The Big Quit
Even tenure-line professors are leaving academe
In addition to this Substack I do longform reporting for The Chronicle Review, and in place of a Friday thread I thought I’d share this essay from last summer. You can read it in its original form here if you have access to The Chronicle of Higher Education. My agreement with The Review assumes their exclusive rights to the article for thirty days, after which rights revert back to me. This was my first major foray into journalism and launched a series about the state of academe, which I continued late last year with an essay focused on faculty of color and early this year with feature on younger faculty. My work in progress on academic librarians is the next in this series. I’ll share those essays with paying subscribers, as well as some of my literary nonfiction, from time to time in lieu of the Friday thread.
When William Pannapacker landed a tenure-track job as an English professor, in 2000, it felt like a religious experience. “Suddenly,” he writes, “I was an academic ‘born-again.’” Pannapacker thought he had escaped his blue-collar roots after completing a Ph.D. at Harvard University, but even with Ivy League credentials he struggled for years to find work. The job offer renewed his conviction that he had been called to faculty life, and he embraced it fully — publishing widely, securing more than $2 million in grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and eventually earning an endowed chair. Yet last year he retired from that position to face an uncertain future at the age of 54.
Faculty members have been leaving higher education for decades, but Pannapacker’s story stands out: He was tenured. We have become accustomed to the exodus of graduate students, postdocs, and adjuncts, but before Covid it was still possible to see tenured and tenure-track faculty members as relatively immune from the stresses of working in higher ed. No more. A 2020 study by The Chronicle and Fidelity Investments found that more than half of all faculty members surveyed were seriously weighing options outside of higher education: either changing careers entirely or retiring early. The study showed that faculty members share a great deal with the millions of American workers whose life transitions have been described alternately as the Great Resignation or the Big Quit. Though it may be true that most faculty members have chosen to disengage from their work rather than quit outright, as Kevin R. McClure and Alisa Hicklin Fryar recently argued in The Review, the story of those who have quit during the pandemic remains largely untold. I am one of them.
Like Pannapacker, I earned tenure and full rank at a small private college in the Midwest where I taught American literature and creative writing for 16 years before resigning at the end of 2021. The top factor in my decision was geographical distance from family members. The pandemic brought that sacrifice into brutal focus, compounding my sense of doom about the future of the humanities. Such feelings are pervasive: Covid-19 did not transform faculty attitudes toward higher education as much as it deepened longstanding concerns about disrespect, inadequate compensation, and an unsustainable work/life balance. Nearly everyone who has shared a resignation story with me has grieved the loss of a calling. But the reasons given by those who left during the pandemic (or are now planning their exit) differ very little from those expressed in at least 20 years of “quit lit.” Our stories highlight problems that stretch back decades and that, if left unaddressed, will plague academe for years to come.