Higher Ed and Me

It was only a week ago that I cleaned out the last bit of my office at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It was an office my wife and I shared, one with a south-facing window we had for just one year, after two years of one adjacent to the men's room and another year of being in a small, dark shoebox. I stood there, looking out the window at a metal sculpture, a defoliated tree in winter, and felt the cold artificiality of everything I worked for and sacrificed slide off me. I seriously almost cried. But I tend to get sentimental. It was a nice office, after all. But there was obviously more at play.

After being at UNL for 8 years, 6 in the English department, my 1.5 year gig as a lecturer was over. I've never left a job in my life unwillingly, and I'm still getting over the unceremonious aspect of this. The department had twenty lecturers on its payroll last year, and this year has five, in part thanks to the university offering more credit to incoming freshman so the students don't have to take freshman composition (I've never had a freshman student who didn't sorely need that class). But I don't think the university will be saving much money.

You'll hear a lot of rumbling and grumbling in higher ed about not being able to find work--far too many applicants for far too many jobs. I was the student rep on a search committee 3 years ago and we saw some 200 apps for one job. That's average to light, I'd say (and has been going on well before the economy tanked).

I spent 9 years in grad school because I wanted to write, have the time to write, and make some money teaching to support my writing habit. I read a ton, and it was awesome. I discovered I loved teaching, and it was awesome. I had no allusions as to why I was in grad school (not for a job), though the bright-eyed 24 year old soon lost his academic naivete--grad school is solitary work, is not glamorous, and you must work hard to take what you want and need while the university takes from you all the while (and you hope to come out a little ahead, or to break even). I'm talking about being a TA and teaching for little pay. I still can't believe anyone let me teach honors freshman my first term at Ohio State after only a week of training. It was exhilarating, like a roller coaster, but I get sick on roller coasters--just as I did for days before that first class.

I moved from Ohio after 3 years of a masters and settled in Nebraska to do a PhD, on a wing and a prayer, because my department didn't have a job for me. I was lucky to find one in a student-centered marketing firm on campus, where I bided my time hoping to be an English TA the next year. When that didn't pan out, I bided my time a second year, then was offered a TA on an annually-renewing basis. Each year I had to reapply, and each year I thought they'd say no. I wasn't one of the lucky ones offered 5 year contracts, or those with 5 year contracts plus lucrative fellowships.

In 2009 I got my PhD, and it was fantastic, best day of my life. I worked with great faculty at UNL, and met some students who are now my friends--I believe, in the end, this is where I was supposed to be. The department hired me as a lecturer for the fall, but I deferred until spring so I could take some time off, recharge my batteries, work on a book (perhaps stupid in hindsight). My deferral likely gave another teacher a job. I was also offered the chance to chair the literary awards committee which allowed me--for the first time in 10 years of working in higher ed--to feel a part of the department. I got to know faculty. I got to know office staff. I worked with students in another way that was rewarding. I felt like I belonged like I never had before. And that was my problem as a part time employee.

In March of 2011 I received a letter, as did all lecturers, that the department would likely not be able to hire as many teachers for 2011-2012, and we should consider seeking other employment. In May all of us were let go--only a few PhDs who are out of funding, and new PhD graduates, received contracts (likely to bolster the statistic of recent grads who find academic employment).

So on the last day of the spring semester I let both of my classes ask me anything about teaching, college, how the department works, anything goes. I had nothing to lose. At first the questions were tepid: why'd you choose the books we read, how long have you been teaching, do you like teaching, do you have kids. Then someone asked me if I was a professor. He was upset to hear I wasn't, said he felt cheated (even though he told me privately after class he thought I was one of his better teachers). Then someone asked me how I much I got paid, to which she replied she made more working part time after school at Kinkos. The students loved this day, and I think I will do it again for every class I may ever teach in the future--they should know what they're paying for when they cash that Kinkos paycheck.

But man, I miss those students. Today as UNL begins fall classes, I told myself I wouldn't do this, but I am: simultaneoulsy dining on ashes and having faint hope, all the while, perhaps, hurting my chances of ever having a tenure track job by speaking like this in a public space (I can't tell you how much I'm holding back--but I suppose in the end it's not worth it).

This summer has taught me a lesson I was lucky to not have had to learn until now, when I turned 35 in July--life isn't fair. Deal with it. Buck up. So your hair is already mostly gray.... But higher ed is in a shambles. Here are some excerpts from an article entitled Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education, which is a spot-on piece:

"Sure, lots of people have it worse [discussing how years of grad school leave so many with no job they trained for]. But here’s another reason to care: it’s also a social tragedy, and not just because it represents a colossal waste of human capital. If we don’t make things better for the people entering academia, no one’s going to want to do it anymore. And then it won’t just be the students who are suffering. Scholarship will suffer, which means the whole country will. Knowledge, as we’re constantly told, is a nation’s most important resource, and the great majority of knowledge is created in the academy—now more than ever, in fact, since industry is increasingly outsourcing research to universities where, precisely because graduate students cost less than someone who gets a real salary, it can be conducted on the cheap....

And what exactly are you supposed to do at that point if you’ve spent your career becoming an expert in, say, Etruscan history? Academia exists in part to support research the private sector won’t pay for, knowledge that can’t be converted into a quick buck or even a slow one, but that adds value to society in other ways. Who’s going to pursue that kind of inquiry if they know there’s a good chance they’re going to get thrown out in the snow when they’re 50 (having only started to earn a salary when they were 30, to boot)? Doctors and lawyers can set up their own practice, but a professor can’t start his own university. This kind of thing is appalling enough when it happens to blue-collar workers. In an industry that requires a dozen years of postsecondary education just to gain an entry-level position, it is unthinkable....

Our system of public higher education is one of the great achievements of American civilization. In its breadth and excellence, it has no peer. It embodies some of our nation’s highest ideals: democracy, equality, opportunity, self-improvement, useful knowledge and collective public purpose. The same president who emancipated the slaves and funded the transcontinental railroad signed the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, which set the system on its feet. Public higher education is a bulwark against hereditary privilege and an engine of social mobility. It is altogether to the point that the strongest state systems are not to be found in the Northeast, the domain of the old WASP aristocracy and its elite private colleges and universities, but in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Virginia, North Carolina and, above all, California....

Now the system is in danger of falling into ruin. Public higher education was essential to creating the mass middle class of the postwar decades—and with it, a new birth of political empowerment and human flourishing. The defunding of public higher education has been essential to its slow destruction. In Unmaking the Public University, Newfield argues that the process has been deliberate, a campaign by the economic elite against the class that threatened to supplant it as the leading power in society. Social mobility is now lower in the United States than it is in Northern Europe, Australia, Canada and even France and Spain, a fact that ought to be tattooed on the foreheads of every member of Congress, so directly does it strike at America’s identity as the land of opportunity....

But it was not only the postwar middle class that public higher education helped create; it was the postwar prosperity altogether. Knowledge, again, is our most important resource. States that balance their budgets on the backs of their public universities are not eating their seed corn; they’re trampling it into the mud. My state of Oregon, a chronic economic underperformer, has difficulty attracting investment, not because its corporate taxes are high—they’re among the lowest—but because its workforce is poorly educated. So it will be for the nation as a whole. Our college-completion rate has fallen from second to eighth. And we are not just defunding instruction; we are defunding research, the creation of knowledge itself. Stipends are so low at the University of California, Berkeley, the third-ranked research institution on the planet, that the school is having trouble attracting graduate students. In fact, the whole California system, the crown jewel of American public higher education, is being torn apart by budget cuts. This is not a problem; it is a calamity.... 

When politicians, from Barack Obama all the way down, talk about higher education, they talk almost exclusively about math and science. Indeed, technology creates the future. But it is not enough to create the future. We also need to organize it, as the social sciences enable us to do. We need to make sense of it, as the humanities enable us to do. A system of higher education that ignores the liberal arts, as Jonathan Cole points out in The Great American University (2009), is what they have in China, where they don’t want people to think about other ways to arrange society or other meanings than the authorized ones. A scientific education creates technologists. A liberal arts education creates citizens: people who can think broadly and critically about themselves and the world....

Yet of course it is precisely China—and Singapore, another great democracy—that the Obama administration holds up as the model to emulate in our new Sputnik moment. It’s funny; after the original Sputnik, we didn’t decide to become more like the Soviet Union. But we don’t possess that kind of confidence anymore."

We have a crisis that goes far beyond higher ed. Having taught 35 college courses, roughly 4 per year, making after taxes around $13,000 a year, I can tell you that our students are becoming more one dimensional. They can't think outside the box--they have tunnel vision. They are less ambitious, risk less, take fewer chances and leaps of faith. Freshman, seniors, it doesn't matter. They've been taught one way to think, programmed to see college as a trade school, high school +. Are these our future leaders and innovators? I sit here with the freedom to think anyway I want (the benefit of a liberal arts education), seeing a situation from multiple angles, distressed that today I can't have the joy of forcing a student to see the same situation from another way, to be surprised, to be pushed, to think outside the lines, to color wherever on the page and do so confidently. And I may never again. I love teaching, even on days when I loathed the job--but it's not a job, it's an honor. Those conversations in my office, those breakthroughs of personal (not academic) profundity and power, those light bulbs coming on like nuclear blasts. It's a drug.

Last year I watched the wiki academic job list come in of who was hired and where. 95% of the winners (I mean hires) had 1, 2, 3 books published. They won Pulitzers, or so it seemed. They weren't young teachers getting their first jobs--they might as well have been full professors. So this fall I'm emailing past students, seeing if I can get anyone to pay me $10 to edit an essay or poem. I started a garden coaching business, with no takers yet. I self published a collection of essays a press almost took, hoping to sell enough copies to attract another press. I'll write a memoir this fall, partly for the joy and challenge of it, partly because it's now or never, and partly because I know I'll have no chance to teach again if I don't publish a book, or three, as quickly as possible. And even then it might not matter. That's life. Am I writing for a job, or to talk to other people? And at 35 I have to say I've felt sheltered from the world, especially after 9 years of grad school, and 2 as a grad student / TA + (lecturer). I'm not prepared to be an academic colleague. I'm not prepared to be a professor. I simply love teaching and writing and have a cv everyone tells me is impressive, full of publications, writing and teaching awards, and department service. But 200 other people have the same credentials. And that's just how it is in higher ed. In life. I guess.