Can a work self be a whole self?

Searching for a "why" after academe

From A Human Workplace

I remember the day I decided to abandon my Political Science major. It was January, not overly cold in northeastern Tennessee, but cloudy and foreboding. I now recognize that day as a turning point much like my decision to leave academe twenty-six years later. As usual, I was bucking the current — making a choice that felt impractical, even self-destructive, but that also felt as necessary as breathing. It felt like I was betraying myself and staying true to my instincts at the same time.

I’d been stubbornly grinding along on the pre-law track for two years because we didn’t quit things in my family and because my father saw no point in me going to college if I wasn’t preparing for a career that would lift me out of poverty. But I’d been struggling to get better than B’s on the multiple choice exams meant to prepare me for the LSAT. It wasn’t for lack of effort — if anything, the depth of my knowledge made me prone to overthinking, seeing nuances that the professor did not intend, and often reasoning my way out of the right answer, which sometimes seemed too easy. 

I now know that plenty of law schools would have welcomed my critical thinking, and that my preference for written arguments and improvised debates would have prepared me well for many programs. But at the time I felt like the tests were trying to tell me something: that I’d never be more than an above average attorney and that the profession itself was defined by petty logic. 

In short, I did not feel like my whole self in Political Science. At the same time that this crisis of confidence was building, literature courses offered a sense of belonging that I’d never found anywhere else. My religious background was an asset, and instead of feeling like a freak for growing up without a television I felt powerful for having gleaned so much from books. After reading My Ántonia, the first literary work that really spoke to my family background, I knew that I had to choose English. Because it had already chosen me. 

So I slunk up to my advisor’s office and announced my plans. He was the only Political Science professor on campus, and he tried to talk me out of it for reasons that I now understand might have been self-serving (course enrollments mattered, even then). But he was the one who had written the exams, and as much as I liked him personally, I was not thriving under his mentorship. So I made the change and dreaded the conversation with my father, who I knew would not understand a phrase like “whole self” or the distinctions between discussion-based courses and exams. Besides, what did anyone ever do with an English major? 

The financial risks for this decision were much lower for me in the late 1990s than they would be for a low-income student today. But at the time I felt that I’d made a terribly irresponsible choice by prioritizing myself over practical exigency. What was wrong with me? I knew that I was wasting a golden opportunity — my ticket out of poverty — yet I felt I couldn’t do anything else with much enthusiasm. Besides, I’d already tried that. My father worked at the county courthouse, and he’d asked the stenographer there about his work, and it turned out that a two-year degree in court reporting could yield a six-figure salary in 1993. So for much of high school I stuck doggedly to that plan, ignoring the nausea that swept over me whenever I imagined myself typing what other people said all day, every day, and never having an original thought of my own. One day I couldn’t pretend anymore, so I started my college search, unwittingly repeating the cycle by thinking more about earnings than about what I wanted from a career. And then, after three semesters of pre-law, that same sick feeling had caught up to me again. 

I wonder now how representative that choice to abandon a pre-professional track for an uncertain future as an English major might be for Ph.D. candidates more broadly. Most professionals know that advancing beyond an M.A. risks narrowing opportunity rather than expanding it. To successfully defend a dissertation requires convincing a panel of experts that you have become one yourself. And with that expertise comes the threat of seeming overqualified for anything but teaching, research, or management within the ivory tower. As I wrote last April, it’s a little like walking down a narrowing passageway through doors that lock behind you. There is no way but forward — through the next door and the cramped corridor beyond it. 

The story I told myself was that those close quarters were comforting, even as they walled me off from the rest of the world. What do you do with an English major? What do you do with a Ph.D.? You win at life by spurning the rat race, by maximizing your freedom. 

It’s a variation on the superiority narrative I learned while growing up poor in Montana. On paper we lived below the median, even by the standards of a logging and mining town. But we were rich in other ways. I’ve never eaten better than I did then: fresh produce in season, a cellar full of canned goods, freezers full of elk, venison, and bear sausage. I never worked for minimum wage, wrangling landscaping jobs for people with lakefront properties. Never flipped burgers or stocked a grocery shelf. My parents were good at marketing our hand-picked huckleberries to chefs in Missoula and Kalispell. And so I paid for school clothes by scrambling across a mountainside with a gallon bucket tied to my waist with an old rag. 

As Merle Haggard says, no amount of money could buy those memories from me. The same goes for graduate school. But I’m not sure you could pay me to live through it again, either. Because I recognize now that what felt empowering to my parents — and to me — was also disempowering. It preconditioned me to see that narrowing hallway in graduate school as a similar path to autonomy rather than entrapment. Sure, there is freedom in forsaking the road more traveled. But it’s the freedom of the ascetic. It comes with a cost that you can’t always get back. What makes the tradeoff worth it?

The story that teachers prefer to tell themselves is best captured by Taylor Mali’s poem “What Teachers Make.” Mali is a gifted slam poet, and you really need to hear his performance to feel the power of the message. I still love how Mali flips the meaning of “make” from earnings to creativity and service. 

 But for that storyline to work, others have to believe it, too. You have to feel your students buying into it, you need to know that your neighbors hold teaching in high esteem, and you have to believe that your employer values you for the qualities that allow you to transform lives. If you can’t break through to enough students, if you feel enough of the scorn for your profession that Mali’s dinner host expresses, or if you feel that your employer is exploiting your passion rather than rewarding you for it, the value proposition no longer holds. 

Kevin R. McClure explores this problem in his research into a more caring university. He wrote recently in The Chronicle of Higher Education that academe has become a land of dead-end jobs — for both faculty and staff:

It’s hard to conclude anything other than that higher education has done a spectacularly bad job of managing talent. Campuses have evolved over centuries and dedicated resources to perfect the art and science of human development, while largely outsourcing or ignoring the professional growth and learning of their employees. Rather than draw upon their own experts to develop and retain workers, institutions let employees burn out, and then replace them.

In Friday’s comment thread, Maureen noted that some faculty and staff endure toxic work environments for the tuition discount their children will receive at that institution or within a tuition exchange network. She also described a vicious economic cycle in which “children of professors who are underpaid are forced to take on student debt, while their parents still pay student debt.” Over time, the ironic effect of all that education is not inherited wealth, but “intergenerational debt.”

Maureen’s comment reminds me of an unforgettable line from Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland, an exposé of human trafficking in Florida agriculture. “Any American,” Estabrook writes, “who has eaten a winter tomato, either purchased at a supermarket or on top of a fast food salad, has eaten a fruit picked by the hand of a slave.” This isn’t a high probability; according to U.S. District Attorney Douglas Malloy, who knows the Florida tomato fields intimately, it is a fact. 

The low cost and year-round availability of tomatoes comes at a steep human cost. In economic terms, this is known as an externality: a cost that the consumer does not pay, but passes on to others. The American economy is riddled with externalities. Some say that capitalism cannot function without them. Jason put it well in Friday’s discussion: “Market rate usually means ‘whatever exploitation we can get away with.’” Naturally, there are different degrees of exploitation, but many faculty find themselves somewhere on that spectrum. And when enough of the “why” that drew them into the profession erodes, the spell of Mali’s “What Teachers Make” is irrevocably broken. 

Colleges and universities are bad at managing talent because they recruit faculty with a mythology about passion and purpose that contradicts what those same institutions claim their graduates will receive as a return on their investment in tuition. It’s as if colleges are speaking out both sides of their mouths in defining what teachers and students “make.” For instance, Western Governors University claims that students can calculate ROI by subtracting the cost of college from their projected earnings over twenty years. Georgetown University offers more nuanced metrics for calculating ROI. 

There are too many logical problems with these metrics to list: accrued interest from college debt is ignored and projected future earnings assume uninterrupted employment (What about kids? What if you quit?). But the biggest omission from ROI calculators is opportunity cost. Faculty with PhDs have foregone lucrative professional opportunities to become experts in their fields, and they have knowingly absorbed a lower ROI as a result. The only way the tradeoff makes sense is if enough of the original “why” remains: making a difference. But the more institutions justify themselves by helping students make a return on their investment, the more they cut the passion myth off at the knees. Put simply, colleges are asking faculty to knowingly sacrifice their own earning potential for the sake of helping students maximize theirs. Instead of making a difference, many college teachers are paying the difference. 

A glance at national salary averages for faculty, averages by state, or the more specific breakdown of individual institutions shows a wide range. It is thus possible for Stephen Levitt, host of the Freakonomics podcast and an endowed professor at the University of Chicago, to reply to a listener question about why college costs so much with the glib response that people like him are paid ridiculous amounts for not doing very much. A nice deflection of privilege there, but another way of putting it is that top-earning faculty like Levitt require other faculty and staff to subsidize their high pay. The average salary for full professors at the University of Chicago in 2021 was a little over $250K, compared to an average salary of about $70K for instructors and lecturers. Levitt might counter that his pay (likely north of the average, given his distinction) is simply a market rate — that he’d simply move into finance if the university couldn’t make his position attractive enough. But that’s just another way of expressing Jason’s earlier point: enough lecturers have to be willing to be exploited at the University of Chicago to keep the big fish happy. There simply is not enough money in the system, even at elite institutions, to privilege the student experience and nurture an equitable level of well-being for employees. 

We all have limits in tracking our complicity in an exploitative economy. I know I do. But I cannot shake the conviction, as my children approach college age, that I don’t want their education to come at someone else’s expense. All those college-credit courses that high school students take and then transfer to more prestigious institutions? Nice way to shave a little tuition, but an adjunct instructor absorbs that difference. All those gen-ed requirements that students need to “get out of the way” to graduate, the big lecture classes and maxed-out composition sections? Graduate students, adjuncts, and lecturers shoulder much of that load, sometimes with no health care and sometimes as teaching professors with benefits but compensation that is less than half the average for their tenure-track colleagues, despite similar credentials. 

There is often no way for prospective parents or students to get a straight answer about the faculty workload at different institutions. But a reliable benchmark of fairness is the ratio of tenure-track faculty to contingent employees. If you see a lot of different titles — many “research professors” or “teaching professors” in a department with regular professors, or a high percentage of lecturers and instructors — that is a sign of a caste system. This does not mean that your child will not have a good experience there. Chances are good that all of those teachers are going to be giving their best, trying to make a difference in the best sense of Taylor Mali’s poem. But chances are also good that your child’s education will benefit from exploited labor. 

It is no coincidence that Mali moved on from public school teaching. Not even he could sustain the illusion of that “why” any longer. In the world of ROI, that dinner question, “Be honest. What do you make?,” is the unspoken heartburn that the majority of college educators feel daily.

I recognize that overcast day in January when I knocked on my advisor’s door as one of many moments when I chose not to trade my life for money. I’ve never been able to knowingly turn off parts of myself to fit the mold that a job or an employer requires. This is my Montana birthright, a libertarian instinct that flares from my core. Leonard Cohen wrote that he didn’t trust his inner feelings because inner feelings come and go. Try telling that to a wolf, an elk, or a bear. Wildness, the original model for freedom, trusts the inner compass absolutely.

There is some of this defiance in everyone who accepts the risks of a Ph.D. — a refusal to be domesticated — and it makes the transition into alternative careers difficult because the answer to “why” is so elusive. Like my parents, who still follow a subsistence model and enjoy their freedom, I found the autonomy and belonging that I sought in academe, at least for a time. I don’t expect there to be any equivalent in industry. I know that my experience translates to LinkedIn keywords like “manager,” “director,” or “communications professional,” and I get lists of those positions in my inbox daily. But nothing I’ve seen offers the “why” that independent writing does: the sense of belonging to a community of readers, the knowledge that I’m meeting a human need, and the ultimate freedom to decide what deserves my time and attention. 

The trick to transitioning successfully from academe to industry is not translating my teaching, research, and service into terms that potential employers might value, at least not at first. It is rethinking my identity, wrestling with how much of my whole self I’m willing to hold back, how much autonomy I’m willing to yield in exchange for opportunity. Before I’ll be capable of networking successfully and wearing a genuine smile in an interview, I’ll have to find something I really want. And that is a very difficult calculus for anyone who has spent decades actively resisting the Dale Carnegie model of happiness. It’s not as simple as completing a work values inventory. It’s more like tossing out a draft of a memoir that I’ve been writing since 1993 and starting over. Or maybe it’s like starting at the end of that story and reverse engineering the earlier chapters, so they build more clearly toward a powerful climax. 

Knowing thyself is hard. What is the arc of my professional past? It could be the story of a man who can’t stick to the plan. Always leaving. Never satisfied. A man whose childhood isolation creates self-fulfilling prophecies of rejection and marginality in adulthood. Or it could be the story of a self-respecting person who doesn’t want to waste his one wild and precious life. Who trusts the nausea when he feels it and keeps moving forward toward better opportunities, healthier environments. 

There are still days when I’m not sure which story is true.