proficient, efficient faculty member, who

perhaps has a working partner and/or reliable, affordable family care, receives little reward for

conference presentation or publication. Ironically, such faculty members might find themselves

assigned to additional committees, or depending on need, preparing and teaching an extra class

or two. A proficient teacher, I believed that I could find ways to manage my workload efficiently

and continue my research projects. Having discovered that I would need to keep my projects at a

lower profile, I still counted on them to help me maintain contacts in the world outside the

university from which I now felt rather adrift.

Although I found that the library provided excellent research support, gathering texts that

it did not possess at lightning speed for me to peruse, I had greater difficulty than I expected

preparing, teaching, and grading for four different classes, completing project reviews for the

Institutional Review Board, attending meetings, and maintaining collegiality. Without

jeopardizing collegiality, I could not say, “This is my writing time, and I won‟t schedule

anything at this hour.” I tried marking writing time into my public calendar, but university

meeting schedulers acted as if that daily hour were free despite its “busy” label. I realized that

boundaries to promote my own writing and research projects were—and are—unacceptable. But

in the larger scholarly community, not having a research project and producing scholarship is

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unacceptable. I wanted to keep my job, so I chose to postpone my projects to perform the duties

of the job I had and to establish collegial relationships. My choice, however practical, meant

diminishing contact with the larger scholarly community and my growing realization that, if I

wanted to pursue a research agenda, I would have to create a low-profile, low-cost, high-return

way to do so. Publish or perish did not apply; teach or perish was the new rule.

Drama in the Drama Department

I survived the transition from graduate student to tenure-track professor and even

managed to produce one scholarly item each year, but still I could not anticipate my next step—

becoming the chair. This, too, has its own story. Now a tenure-track professor, I learned that in

addition to traditionally understood service activities, the university expected me to attend

church regularly, and as my contract specifies, pick up other duties as assigned. I assumed that

“other duties” would relate to my position in the English department, my PhD, or my

professional writing experience. I was mistaken.

About seven years ago, the English department chair became the coordinator for the

drama concentration in communication studies. Without any other full-time drama specialist, he

took on a double administrative load, planning and staffing courses in both the English and

communication-drama departments. In addition to drama, about which this professor cared a

great deal, he ran the university‟s writing center, training tutors and coordinating schedules.

Lacking support in the drama department, he also built sets for every semester‟s production

while teaching a three/three load, which became a three/four or a four/four load depending on his

ability to find staffing and his monetary needs. With such a diverse skill set, he looked a little

like Superprof. Eventually, however, the doubled load weighed too much, and he repeatedly

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requested relief from his duties as English department chair. Then he requested a sabbatical. The

November before his sabbatical began, he and the dean realized that they had not planned or

scheduled a drama production for the next semester. But they did have students registered for

and graduating in the major, so they approached my colleague whose sabbatical project had been

an original stage play and asked if she were finished enough with the script to let the drama

department perform it the next semester and to run the on-stage portion of the production. She

agreed, but only if I would run the off-stage portion of the production. Fortunately, both my

colleague and I love drama, and both of us have some amateur acting experience, but neither of

us had ever studied play production at any level. Nonetheless, we agreed to the on-stage/off-

stage split, and our adventure began.

These new responsibilities meant that we each taught three classes and put together a

dramatic production in the one “course release” per person that we each received. At the same

time, my colleague was elected to the Faculty Development Committee, and my first book was

released, so both of us had considerable professional duties beyond classroom teaching. But our

“course release” meant responsibility for another course in a department different from ours,

complete with assessing student work and assigning semester grades. We did not see it as a

“course release” in the conventionally understood definition of the term. Essentially, both of us

were now doing two full-time jobs, but we heard from administrators multiple times how lucky

we should feel that they gave us “release time” for the drama production. Frighteningly, this

statement implies a changing definition of the term “release time.” This term usually means that

the university grants the professor in question specific time away from regular teaching tasks to

perform other duties, such as administrative service to the university or scholarly research. Our

“release time” meant the equivalent of a second full-time job for no additional pay despite our

added obligations to the university (teaching, administration, and research to fill in our

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knowledge gaps) that usually indicate need for a true course release. Moreover, the university

granted our chair a feeble “sabbatical”; indeed, it more closely resembled the traditionally

understood definition of “release time” than a true “sabbatical.” He was expected to be on

campus, to set agenda for and run department meetings, to plan course offerings and teaching

schedules in English and drama for the following semester, and to lead assessment activities and

collect the data. Because he reliably appeared on campus weekly, we also asked him to build the

set needed for the new production. Teaching was the only task that the university did not expect

him to perform.

Despite these issues and our concerns regarding workload, my colleague and I learned a

tremendous amount about theatrical productions by trying—successfully, from a box office point

of view—to produce a full-length play. I secretly hoped this experience would translate into a

few research projects on teaching and performing Shakespearean drama. My colleague had

enjoyed the project, as well, so we asked for the same course release to produce the next year‟s

dramatic season. When we made our request, our logic went something like this: we learned new

information and skills, including to whom to make requests for building maintenance, printing

materials, and petty cash; losing what we have learned would be a pity, and passing it on to an

adjunct will be incredibly difficult; no staff have appeared in the drama department, no position

in drama is forthcoming as that budget line has been “reassigned” within the communication

department, and the chair of English and drama will return from his “sabbatical” in the fall;

therefore, we will have much less to do and more knowledge to do it with. We were wrong.

In the fall, the faculty returned to campus for a two-day “retreat” and mentally prepared

for a less stressful semester than the previous spring, I, too, returned to campus and dutifully

attended the first three retreat sessions. I noted my chair‟s absence; I assumed that he would

appear later. He did not. Instead, the Provost stopped the proceedings with a pseudo-question:

19

“Has any one heard from the English department‟s chair?” Truly, this interrogative dangled a

declarative in the air, announcing that no one had heard from our chair. All of our department

members and our dean knew that the chair had long complained of combined teaching and

administrative duties for two departments. We did not expect him simply to disappear over the

summer. But disappear he did.

This surprise announcement triggered an unwelcome August blizzard of activity—and

most of it fell to me, a yet unappointed chair: I took temporary responsibility for the

department‟s continued functioning; department members took on extra tasks; the dean found

adjuncts to cover classes; administrators needed to determine if the absence were temporary or

permanent. We, who had known the weight of his load, suspected that he was finished. By

November, long after I as acting chair had completed the Spring schedule and had submitted

assessment reports, administrators announced that he would not return.

The university did not officially appoint me chair that August morning, in part because

administrators were unsure of our chair‟s return, but also because they were unsure of my

leadership capacity. Despite the fact that I had endured discriminatory practices and had resolved

openly hostile behavior from some faculty members with no administrative assistance or

mediation, that my peers had elected me to the Faculty Development Committee, and that my

department colleagues saw my vision for the department as clear, progressive, and collegiate, my

senior colleague had to lobby for my appointment as chair. Interestingly, none of the reasons to

appoint me chair had anything to do with my earned doctorate in the field, my teaching, my

publications, my service commitment, or even my church attendance. My education had led me

to expect that my merits would be important to my professional progress, and I had believed it. I

was wrong.

20

Certainly, nothing in my education, experience, or handbooks on appropriate academic

protocols had prepared me for the very human challenges I now faced. Not only did I have to

convince administrators that I could chair a department, but I also had to do so with a

traumatized department, and this department had a distinguished trauma history. In two years,

my department had endured a forced rearrangement of teaching personnel, one screaming-match

of a meeting that resulted in a faculty member‟s resignation, and the chair‟s disappearance.

Without any warning, nor any course release for administrative duties, nor any budget

information, nor any of the emails or files of the previous chair, I was to run the department and

do it excellently well. Apart from willing colleagues, my practical help was a student assistant,

university-hired for ten hours a week to serve the entire department. The ten-hour-per-week

assignment represented a substantial improvement from the five-hours-per-week support of the

previous year. This budgetary victory notwithstanding, I faced a mountain of work. Perhaps, I

thought, I would develop into Superprof.

Practically, my new assignment hid a few pitfalls. Among them was the university

community‟s shared belief that my new responsibilities mirrored the responsibilities of the

former chair. Technically, I was not the contact person for the drama department, but my shift

into running the English department while heading up the technical side of the theater

productions seemed to make it so. As a result, students and advisors who had questions about

drama classes, future offerings, and scholarships contacted me first. I pointed them to the

appropriate persons. My previous experiences had led me to expect that such questions usually

fall to an administrative assistant, but none being available, I did the job. In early spring, I asked

the dean if he planned to continue giving drama scholarships, and if so, who would audition

incoming students. His blank stare told me that he had forgotten that the drama department

offered scholarships and had, therefore, no idea that drama scholarships required auditions,

21

decisions, communication with the financial aid office, and tracking. Fortunately for me, he

assigned this duty to my English department colleague responsible for the onstage aspects of

dramatic productions that year and the adjunct in drama who taught acting lessons. I hoped that

they received additional remuneration for their extra work. Additionally, my new duties meant

that I worked many nights until 1 a.m. in the theater, drove home, and returned to campus for

World Literature class the next morning at 9 a.m., taught two additional classes, and then worked

department and committee meetings and my other duties into the remaining hours. This schedule

left little time for responsibilities or relationships not directly related to my job, including but not

limited to my relationship to my partner, who waited patiently for the dust to settle.

After that year, I deeply understood why my colleagues had taken survival as their goal.

For that year, endurance was mine. And while the English department and I survived, my

research project on teaching and performance did not. I have not yet decided to scrap it entirely,

but I will not return to it soon. The English department has finished with the drama department,

and although the university has yet to hire a full-time faculty member in drama, the drama

program remains available to students.14

The dean hopes that his proposal for a drama faculty

position will “make it into the budget” for the next academic year—many years after my

department head simply did not return to campus. Now, with the economic downturn and

resulting budget pressures, I doubt this will happen. My experience and that of my colleagues

hint that universities may overlook their faculties‟ human needs to maintain programs to which

they have committed. This situation seems outrageous, the stuff of academic urban legend. Not

true.

Are You Serious?

22

Drama in the drama department notwithstanding, I left graduate school expecting more of

myself than lecturing 40 years of students from yellowed notes. I had a bone-deep understanding

that if I wanted a serious academic career, then I would have to publish, teach, and serve (with

limits, of course). I had learned that most academics, regardless of discipline, divide the

professor‟s job into three or four different but related areas: teaching, research (which

theoretically supports teaching), and service. The service component may break into two parts—

service to the profession/institution and service to the community. I quickly discovered that those

professors who claim that they can teach a four/four load, keep their research projects moving,

and perform community service—a status close to that of Superprof—usually have department

administrative assistance, possibly a research assistant, and perhaps a partner who manages the

home front, including any caregiving. These professors teach classes in their specialties, not “as

assigned,” and their institutions encourage research. In sharp contrast, administrators at my

institution struggle with research; one of them pounded his head on his desk, repeatedly

proclaiming a project “boring” while the professor whose research “merited” this assessment

watched. Under such behavior lies ambivalence toward research itself. Yet, although my current

colleagues and administrators recognize the difficulties of maintaining a research agenda while

teaching a four/four load without support, they have hinted that they may come to expect active

research agendas for professional advancement and tenure.15

Regardless of an institutional hesitancy that mirrors a broader social ambivalence toward

“useless” research in the humanities, the fact remains that the academic community outside of

my institution demands that I engage in my own research projects. Partly because I teach “as

assigned” and partly because I do not teach graduate seminars that might lend themselves to

publishable research as classroom preparation, I often separate class preparation from my

research projects. If my days were infinitely long, I would have time for preparing, teaching,

23

writing, relating, caregiving, and sleeping, but all of those activities must fit into a finite twenty-

four hours. Negotiating personal responsibilities while teaching a four/four load, advising,

serving on committees, fulfilling “other duties as assigned,” and writing turns out to be much

harder than I thought, and I have now accepted the difficulty of finding a free fifteen minutes in

which to write. That first year as chair also held many personal struggles that made my

professional ones even more challenging. I had returned home to help my mother give care to her

aging parents. Walking with my mother through her parents‟ last years, hospice care for her

mother, and finally the death of both her parents within one calendar year was not easy. My

partner‟s mother also needed end-of-life care, which his sister coordinated, but which

necessitated our time and attention. Now we have adopted a baby girl, and she, too, needs care.

Those who, like us, have worked full-time jobs while caring for aging family members and/or

children know the complications that interweaving job and family creates. In some ways, my

professorial job makes these caregiving responsibilities easier because, outside of my actual

classes, I do not punch a clock for forty hours of office time every week. Still, my students and

my superiors expect me to teach my students effectively and to serve the university efficiently. I

wanted then, and now, to keep my research alive—if barely. Considering the demands of my

teaching-administrative position and my own expectations for limited scholarship, as well as my

personal responsibilities, I realize that my colleagues and I face extremely heavy loads yoked to

questions from the larger academic community about the seriousness of our academic careers.

Hard as it might be to imagine, some readers may think that I am overly concerned about

caregiving, thus revealing that I have thoughtlessly succumbed to female socialization or that my

standards are simply so high that I feel I must do it all. But I and my colleagues are like most

other loving children and parents: we have to work, and we want to know that the people caring

for our parents and children are credible, responsible, and loving. We also need cost-effective

24

care. Our inability to find decent, affordable care has led to hard choices. Several of my

colleagues have opted to have one partner prioritize caregiving and stay at home, but to

compensate for that sacrifice and put food on the table, they developed their own food bank to

serve the university community. Those fortunate enough to live near family have pressed that

family into caregiving service, and others have created nanny-shares or traded caregiving times

with faculty members in their departments. Still others have bankrupted their parents and moved

them to Medicaid in order to finance necessary care. Some have chosen teaching as their focus

and so do very little—if any—research at all. Some have chosen teaching and research but have

given up on their relationships. As individually creative as these solutions are, they convert the

relationships that make humans human into problems to solve, thereby adding more weight to

already overburdened people and threatening their humanity.

Appeals to administrators and others for assistance have fallen on deaf ears. Occasionally

declaring that having one partner at home is a choice and that other faculty have “made it work,”

administrators reject pleas to increase salaries enough to allow faculty and staff to pay for the

care that their family members need. University budgeting offices, however, are not the sole

keepers of the purse: they, too, face extreme demands from the students and parents, and in many

cases, taxpayers and state budget officers, who want to know that the educational cost is “worth

it” and who vote with their feet against paying additional tuition. To ignore the financial and

psychological realities driving choices by faculty, administrators, and students is simplistic, and

it does not make those realities disappear. Yet only Superprof can combine caregiving with a

heavy teaching load, assessment demands, lack of support from many quarters, service

expectations, and potential demands for research, and still maintain shards of humanity.

The ground over which I contest is that of English—a discipline in the humanities—and

my very humanity. I have never minded hard work. I will finish grading papers and prepare

25

myself for classes the next day. The cost to me is high, like the cost paid by other humanities

scholars. Each has made different choices to meet the demands of professorship while growing

as a human being. Yet, the educational enterprise that requires its faculty to be inhuman cannot

teach humanities. An educational institution that offers classes titled “Ethics” should not send

envoys from the fundraising office to faculty offices with their hands out when faculty salaries

are stalled significantly below area cost-of-living, when requiring furloughs to meet demands for

budget reductions, or simply not offering sufficient sections of courses to enroll all who need the

course to matriculate because of insufficient funds. But those agents appeared at my office, and

my colleagues at many publicly funded institutions have taken their required furlough days.

Some of my students enroll alternating semesters in order to take classes that they need and to

pay for their schooling as they go. Faculty cannot provide worthy educations while

administrators raid library funds to compensate for budget shortfalls, or cut the lab supply budget

to the point that the lab assistant auctions textbooks online to buy beakers.16

Yet the requests for

money do not cease. Students and their parents, worried that they are not “getting what they are

paying for,” should fear, for continued demands for below-cost education ensure that these and

other behaviors will continue while faculty determine how they can do more—perhaps be

more—with less.

Three recent experiences solidified my sense that faculty must insist on their positions as

working humans, that work must, at the very least, be compatible with a person's humanity.

These are they. First, I met two academic stars at a recent academic conference. They are lovely

people, senior scholars, well established. Over lunch, they kindly offered to help me solve

problems that I face. Their encouragement to continue in my scholarly work was genuine and

helpful, and they offered several creative ideas for finding funds for my department and working

within the academic system. But I stopped them dead when I asked “How can I chair a

26

department, teach a 3/4 load, chair a major university committee, publish, and parent?” They

suggested that I relinquish being chair. But when I said that wasn‟t an option, they said, “Well

then, you can't do it.” This tension, I think, is the crux of the problem: the professional demands

are for Superprof, but in my most real moments, I am not that super. I know I will never be. I am

only human. And somehow, what I do in all of these spheres must be just good enough, which is

antithetical to my drive for excellence and does not seem to suit well people who teach. Second,

in a committee meeting, my provost asked why faculty objected to having additional meetings

scheduled on short notice at the end of the workday, why they did not see themselves as required

to be on campus until 5 p.m. In the ensuing discussion, it became clear to me and other

committee members that the way we envision our jobs and our lives weaving together is not the

way that administrators envision that work-life balance. Last, a very new adjunct faculty member

in English asked me point blank “Is our profession antithetical to having a family?” His query

was not a complaint, but an honest question about how one might functionally balance the

demands of an academic career with healthy relationships. Academics are not the only people

facing this issue of work-life balance, but their profession—with the high demands for work that

is often invisible to the people paying for the “product”—highlights the battle for the worker and

his/her right of the worker to have work that, at a bare minimum, does not destroy his/her

humanity. The fact that more and more academic workers are losing their health insurance and/or

facing greater and greater workloads for stagnant pay—three years and counting with nothing for

a raise, not even a COLA for some—suggests far graver issues in academe than money.

Humanity and workload are linked in such a way that the university as employer must be

reasonable about what it assigns and expects, or it might very well strip away the humanity of its

faculty altogether, a practice which is antithetical to the ideals of an education that is to prepare

students to be global citizens capable of flexibility and life-long learning.

27

Alas, these stories and others like them should be unbelievable, but they are true. In the

years between my graduate education and my current position, I discovered the great gap

between my training and my job. I expected that working in the humanities would give me the

opportunity to explore human beings and to encourage my students to explore and develop their

own humanity more fully. Progressively, I have less and less time to do so. I have learned that

the demands on faculty to provide a value-for-dollar education, while teaching heavy loads,

researching, serving their communities (even minimally), and managing personal responsibilities

can and will break faculty members. I have seen it.17

Yet, I have also learned to value the

perspective outside the ivory tower—or at least from its open-air balconies. Outside, I remember

that knowledge does not exist for its own sake. Learning and knowledge exist so that my

students and I will be more human and more humane, able to think through practices, behaviors,

and activities so as to separate the ethical from the unethical and recognize those who will sell

the well-being of the less fortunate to the greed of the most fortunate. Students in the humanities

must learn the foundational ideas of their disciplines to become informed, thoughtful world

citizens.

Sadly, I have also learned that institutions of higher education are not necessarily

committed to producing critically thinking students,18

a process that starts with treating faculty

humanely. Instead, institutions—committed to their budgets—require high-energy teaching from

their faculty, but pay so poorly that their faculty work extra jobs to buy food; and ask for

thoughtful scholarship, but make bone-deep cuts to library and research supply budgets. Faculty

who hope to maintain intimate relationships and shoulder the additional caregiving

responsibilities that come with children and/or parents should beware.19

The faculty are only

human. I am only human. Superprof does not work here. I thought I might meet her or become

her. I was wrong.

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Notes

1 Generally, those who defend English as a course of study fall into two camps—either

they see English studies as a religious/moral/spiritual force in the way Matthew Arnold and F.R.

Leavis articulate it, or they are more “pragmatic” and think about the discipline as does Rick

Rylance, whose brief essay focuses on the ways of thinking promoted by English studies that are

“appropriate to our times and human situation” and which are “emblematic of the way values

should operate in societies like our own.” Incoming president of the Modern Language

Association, Michael Bérubé has most recently articulated this position.

2 As has been amply documented by a wide variety of scholars, such as Nelson and

Bérubé; Bok; Donoghue; Bousquet; Johnson, Kavanagh, and Mattson; and others, the university

is quickly becoming the home of the inhuman demand. As these scholars show, an educational

enterprise that relies on the exploitation of graduate students and adjuncts is not a viable business

model in the long term. In fact, because education is “in the business” of teaching, it must be

very careful about what and how it teaches, for it risks educating the best and brightest “out” of

the system rather than “up” into it. Moreover, more mature academics also recognize the costs of

the academic life, but when they choose their personal over their professorial lives, they make

news. For example, Robert Drago merited an interview in The Chronicle of Higher Education for

his decision to give up his tenured position and move to be closer to his girlfriend.

3 Thomas H. Benton offers a brief overview of the thinking that prevailed in the early

„90s when many Generation-X students decided to continue into graduate education. He, too,

points out that job prospects were over-predicted. Like Benton, Donoghue offers a chilling

picture of the future for full-time, tenure-track professorial positions, but he treats the rise of the

corporate university that controls course content and management electronically as a future

occurrence. The Generation-X adjuncts who now cobble together paltry paychecks might argue

that Donoghue‟s picture is closer to reality than he would like to believe. Perlmutter agrees with

Donoghue and argues that graduate professors need to shift into “reality-based advising,” despite

the pain such a decision and such advising will cause. Both Donoghue and Perlmutter ignore the

reality that even if jobs are available at the small, religiously affiliated, liberal arts school, most

graduate schools do not prepare their students for those jobs and many graduate professors think

of those and similar jobs as beneath their students.

4 The problem of assigning graduate students to teach first-year or lower-division classes

applies across disciplines. In English, graduate students teach primarily first-year composition

and some lower-division survey courses. The latest thinker to examine this issue is Bousquet. He

joins others who have highlighted the problems inherent in using graduate students and adjuncts

to teach progressively more university classes. These include Nelson and Berubé; and Johnson,

Kavanaugh, and Mattson.

5 The most succinct survey of this information, although it is specific to English as a

discipline is the Modern Language Association‟s “Midyear Report on the 2009-2010 MLA Job

29

Information List.” In English alone, the report shows that PhD-granting departments graduate

approximately 1,000 students every year, but it “suggests a higher-education system prepared to

absorb 400 new English doctorate recipients” (3). A quick subtraction reveals that 600 of 1,000

new PhDs, or 60 percent of new PhD recipients, do not find tenure-track jobs, which must, of

necessity, push them to one of several alternatives. These newly minted PhDs could find work as

adjuncts or visiting professors, taking up the mantle of the freeway flier who teaches at several

institutions, often unable to make ends meet or to repay the high costs of the terminal degree.

The new PhD might take a position at a private preparatory school, or perhaps decide to pursue

teaching in high school, although for most, that decision means pursuing a teaching certificate.

Others may decide to change careers altogether, a choice that may mean additional education and

additional debt and may generate resistance, perhaps rejection, from students‟ advisors as

documented by Debelius and Basalla. Still others opt out entirely, becoming stay-at-home

parents. Graduate students such as Polak argue that professors should help their graduate

students to make other career choices if possible, so that students “can be useful not exploited.”

A quick search reveals that a number of scholars have documented and explored the

current state of graduate education in the humanities. Among them are Thomas H. Benton

(“Dodging” and “Big Lie”); Greenwald; Conn; and Sheila Bonde, Marc Bousquet, Jon Butler,

Brian Croxall, Joseph Grim Feinberg, E. Gordon Gee; Wallace D. Loh, Michael A. Olivas,

Gregory M. Colón Semenza, Sidonie Smith, Heather Steffen, Mark C. Taylor, Robert B.

Townsend, and Harriet Zuckerman, whose opinions appear in a forum held April 4, 2010, by the

Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Graduate Humanities Education: What Should Be

Done?”. Interestingly, James Mulholland, who teaches at a private, religiously affiliated, liberal

arts school argues that pursuing graduate education continues to be worth the risk and financial

strain. Additionally, in her Los Angeles Times article “Universities are offering doctorates but

few jobs,” Alana Samuels documents the way that, as of June 4, 2010, universities now trim the

numbers of full-time faculty as a way to balance their shrinking budgets. Perhaps the most

significant finding Samuels mentions is that universities now have approximately 51 percent of

the faculty in full-time positions. In the 1970s, that number was 78 percent. Even if universities

hire adjuncts and part-time faculty members to teach classes, that sharp drop in full-time faculty

numbers means that administrative workloads for faculty have increased by at least 25 percent,

and that figure does not include the new demands on full-time faculty for assessment.

Marc Bousquet et al. have gone so far as to predict the future of higher education, in

which they see increases in the numbers of adjunct instructors.

6 See for example, The New York Times Education section blog in which Jack Kadden

(September 4, 2009) offers the detailed results of his interview with a college president regarding

sharply increasing tuition costs. See also Cavanaugh; Baum; Strauss and Howe; and Katz. Such

concerns manifest themselves in other ways as well. Katharine S. Brooks argues that liberal arts

classes and majors must articulate the reasons for their existence in terms of students‟ bottom

lines—their future careers. She bases this assertion on observations that those departments that

30

do not contribute to the university‟s bottom line will be cut in an effort to contain costs. Still,

some writers question the need for higher education: for example, see Ann Larson.

7 One of the latest incarnations of this thinking is outsourced grading (June).

8 GMP, “Serves You Right,” Inside Higher Ed. June 18, 2010,

http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/jungle/jungle1.

9 McPherson.

10 The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and

School v. EEOC that religious institutions may discriminate in hiring if the person in question is

engaged in carrying the message of the church, even if that person is not the head of a

congregation. The person who received increased pay and rank taught in the school‟s most

explicitly religious program, which appears to shift the ground from sexual discrimination to

discrimination based on religious freedom. While I fully support freedom of religion, I believe

that in religious organizations known for preventing the rise of women to locally influential

leadership positions, such religiously cloaked freedom to discriminate in hiring may become

sexual discrimination by another name.

11 Both Maike Ingrid Philipsen and Paula J. Caplan ably document the variety of

challenges unique to women in the academy. Significantly, although nearly an aside in his

interview, Robert Drago observes that if a woman with tenure had made the decision to give up

tenure for love, she would not receive the almost heroic treatment that he has (Wilson “For

Love”).

12 Howard. See also Croxall.

13 Korey Jackson offers a strong summary of the way in which this occurred during the

Modern Language Association‟s annual conference in January 2012.

14 According to recent studies cited by Marc Bousquet, a decision to staff a program

entirely with contingent staff members bodes ill for that program, largely because student

retention declines significantly when contingent faculty instruct most first- and second-year

courses. In this case, if students were to stick out the first two years in the drama program, they

would only meet more contingent faculty, a scenario that would likely produce more transfers

than graduates.

15 Donald E. Hall in 1999 detailed his principles for keeping research alive on a four/four

load, but he does not comment on the kinds of institutional support he receives, perhaps a full-

time department secretary or research assistant. Piper Fogg‟s 2008 article, “The 24/7 Professor”

reveals four different professors‟ strategies for managing the demands of career and children.

The techniques these professors use range from additional technologies to grant monies: the

unstated assumption is, however, that institutions provide some support. The one single-parent

31

professor Fogg mentions made extra money day-trading, teaches extra classes, and was

considering another degree program to increase her ability to support her family. Comments on

GMP‟s article about reducing service load reveal that other professors at schools who do not

boast of Research I status have noticed the creeping tendrils of demands for research agendas

entangling their workplaces. Still other academics have begun a regular column in the Chronicle

of Higher Education entitled “ProfHacker.” Interestingly, many of the essays are about hacking

work productivity so as to write more articles and hacking relationships so as to maintain them.

The decision of Chronicle editors to run a regular column on hacking the professor‟s life

indicates that the tensions created by increasing demands and decreasing support are widely felt.

16 One way to stretch resources is to close expensive loopholes. For example, Seattle

Times reporters Nick Perry and Justin Mayo revealed that as of June 26, 2010 administrators

from some state schools retired, then were rehired to their former positions, without any searches

to fill those positions. The result is not only that those administrators may boost their pay by as

much as 60 percent, but also that those positions are not available to those looking for

advancement.

17 Significantly, the Chronicle of Higher Education surveyed adjuncts in the greater

Chicago area regarding their views of their work. Of the 625 respondents, 30 percent

acknowledged that their inability to find full-time work led them into adjuncting, but about 50

percent chose part-time teaching because it fit their lives better (Wilson “Survey”). While these

data suggest that the full-time, tenure-track professors need to re-examine the conventional

wisdom about adjuncts, they also hint that adjuncts may choose their work because they find the

demands of full-time tenure-track positions unacceptable for some reason. Moreover, as Wilson

acknowledges, several problems exist with the survey, most notably that it covers only one

geographical area and that only 18.6 percent of those to whom survey administrators sent the

survey returned it.

18 The astounding findings related to students‟ abilities to think critically documented in

Academically Adrift seem to support this assertion.

19 Always some graduate students depart the academy at the end of their studies, and

some return to it. The ones who did not usually faded away quietly as if shamed. Generation-X

academics who have departed the academy for lack of fitting place chose the opposite approach.

Some have begun websites and written books to help other academics leave the academy without

shame. Among them are Paula Chambers, whose WRK4US list-serv grew to such a degree

between 1999 and 2010 that it is now a self-supporting website, The Versatile PhD

(versatilephd.com). Another Generation-X academic, Alexandra Lord, created Beyond Academe,

a website designed to help people decide to remain in academics or to leave it based on

information about the other careers they could pursue (www.beyondacademe.com). Susan

Basalla and Maggie Debelius‟s book is now in its second edition and functions as a useful guide

to those with interests in the humanities who find that the academic life does not fit them or

perhaps does not have a place for them. The very existence of these resources and others—and

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the calls for more of them—indicates profound, growing dissatisfaction among Generation X

with the academy as they experience it.