How many tenured humanities professors want to quit?

Here’s an essay in the CHE, written by somebody who is trying to escape his tenured position at a Michigan liberal arts college (Hope), that argues or assumes that the answer is “a lot:”

The recent Netflix series The Chair dramatizes — honestly, I would say — the pathos of certain tenured professors who feel they have outlived their value to their institutions and become irrelevant, yet will not leave their jobs. Instead they spend their waning energies on thwarting the changes that might either revive their disciplines or eliminate them in favor of fields with more-vital prospects. Some months ago, while cleaning out my office, I ran into a professor nearly in his 80s, telling me that he would never retire. I think he expected me to congratulate him; instead, I saw him as a warning of what could happen to me. . .

How many of us understood what we were embarking upon when we decided to become professors? How could we even grasp the accelerating rate of change in higher education: neoliberal managerial approaches; part-time, no-benefit, transient adjunct teaching; the uncapping of mandatory retirement and the graying of the profession; the withdrawal of state funding; the endless political attacks from all directions; the unsustainable increases in student debt; and, with all that, declining enrollments in any field that does not lead directly and obviously to employment?

Even now, in my experience, if you point out these trends, you risk being accused by students of “crushing their dreams” and by colleagues, in effect, of “disrupting the Ponzi.” . . .

Graduate school attracted a lot of people like me. We struggled financially, accumulated significant debt, worked a series of adjunct and visiting gigs, and — if we were one of the lucky ones — found an academic position at an isolated institution with a heavy teaching and service load from which there was little chance of moving elsewhere, especially once we had tenure.

And here I am, more than 30 years later, coming up for air, realizing that I have too much in common with Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, who said, “I’ve never done a single thing I’ve wanted to in my whole life!” Once again, I do not appear to be alone in that regard. A lot of professors would leave their tenured jobs if they believed that they could survive financially doing something else, while maintaining their sense of intellectual identity.

Consider: Academics who want to be employed do not get to choose where we live or teach what we would like to teach. Depending on where we teach, we do not have time to do research on what interests us (and if we do, we know that it isn’t read by many people, anyway). We do not necessarily work at institutions that align with our deeply held values. And, far from being well compensated for those sacrifices, many of us struggle financially with little savings and massive debts, and have not accumulated enough, even in our 60s, to comfortably retire.

An industry has arisen primarily to help doctoral students and adjuncts find their way into careers outside of academe. There is a library of advice books now: I am reading them (and may have more to say about them, later). But there also is a lot of skepticism. The alternative-academic (“alt-ac”) movement, for example, seems cynical to many long-time observers: a way for universities to sustain business-as-usual, treating Ph.D.s, as Marc Bousquet famously said, as a “waste product” of the system. No need to reduce graduate enrollments, even if there are no tenure-track jobs available, because we need teaching assistants and students to fill our seminars. Who cares what happens to them afterward? It’s not our problem; we are not an employment agency.

In a time of financial exigency and eroded faculty governance, the elusive “brass ring” of tenure offers less protection from arbitrary dismissal than most civil-service jobs, but it also locks professors into positions that many no longer want and some do little to deserve. One consequence is that personal misery is structural in the humanistic disciplines: feeling both entitled and powerless is one of the foundations of its culture of grievance, outrage, and despair.

Obviously there’s a lot of bad stuff going on in academia at present. In particular the plight of contingent faculty, who now do the majority of the teaching in American higher education for what as a practical matter is often less than minimum wage pay with no benefits or job security, is an ongoing scandal.

The claim that deep dissatisfaction/angst/despair is commonplace among tenured faculty, or at least as the essay argues tenured faculty in the humanities and related fields, is a different matter however. Maybe this is the case, but the essay provides no evidence for that claim.

A related question that’s touched on here is the ethical questions raised by continuing to structure American academia around the practice of producing vastly more people with doctorates than can possibly get full-time (let alone tenured) employment in their fields of study.

Since we have a lot of people in and around academia here, I thought this would be a good topic for general discussion.